100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 737 - Changes

The Grand Intercontinental Competition was officially over.

That did not mean everyone had to leave immediately.

Lucien had already decided to keep the preserved region open for another week. Anyone who had attended the competition could remain during that period, and the training facilities Lootwell had constructed throughout the region would continue operating without charge.

The announcement was received enthusiastically.

After weeks of competition, followed by several hours of believing they were fighting for their lives, many people had no intention of immediately stepping through a teleportation gate and pretending everything had returned to normal.

The Clear Mind Halls remained busy.

The Interweaving Grounds were even worse.

Authority Resistance Fields that had once intimidated newcomers now had lines forming outside them, while groups that had fought together during the Battlefield Simulation returned to the training grounds to recreate mistakes they had noticed during the apparent invasion.

Lucien allowed all of it.

In fact, he quietly made things more difficult.

The pressure throughout several facilities increased little by little.

Never enough for anyone to immediately notice.

A field that had felt uncomfortable yesterday became slightly heavier today. Authority interference lingered a little longer. Certain environmental conditions demanded slightly faster reactions than they had before.

Most people assumed they were simply tired.

Others believed they had become more sensitive after the competition.

Very few realized that Lucien was still training them.

He saw no reason to correct the misunderstanding.

By the end of the week, many of them had already adapted to pressures that would have troubled them when they first arrived.

The competition had ended.

Lucien’s training program had not.

•••

Not everyone stayed.

The teleportation hubs became some of the busiest places in the preserved region.

Lootwell personnel took control of the departure process before the enormous population could turn it into chaos. Routes were separated by continent and destination. Larger factions received scheduled departure windows, while independent travelers and smaller groups were directed through separate hubs.

Beast clans had their own arrangements where ordinary teleportation infrastructure could not comfortably accommodate them.

Supplies were returned.

Missing belongings were traced.

Temporary accommodations were cleared and inspected.

Those still waiting for departure were redirected toward open districts instead of being allowed to clog the teleportation zones.

The scale remained enormous, but the movement rarely stopped.

One group disappeared through a gate and another took its place.

For many, stepping through those portals felt stranger than arriving had.

They were returning to cities, sects, clans, kingdoms, academies, wilderness territories, and homes that had continued existing while they were away.

Yet the people returning were not quite the same ones who had left.

Some carried rewards.

Some carried new equipment.

Others had rankings that people back home had probably already heard about.

Many carried nothing visible at all.

They simply knew more than they had before.

And almost everyone carried stories.

The qualification routes were argued about again.

The Shifting Trial produced new debates every time someone remembered a different objective.

People compared decisions from the Team Trials and insisted that their commander would have performed better if another faction had simply listened earlier.

The hidden Battlefield Simulation remained the favorite subject for obvious reasons.

Those who had been caught inside it complained about Lucien while simultaneously explaining every detail to anyone willing to listen.

Even the people who claimed they never wanted to experience anything like it again seemed incapable of talking about anything else.

The largest competition the world had ever seen had ended.

For the moment, ordinary life seemed almost too quiet.

•••

By the end of the week, most of the temporary population had departed.

The preserved region should have begun emptying.

Instead, Lucien noticed a problem.

Millions of people were still there.

Many belonged to factions that had already left.

Others were independent practitioners who had arrived alone but no longer seemed particularly interested in traveling alone again.

A large number came from the coalitions formed before the Team Trials.

Those groups had originally been practical arrangements.

Independent people needed enough numbers to compete against organized factions, so they had gathered together.

Several coalitions had expected to dissolve immediately afterward.

They did not.

After fighting, training, arguing, losing, reorganizing, and surviving the fourth stage together, leaving suddenly felt less obvious.

Some had already started discussing permanent cooperation.

Others simply wanted somewhere to continue training with people they now trusted.

That was when requests began reaching Lootwell.

They wanted to stay.

Lucien approved them almost immediately.

The demand only confirmed something he had already been considering.

The preserved region had everything necessary.

Training facilities already covered enormous stretches of land. Teleportation hubs connected it to the other continents. Medical districts, supply networks, residences, communication formations, and defensive infrastructure had all been constructed for the competition.

Closing it afterward would have been wasteful.

So Lucien did the opposite.

The following day, another message appeared across Lootwell’s communication network.

Communication devices throughout the five continents received it almost simultaneously.

The announcement was brief.

[The preserved region will remain open.]

[Beginning today, the facilities constructed for the Grand Intercontinental Competition will be reorganized into a permanent Lootwell training branch.]

[The training grounds will be available to everyone under Lootwell’s standard access rules, regardless of faction or affiliation.]

The message spread quickly.

•••

For members of major factions, good training grounds were valuable.

For independents, they could be life-changing.

Many had spent years relying on dangerous wilderness areas, rented facilities, temporary arrangements, or whatever resources they could personally obtain.

The preserved region offered something different.

Authority Resistance Fields could be accessed without possessing an ancient inheritance.

Interweaving Grounds allowed strangers to practice together under controlled conditions.

Clear Mind Halls offered recovery and mental stabilization that many smaller organizations could never afford to build.

Loss Condition Zones, Pressure Marches, and the other facilities gave people ways to train weaknesses that ordinary combat often exposed only when it was already too late.

More importantly, none of it required them to swear allegiance to a faction.

The response spread quickly.

People who had been preparing to leave postponed their departure.

Several independent coalitions immediately began discussing whether they should establish permanent headquarters nearby.

One group that had spent the entire Team Trial insisting it would separate afterward lasted less than an hour before submitting a joint application for training access.

Lucien approved that too.

If they wanted to form something new, he had no reason to stop them.

•••

The competition had already changed more than the preserved region.

Rankings that had once existed only on projection boards were now circulating across the five continents.

Names that had been almost unknown before the event had become recognizable.

Factions noticed.

Recruiters had been waiting before some competitors even returned home.

Several commanders who had performed well during the Team Trials received offers from organizations considerably larger than the ones they had represented.

Scouts who had barely received attention before the competition suddenly discovered that battlefield awareness was a skill people were willing to pay for.

Healers, formation specialists, Interweaver users, beast handlers, and support personnel received attention that would once have gone almost entirely toward the strongest individual combatants.

The achievement boards had changed what people looked for.

Raw strength still mattered.

It simply no longer answered every question.

Some accepted the offers.

Others used their newfound reputation to negotiate better positions inside their existing factions.

A surprising number refused everything.

Several independents who could have joined powerful organizations instead returned to the coalitions they had formed during the competition.

They had fought well together.

They trusted one another.

For some, that was worth more than entering an established faction as another talented recruit.

Small groups began talking about forming clans, mercenary organizations, exploration teams, training associations, and entirely new factions.

The competition had created rankings.

It had also created relationships.

Those were proving harder to dissolve.

•••

Lootwell became busier along with everyone else.

The promised compensation had to be distributed.

That was not a small problem when the promise had been made to everyone caught inside the fourth stage.

Attribute selection stations opened through the major Lootwell branches and teleportation hubs.

People submitted their choices, received collection records, and were assigned distribution schedules so that billions of requests did not arrive at the same location simultaneously.

Space Attribute remained predictably popular.

So did Time, Plant, Metal, and several other attributes.

Others chose stranger options based on weaknesses they had discovered during the competition.

Lucien approved the process without worrying much about supply.

The Farming World had been producing attribute-bearing fruits for a long time.

Aerolith and Green had taken good care of the plants, and the stock accumulated under their supervision was far larger than outsiders would have guessed.

More importantly, Lootwell did not need one entire fruit for every recipient.

Proper processing allowed a single suitable fruit to provide many attribute-granting extracts.

The compensation sounded extravagant.

It was extravagant.

It simply was not ruinous.

Lootwell could afford it.

•••

Days passed.

The teleportation hubs remained active.

Training grounds remained crowded.

Recruitment offers crossed continents.

New groups formed while older factions reconsidered how they trained their own people.

Equipment designs from the Interweaving Trial continued spreading.

Commanders reviewed battlefield recordings.

Participants returned to the Clear Mind Halls to confront moments from the fourth stage they still disliked remembering.

Even those who had already returned home carried pieces of the competition with them.

A retreat was no longer automatically treated as cowardice by people who had watched tactical withdrawals save thousands.

Support specialists received more attention.

Interweaver training became more serious.

Factions began asking how quickly they could reorganize if their strongest Law users suddenly lost access to their authority.

People who had once treated Black Mass warnings as a distant problem now had memories of miasma armies advancing toward them.

The invasion had not been real.

The habits it created were.

Lucien watched those changes spread through reports arriving from every continent.

That was what he had wanted from the beginning.

A competition could end with a winner.

This one had done something more troublesome.

It had left the world unable to settle down again.