100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 749 - Plan

There was another problem.

Confusion.

The public had spent months preparing for something to happen around the five continents.

Now news would spread that Black Mass monsters were attacking faction territories throughout the void.

People would begin wondering where the real front was.

The seas?

The void?

Their home cities?

The conquered worlds?

Should elite forces leave the continents?

Should they stay?

Too many different answers could damage the very readiness they had spent months building.

Worse, the Black Mass did not need everyone to make the same mistake.

It only needed every faction to make a different decision.

Fragmentation would do the rest.

Lucien could not allow that.

•••

He sent new instructions to Lootwell’s deployed forces.

They were to assist the local defenders and stabilize damaged boundaries, but they were not to pursue retreating Black Mass groups deep into unknown regions of the void.

If the enemy wanted to pull them farther outward, Lucien had no intention of cooperating.

They were also ordered to record everything.

Which monsters struck the barriers.

Which parts of the formations they targeted.

How long they remained.

Whether they retreated after reinforcements arrived.

Whether certain Laws attracted their attention.

How quickly miasma damaged formation materials.

If the attacks were reconnaissance disguised as raids, then Lucien intended to gather information from them as well.

The newly expanded Grace communication network immediately proved useful.

Lootwell personnel operating beside different factions received silent instructions without creating additional communication traffic.

Damaged boundary sections could be marked instantly.

Reinforcement requests moved directly toward available units.

Formation specialists received warnings about failing nodes before messengers could physically reach them.

Medical teams knew where casualties were accumulating.

The system had been expanded for a war that had supposedly not begun.

Now Lucien wondered whether the enemy had already decided otherwise.

•••

That thought stayed with him.

He returned his attention to the void map.

Sending ancient beasts could stop individual attacks.

It could not solve the structure of the problem.

There were too many conquered worlds.

Even Lootwell did not possess enough Extinction Grade beings to station one beside every barrier.

The factions could reinforce their own worlds permanently.

That would weaken continental defenses.

They could abandon the conquered worlds.

That would destroy economies, surrender resources, and potentially leave entire worlds exposed to the Black Mass.

Neither solution was acceptable.

Lucien needed something else.

•••

His eyes moved across the reports again.

Cracked barrier. Destroyed formation node. Collapsed defensive station. Overloaded spatial anchor. Emergency reconstruction.

The pattern made the weakness obvious.

The worlds already possessed defenses.

The problem was that those defenses had been built independently, usually to repel ordinary void threats or small scale incursions.

They had never been designed to endure sustained pressure from organized Black Mass forces.

That could change.

Lucien’s gaze moved toward several Lunarian installations recorded within Lootwell’s network.

Then toward the southern regions where the Celestials operated.

The Lunarians had once made the moon untouchable.

Their arrays and technology had advanced so far that even ancient experts had been unable to approach them casually.

The Celestials possessed a different strength.

Stabilization. Support. Purification. Enhancement. Large scale energy management.

They understood how to keep complex structures functioning while under pressure.

Lootwell had already benefited from both.

Now Lucien needed them again.

But not to protect one city.

He needed something that could reinforce entire worlds.

•••

Lucien began assembling the requirements in his mind before contacting anyone.

Simply making every existing barrier thicker would be wasteful.

Some conquered worlds were enormous.

Maintaining a Primordial resistant shell around each one continuously would consume absurd amounts of energy and materials.

And no matter how thick a barrier became, a static defense still had weaknesses.

Anything struck long enough could eventually be studied.

Anything predictable could be tested.

The Black Mass adapted.

Lucien needed layers.

The outer boundary needed to detect approaching corruption before physical impact.

It needed to identify concentrated Black Mass miasma.

Damaged sections needed to isolate themselves before failures spread across neighboring nodes.

Spatial anchors needed redundancy.

The barrier needed authority resistance, not merely physical durability.

Void routes had to remain accessible to reinforcements without creating obvious weak points.

And the entire structure needed to inform defenders immediately when pressure shifted.

Most importantly, it had to be scalable.

A perfect barrier around one conquered world would solve almost nothing.

Lucien needed something factions could actually reproduce.

Something modular enough to strengthen whatever defenses were already there rather than requiring every world to rebuild from nothing.

Living Creation stirred.

His thoughts accelerated.

Lunarian arrays could handle long range detection and calculation.

Celestial techniques could help stabilize barrier energy and resist corruption.

Lootwell could provide adaptive clauses and communication.

The Grace System could warn authorized defenders the moment a node began failing.

Law Interweaver principles might allow defensive anchors to carry limited auxiliary authorities when needed.

Even the Tidewatch Network offered useful ideas.

Lucien stopped.

Tidewatch. It had succeeded because it did not try to destroy everything approaching the five continents.

It detected. It warned. It bought time.

The conquered worlds already had walls.

Perhaps what they lacked was not another wall.

Perhaps they needed something that made those walls intelligent.

Lucien’s eyes sharpened.

•••

What if each conquered world possessed a distributed network anchored around its outer spatial boundary?

A system capable of using the world’s existing barrier instead of replacing it.

The name appeared in Lucien’s mind almost immediately.

Voidwatch.

He almost smiled.

Then decided against becoming attached to it.

Naming an unfinished project before proving it worked was how people ended up defending very expensive failures because the name sounded impressive.

For now, it was simply a problem that needed solving.

•••

He contacted Eirene adn the Lunarians first.

The message was concise.

He provided the confirmed attack patterns, casualty reports, damaged barrier designs, and the distribution of affected worlds.

Then he contacted Virel and Aniel through the Celestial network.

He did not ask either side to send more fighters.

He asked for engineers, array specialists, barrier experts, and purification specialists.

People who understood how to keep world scale defenses functioning while something powerful repeatedly tried to break them.

The responses arrived rapidly.

Nobody argued about whether the threat justified the effort.

Several conquered worlds had already suffered barrier failures.

That was enough.

•••

Before beginning the meeting, Lucien looked once more at the reports.

Another conquered world had detected Black Mass movement beyond its boundary.

No attack yet.

The creatures remained far outside the range of the defensive barrier.

Watching.

Lucien marked it.

Then another alert appeared.

A Western faction reported that miasma had begun gathering around one of the void routes leading toward its resource world.

Its barrier remained intact, but reinforcements had already been placed on standby.

Lucien sighed..

A straightforward assault against the five continents would unite the Thousand Races immediately.

This was quieter.

Every faction could still tell itself that its own attack was local.

Every elder could still believe they only needed to defend one more boundary.

Every reinforcement could still look temporary.

Until enough forces had been spread across the void.

Lucien’s expression turned cold.

He would not allow the enemy to arrange the battlefield uncontested.

•••

The emergency meeting began soon after.

Lunarian projections appeared first, followed by Celestial representatives and several Lootwell specialists.

Lucien kept his explanation short.

"The attacks are no longer isolated. Whether they are coordinated or not, we have to treat them as if they are."

No one objected.

"If every faction has to choose between protecting the five continents and keeping enough elders beside every conquered world, then the enemy has already decided where our forces stand."

That earned silence.

Lucien looked across the projections.

"So we remove the choice."

That was the real objective.

Not making every conquered world impossible to attack.

That would be unrealistic.

Not building barriers capable of killing entire Black Mass armies by themselves.

That would be unnecessary.

The defenses only needed to become strong and intelligent enough that a faction did not have to dispatch several Eternals every time monsters appeared outside its boundary.

Detect early.

Strengthen the section being struck.

Slow barrier degradation.

Reject corruption.

Preserve reinforcement routes.

Warn defenders before a failure occurred.

Buy time.

Enough time for help to arrive without sacrificing everything else.

The philosophy was familiar to Lucien by now.

Survival did not always mean defeating the enemy immediately.

Sometimes it meant making sure the enemy could not force you to fight on its terms.

•••

The Lunarians began evaluating long range spatial detection methods.

The Celestials studied how purification and stabilization structures could reinforce existing world barriers without interfering with their native formations.

Lootwell’s formation division began comparing the damaged designs supplied by different factions.

Lucien listened while Living Creation continued arranging relationships between them.

The project would not be simple.

Some conquered worlds were enormous.

Some had unstable spatial boundaries.

Some existed inside unusual environments where standard formation laws behaved differently.

A few possessed extremely powerful native barriers that only needed better detection and redundancy.

Others relied on cheap defensive shells that would require significant rebuilding.

A universal design would fail.

A universal framework might not.

That distinction mattered.

They did not need every conquered world to possess the same barrier.

They needed every world to possess a defense capable of responding to the same threat.

Lucien finally smiled faintly.

That sounded much more like Lootwell.

•••

Far beyond the five continents, another battle had already begun.

Astraea moved through the void beside a glowing conquered world while stormlight tore through the darkness.

Behind her, the world’s barrier pulsed where formation masters were repairing a damaged section.

Ahead, Black Mass monsters surged through clouds of miasma.

Faction elders fought beside ancient beasts that many of them had once known only through records.

Grace messages moved silently among Lootwell personnel.

The worlds themselves still stood.

Their barriers still separated life from what waited outside.

But across the void, those barriers were being struck.

One after another.

There had been no declaration.

No grand army had appeared over the five continents.

No Primordial Incarnation had stepped forward to announce the beginning.

History would probably argue later about when the war truly started.

Lucien no longer cared about the exact date.

He looked at the growing number of reports and understood the only part that mattered.

The enemy had chosen the outer boundaries as its first front.

The invasion had not entered the worlds yet.

It was knocking on their walls.