100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 765 - Unpredictable

Lucien’s return to personal training did not consist of sitting in isolation and contemplating Living Creation until something changed.

Meditation remained important, but comprehension without application had never suited him.

So while part of his time was spent sinking deeper into Living Creation, the rest was devoted to making everything else he possessed more dangerous.

He began with his Laws.

Lucien had accumulated enough unusual abilities over the years that simply possessing them was no longer impressive to him.

What mattered now was whether he could bring the correct Law into a battle at the exact moment it was needed, combine it with something completely unrelated, and do so quickly enough that an enemy with Primordial-level perception could not comfortably predict what came next.

That required practice.

A great deal of it.

The Echo Crucible became one of his favorite places again.

•••

Lucien entered the simulated battlefield with nothing prepared except what he normally carried.

The Primordial Incarnation waiting for him did not give him time to organize his thoughts.

Authority descended immediately.

Space around Lucien distorted beneath pressure that would have crushed most opponents before the fight properly began.

His first response was familiar. Too familiar.

That was why he died.

The Echo Crucible dissolved the fatal consequence before it became real, and Lucien opened his eyes outside the simulation with an annoyed expression.

He started again.

The next attempt lasted longer.

Instead of answering the enemy’s authority with the most obvious Law available, he layered several effects together and used one of his remaining drops at a timing he normally would have considered wasteful.

The Incarnation adjusted.

Lucien adjusted again.

He died several exchanges later.

That was progress.

So he tried again.

•••

Most of the special drops he had once accumulated were gone.

The battles against Severance and Convergence had consumed many of the truly dangerous ones, and Lucien had no intention of pretending his inventory still contained an endless collection of convenient answers.

What remained had to be understood properly.

He reorganized the usable drops according to what they could actually accomplish in a high-level fight rather than how impressive their descriptions sounded.

The Divine Grade items received the most attention.

Some were powerful enough to change the direction of a battle by themselves, but Lucien treated them carefully.

A trump card revealed at the wrong time stopped being a trump card.

He practiced creating situations where an enemy would believe one outcome was inevitable, only for a drop to alter the conditions at the final moment.

Sometimes the result was devastating.

Sometimes the Echo adapted and killed him anyway.

Both outcomes were useful.

Every failure told Lucien which combinations only looked clever in theory.

•••

He practiced with individual Primordial Incarnation Echoes first.

That allowed him to study how different forms of authority pressured his Laws, how quickly his options disappeared once an enemy established control of the battlefield, and which abilities remained useful even when his most natural response was suppressed.

Lucien deliberately repeated unfavorable matchups.

There was little value in learning only how to win comfortable battles.

If one Echo countered something he relied on, he fought it again until that counter no longer decided the battle by itself.

Then he changed his approach and did it again.

The Echo Crucible did not praise improvement.

It simply killed him less often.

Lucien considered that sufficiently encouraging.

•••

Eventually, he stood before another opponent.

The Human Ancestor.

Even knowing that what stood before him was only an Echo did not make the experience comfortable.

There was something irritatingly difficult about fighting him.

Not merely because of strength.

Lucien had fought powerful enemies before.

The problem was that the Human Ancestor refused to behave like someone who possessed a sensible combat style.

An exchange would begin with one method and end with something that seemed unrelated until Lucien realized, too late, that the first action had existed only to make him react incorrectly to the fourth.

Skills appeared from angles that should not have belonged to the same fighter.

Magic interrupted physical sequences.

Artifacts entered and disappeared from the rhythm of combat without warning.

One ability forced Lucien to defend a particular way, only for that defense to become the condition exploited by something completely different.

The Human Ancestor did not fight like someone following a path.

He fought like someone who had collected far too many paths and saw no reason to respect the boundaries between them.

Lucien lasted longer than he had before.

He still lost.

When the simulation released him, he remained seated for some time.

Then he smiled.

He finally understood what he had been missing.

•••

Primordial Incarnations were difficult partly because their authority was overwhelming.

But overwhelming strength became easier to deal with once an opponent understood what you were going to do.

Lucien had been increasing the depth of his Laws, improving his constitution, and refining Living Creation.

All of that mattered.

It still left patterns.

He favored certain responses.

Certain combinations came naturally.

Certain Laws appeared whenever particular dangers emerged.

An enemy sufficiently experienced could learn him.

The Human Ancestor’s Echo was much harder to read because almost anything could become relevant.

Lucien did not need to copy him.

That would have been impossible anyway.

He needed to learn the principle.

If his enemies wanted to prepare for him, he would make preparation increasingly unpleasant.

•••

The Skill Doors and Magic Doors suddenly became much more valuable.

Lucien disappeared into them for long stretches at a time.

He no longer entered simply to collect whatever looked powerful.

He studied with combat application in mind.

A minor movement skill that appeared unimpressive on its own could become terrifying when combined with Space-related effects or a perfectly timed Law activation.

A defensive spell might be useless against Primordial authority directly but valuable if it bought half a breath while Lucien changed the structure of the battlefield.

Some skills existed only to create openings.

Some magic worked best when the enemy misunderstood why it had been cast.

Lucien began caring less about whether an ability was individually exceptional.

He cared about whether it gave him another possible answer.

That changed the way he learned.

•••

His days developed a rhythm.

He would study new skills and magic until he understood how they functioned naturally.

Then he would take them into the Echo Crucible and discover how many of his assumptions were wrong.

Afterward, he returned to the Doors, adjusted what he had learned, and tested the combinations again.

Living Creation gradually entered those sequences as well.

Lucien stopped treating his Law as something he activated separately from everything else.

He allowed it to support the structure of his fighting.

A created construct could change after the enemy adapted to it.

A defensive measure could become offensive when conditions shifted.

A spell could be supported by something Living Creation produced specifically to compensate for its weakness.

A Law that seemed unrelated could become part of a sequence only because Lucien created the missing connection between them.

That was when his combat style began becoming genuinely unreasonable.

•••

The Human Ancestor Echo continued defeating him.

Just less consistently.

The first time Lucien forced it to abandon a prepared sequence midway through the fight, he nearly celebrated.

The Echo responded by killing him with something he had never seen it use before.

Lucien’s excitement disappeared immediately.

He returned the next day.

Then again.

With every fight, he learned something.

Sometimes it was about the Human Ancestor.

More often, it was about himself.

Lucien discovered which habits he repeated under pressure.

He learned which skills he trusted too much and which Laws he neglected because their applications were less obvious.

He noticed how often he preserved a powerful drop because he was waiting for the perfect moment, only to die before that moment arrived.

That habit disappeared quickly.

A trump card that remained unused after death was merely expensive luggage.