100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 766 - Threshold

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Previously on 100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full?...

Lucien trained rigorously in the Echo Crucible, pushing himself against simulated opponents to refine his combat style. He experimented with combining disparate Laws and strategically using his remaining powerful drops, often dying but learning from each failure. His training intensified against the Human Ancestor's Echo, whose unpredictable methods revealed Lucien's own predictable habits and taught him the principle of maintaining a diverse and adaptable fighting style.

Time passed.

Lucien became harder to predict.

The change was not obvious when someone watched him train casually.

He still looked like Lucien.

He still preferred efficient solutions.

He did not begin throwing random abilities around simply for the sake of being confusing.

Unpredictability without purpose was just incompetence wearing interesting clothing.

Instead, Lucien built more routes toward the same objective.

If an enemy shut down the first, he could move into the second without losing momentum.

If that response was anticipated, another combination was already available.

His Laws stopped competing for attention and began supporting one another more naturally.

Skills filled the spaces between them.

Magic widened his options.

Living Creation connected things that had never been designed to work together.

And somewhere beneath all of it remained the drops he had not yet revealed.

Those were still his sharpest surprises.

He intended to keep them that way.

•••

His training did not make him forget Lootwell.

If anything, learning how important adaptability was made him pay even more attention to the forces he had spent years developing.

The young talents discovered during and after the Grand Intercontinental Competition had grown far beyond what they had been when Lucien first noticed them.

Some had become powerful enough that their younger selves would not have recognized them.

Others had developed into specialists rather than straightforward combatants, which Lucien increasingly appreciated.

A battlefield did not survive on powerful attackers alone.

The most valuable development, however, was the commanders.

Lucien needed people who could understand Lootwell’s larger objectives without requiring him to personally control every engagement.

They had to be capable of adapting when communication failed, recognizing when a position was no longer worth holding, and coordinating forces whose abilities differed wildly.

The competition and everything that followed had given them years of practical preparation.

Now that investment was beginning to show.

Lucien quietly increased their access to more difficult simulations and larger coordinated exercises.

If the day came when several fronts opened simultaneously, Lootwell could not afford to have every army waiting for Lucien to tell it what to do.

•••

The Grace System also continued supporting growth in the background.

As Lucien learned more skills and magic himself, the range of Skill Cards and Magic Cards he could produce expanded with him.

He did not flood the system with them.

Instantly learning something did not automatically mean someone knew how to use it well.

The rewards remained contextual.

A fighter whose existing style lacked mobility might receive an appropriate movement skill after completing the right training.

Someone with excellent control but limited defensive options could earn something completely different.

Others received magic that complemented talents they had already developed rather than replacing years of work with an unrelated shortcut.

That approach produced increasingly strange results.

The younger generation had already grown up surrounded by systems, artifacts, training environments, Law Interweavers, and people who considered impossible opportunities part of normal life.

Now some of them were accumulating carefully matched skills and magic on top of that foundation.

Lucien watched the Thousand Race’s progress and experienced the uncomfortable realization that he might have created an entire generation with unreasonable expectations about what counted as normal development.

He decided that was a future problem.

For the moment, it was extremely useful.

•••

Whenever he finished dealing with Lootwell’s needs, Lucien returned to the Echo Crucible.

His standard gradually changed.

Defeating a Primordial Incarnation Echo once no longer satisfied him.

A single victory could be luck.

It could depend on a favorable opening or one successful surprise.

Lucien wanted reliability.

So he began constructing different ways to kill the same Echo.

One approach relied heavily on his Laws.

Another emphasized magic and movement.

A third forced the enemy into a prepared interaction with one of his remaining drops.

Some victories required prolonged pressure.

Others depended on creating one opening and making sure the enemy never recovered from it.

Lucien continued until he could look at a specific Primordial Incarnation and imagine numerous viable routes toward its death.

Only then did he move on.

He found the process deeply satisfying.

The Primordial Incarnation Echoes probably would not have agreed.

•••

Eventually, Lucien increased the difficulty.

Two Echoes appeared together.

His confidence lasted considerably less time than expected.

The first attempt ended badly.

The second was more educational but only slightly less fatal.

By the fifth, Lucien understood the problem.

A Primordial Incarnation fighting alone could be manipulated.

Two of them with proper coordination were different.

One could pressure him while the other protected the weakness he intended to exploit.

Their authorities overlapped.

Their positioning denied several combinations before he could create them.

Whenever Lucien forced one into an unfavorable situation, the other changed the battlefield enough to ruin his follow-up.

It became worse when the Echo Crucible gave them coherent formation behavior.

Lucien’s new unpredictability helped him survive.

It did not make coordinated Primordial Incarnations stupid.

That was reassuring in a deeply irritating way.

He continued anyway.

•••

The goal changed from victory to understanding.

Lucien studied how coordinated Incarnations covered one another, where their formations became rigid, and what happened when two different authorities were forced to respond to the same abnormal situation.

He occasionally broke their coordination.

He never maintained the advantage long enough to win consistently.

That was fine.

For now.

Each failure gave him material for the next period of meditation.

After leaving the Crucible, Lucien would sit quietly and replay the battle through Parallel Thoughts.

One part of his mind studied timing.

Another reconstructed authority interactions.

Others examined his Law usage, wasted movement, inefficient magic, and opportunities he had failed to notice.

Living Creation sat at the center of those reflections.

Not as a weapon.

As the principle connecting everything.

•••

That was where Lucien began noticing another change.

His comprehension had been deepening for months, but he had stopped trying to assign a number to it.

The old percentages had become less useful after Creation evolved into Living Creation.

He could feel advancement.

He simply could not translate that feeling cleanly into the measurements he had once relied upon.

The Law itself had become too different.

Living Creation was not merely about bringing something into existence.

Lucien had understood that long ago.

It was continuation, adaptation, growth that responded to experience, and structures capable of becoming more than the purpose for which they had originally been created.

The more Lucien watched the world, the more examples he found.

Voidwatch had begun as a response to damaged barriers, then became a framework factions could adapt themselves.

The Grace System had changed repeatedly because static rules could not serve living societies forever.

The Liberators evolved differently because forcing them into one standard would have destroyed what made them valuable.

Even Vorren had changed once someone stopped treating his instinct as something useful only for escape.

Lucien had spent years surrounded by things that became something new because circumstances demanded it.

He had been practicing Living Creation long before he realized those experiences were teaching him the Law.

•••

His meditation changed after that realization.

Lucien stopped reaching for comprehension as though it were an object waiting somewhere ahead of him.

Instead, he examined everything he had already built.

Lootwell itself had evolved from a territory into something increasingly difficult to define.

The systems surrounding it interacted, adapted, failed, improved, and produced consequences he had never planned at the beginning.

People did the same.

A living creation was not valuable because its creator controlled every future choice.

It was valuable because it could continue after the creator stopped choosing for it.

That understanding settled deeper than the previous ones.

Living Creation stirred.

Lucien felt his authority expand.

Something inside his Omnigenesis Vessel answered.

•••

Lucien opened his eyes.

For several seconds, he remained completely still.

He could feel the difference.

He had experienced enough breakthroughs to recognize the sensation of approaching another threshold, but this one did not resemble his earlier advancement through the Eternal Realm.

He still could not assign an exact amount of comprehension to Living Creation.

That mattered less now.

The pressure gathering around him told him what numbers could not.

He was approaching a level beyond ordinary Eternal strength.

Extinction Grade.

Lucien smiled slowly.

For months, he had been sending ancient beasts through that threshold.

Now he could finally feel his own path nearing it.

The realization should have satisfied him.

Instead, the Omnigenesis Vessel reacted again.

The sensation was faint.

Lucien almost missed it.

It did not come from Living Creation itself nor did it resemble the pull toward Primordial Space that Luke and Cienna had described after recognizing their original Laws.

This was different.

His constitution had changed when the Primordial Vessel evolved into the Omnigenesis Vessel, yet Lucien still did not truly understand what that name represented.

At first, he had treated it as another extraordinary constitution created by the strange convergence of everything inside him.

Now he was less certain.

Whenever his comprehension of Living Creation deepened, the vessel seemed to respond as though the Law were only one part of something larger.

Lucien followed the feeling inward.

For an instant, he sensed something beyond the threshold he had been approaching.

It’s something whose shape he could not understand yet.

The sensation disappeared the moment he tried to grasp it directly.

Lucien remained motionless.

Then his smile returned.

He had spent enough of his life discovering impossible things to know better than to dismiss one simply because he could not reach it yet.

Extinction Grade was close.

Living Creation was still deepening.