100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 787 - Sand

Months of repeated incursions eventually gave Lucien something he had not enjoyed in a long time.

Breathing room.

The attacks had not stopped, but they no longer required him to personally watch every coastline and every battlefield.

The Thousand Races had grown too accustomed to dealing with them, and the defensive structure surrounding the five continents had matured enough that Lucien could finally step away without feeling as though something would collapse the moment he turned his back.

He did not leave the world unattended.

The responsibility simply rotated.

The ancient beasts began taking turns overseeing the continents alongside Lootwell’s commanders and the major factions. Some were better suited for the role than others, but all of them possessed enough strength that anything short of a true escalation would have difficulty surprising them.

Lucien still received reports.

Tidewatch still remained linked to him.

If anything truly unusual happened, he could return immediately.

But for the first time in months, he stopped treating every alert as something he personally needed to solve.

Then he entered his inner universe.

•••

The changes there had become impossible to measure at a glance.

Every time Lucien returned after spending a meaningful amount of time outside, something had advanced.

His pets had become increasingly unreasonable.

The people closest to him had continued training.

More Fruits of Creation had ripened and been distributed to those who could benefit from them most.

Even people who had once seemed impossibly far from the highest realms were now beginning to approach thresholds that would have taken them decades or centuries under ordinary circumstances.

Lucien wandered through several regions before remembering one person he had left alone for quite some time.

Vorren.

He found him in the temporal zone exactly where he had been placed, although almost nothing else about him felt the same.

The Fruit of Creation had finished its work.

Lucien noticed the physical change first.

Vorren’s body had become more stable in a way that was difficult to describe. His Law flowed through him without the small points of resistance Lucien had previously sensed, and the connection between the two seemed considerably tighter than before.

But that was not what caught Lucien’s attention.

Vorren opened his eyes.

Then frowned.

"What?"

Lucien tilted his head.

Vorren looked toward one side of the training region.

"There."

Lucien followed his gaze.

Nothing appeared unusual.

Vorren stood and walked several dozen meters before stopping beside a formation anchor buried beneath the ground.

He stared at it for a few seconds.

"The flow is wrong."

Lucien’s attention sharpened.

Vorren was right.

The problem was minor, barely enough to matter yet, but one of the internal channels had begun degrading unevenly.

Lucien looked back at him.

Vorren looked just as surprised.

His ability had changed.

Before consuming the Fruit, Vorren’s instincts had warned him when something felt dangerous or wrong. The sensation could become stronger or weaker, but the information itself had remained vague.

Now the response was no longer separated from the rest of him.

His body reacted with it.

A tightening in one part of his chest could indicate immediate physical danger. A pressure behind his eyes seemed to accompany distant threats. Sometimes his skin prickled when the problem came from corrupted energy, while spatial instability produced an entirely different kind of discomfort.

The sensations were not perfectly consistent yet.

That was exactly why Lucien had him test them.

For several days inside the temporal zone, Vorren moved through controlled environments while Lucien changed variables without warning him. Some tests contained real problems. Others contained nothing at all.

Vorren failed enough of them to reassure Lucien that the Fruit had not somehow turned him omniscient.

But he succeeded far more often than before.

More importantly, he could increasingly tell Lucien why something felt wrong.

Not the complete answer.

Not always.

But enough to narrow the search.

The improvement was enormous.

Lucien immediately sent him into longer training.

Vorren protested when he realized that becoming better at detecting danger had apparently rewarded him with more opportunities to experience controlled danger.

Lucien ignored that complaint.

A useful instinct was good.

A useful instinct that understood itself was much better.

•••

After dealing with Vorren, Lucien went to the Monster Small World.

The blood pools needed replenishment.

He had maintained the supply for a long time now, and the process had become almost routine. A measured amount of his blood entered the pools, mixed with the ancient beast blood already there, and slowly became part of the environment that had helped raise an increasingly terrifying population of monsters.

The moment Lucien arrived, several ancient beasts noticed him.

So did a great many younger ones.

He pretended not to see the enthusiasm spreading through the surrounding region.

It usually meant someone wanted to challenge something stronger than themselves.

Lucien finished replenishing the pools before walking farther into the world.

The changes pleased him.

The beasts were larger, smarter, and better coordinated.

Many of those who had once fought entirely by instinct now understood formations, retreat, timing, and the value of not trampling their own allies during a charge.

That last lesson had required more effort than Lucien wanted to remember.

Then his attention shifted toward one distant region.

A desert covered a vast portion of the horizon.

Lucien smiled.

The Soilwyrms had done that.

The first time he had encountered creatures of their kind in the small world, they had been troublesome enough.

The ones here had become enormous.

Their bodies rolled beneath the desert like moving hills, occasionally sending entire dunes sliding aside as they surfaced. They consumed soil essence wherever they traveled, leaving once-fertile ground stripped of the vitality it had contained.

Under ordinary circumstances, that should have been a problem.

Instead, Lucien had accidentally made it useful.

Every monster living here had been given access to Divine Energy.

That included the Soilwyrms.

Lucien had noticed the difference some time ago, but only recently had enough of the transformed material accumulated for the researchers to begin taking it seriously.

A Soilwyrm emerged in the distance.

Its massive jaws opened.

Several hundred meters of earth disappeared.

The creature sank beneath the sand again with obvious satisfaction.

Lucien watched the trail behind it.

The soil it left behind was no longer truly dead.

Its ordinary essence had been consumed, but the remnants carried something else now.

Divine Energy had altered what should have been barren waste.

The sand glittered faintly under the artificial sun, each grain carrying an unusually stable trace of purified energy that resisted the sort of contamination the researchers had been struggling to counter.

They had given the material a name.

Sanctified Aetherglass Sand.

Lucien thought the name was unnecessarily grand.

The researchers had refused to change it.

He privately continued calling it divine sand.

•••

The first tests had been encouraging.

The material did not behave like raw Divine Energy.

That was precisely what made it useful.

Someone without Divine Energy could still carry it.

Formations could use it.

Protective equipment could incorporate it.

More importantly, preliminary exposure tests showed that miasma had difficulty penetrating areas where enough of the sand had been refined and stabilized.

It was not immunity.

Lucien would have distrusted the result if it had been.

But it delayed corruption.

Sometimes significantly.

That was exactly what the research teams had been trying to achieve.

Lucien crouched and let a handful of the pale sand run between his fingers.

The Soilwyrms had produced mountains of it.

Literally.

He looked toward the horizon.

Another enormous shape moved beneath the dunes.

Then another.

Lucien’s expression softened.

He had never expected Soilwyrms to become one of his favorite monsters.

Yet there they were, happily consuming soil essence and leaving behind enormous quantities of potentially life-saving material.

They were destructive.

They were absurdly large.

They had converted a significant portion of an entire world into desert.

And somehow, they had become strategically valuable.

Lucien found that adorable.

He decided not to tell anyone.

Especially not the Soilwyrms.

They were already difficult enough to manage when excited.

•••

Researchers arrived soon afterward to collect another shipment.

Several storage devices disappeared beneath the dunes and returned filled with compressed Sanctified Aetherglass Sand.

Lucien watched them leave.

For months, they had been searching for a way to give ordinary fighters more time against miasma.

Now they finally possessed a material that might make the difference.

The solution was still incomplete.

Raw sand could not simply be stuffed into armor and expected to solve everything.

It needed refining.

Its Divine Energy had to remain stable.

Researchers needed to learn how much protection could be gained before the material became too expensive, too heavy, or too difficult to maintain.

But for once, supply would not be the problem.

The Soilwyrms could produce more.

A great deal more.

Lucien looked toward the expanding desert.

Perhaps too much more.

He made a mental note to ensure the creatures did not eventually eat the entire world.

Then he left the researchers to their work.

There were worse problems to have.

For now, the Thousand Races had gained another weapon against corruption from one of the strangest sources imaginable.

And somewhere beneath an endless desert, several enormous Soilwyrms continued eating without the slightest idea that they had just become part of Lootwell’s war effort.