100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 789 - Experiment

The discovery of Omniarch did not give Lucien peace.

It gave him more questions.

Unfortunately, questions had always been one of the most effective ways to make him do something unreasonable.

For several days inside his inner universe, Lucien did little except test the boundaries of what he had just learned.

The first experiment came from Luke and Cienna.

Their connection to Primordial Space disappeared whenever they entered Lucien’s universe, only to return once they stepped outside again. Until now, Lucien had treated that as useful insulation.

It allowed his parents to continue strengthening themselves without being pressured toward a place they were not yet ready to enter.

After realizing what his authority over the inner universe might eventually represent, however, Lucien began looking at the absence differently.

If Primordial Space could not reach inside his universe, perhaps his universe simply did not possess an equivalent yet.

That led to an obvious question.

Could he make one?

Lucien chose the farthest region of the inner void and isolated it from every inhabited world before beginning.

He knew what Primordial Space was supposed to accomplish. Original Laws could be established there more deeply into the universe, allowing the beings who carried them to take another step toward becoming something far more fundamental.

Luke’s Law of Skills and Cienna’s Law of Magic would eventually need that opportunity.

If Lucien could provide it himself, neither of them would have to rely on the external Primordial Space.

The idea was attractive enough that he immediately distrusted it.

Still, he tried.

Space folded beneath his authority.

Layers formed.

Lucien adjusted their separation from the ordinary universe and gave the region enough stability to survive pressures that would have destroyed a normal spatial pocket. He introduced Laws gradually, watching how they interacted while deliberately leaving room for something deeper to emerge.

Nothing did.

The result was impressive.

It was also useless.

Lucien stood inside the enormous empty layer and stared around him.

There was Space.

There was stability.

There were Laws.

There was enough energy to sustain powerful beings for an absurd length of time.

But it was not Primordial Space.

It did not possess whatever quality allowed an original Law to become established into the universe itself.

Lucien tried again.

The second attempt was more complex.

It failed more beautifully.

By the fourth, he had created several extremely stable dimensional layers that would probably become useful for something else later.

None of them were what he wanted.

Lucien eventually sat in the middle of the newest failure and sighed.

It was strangely refreshing.

He had become so accustomed to shaping his inner universe that being told no by it almost felt nostalgic.

The reason was obvious once his irritation faded.

He did not understand Primordial Space.

He understood what it did.

That was not the same thing.

Lucien had never entered it. He had never experienced the way its Laws behaved.

Trying to reproduce it from secondhand understanding was like attempting to recreate an artifact after hearing someone describe what it was used for.

The shape might be convincing.

The substance would not be.

The Abyss went even worse.

Lucien abandoned that attempt much sooner.

He knew far too little about the structure that Alanthuriel and the other Abyssal beings inhabited. Knowing that the Abyss helped maintain some form of cosmic balance did not tell him how it existed, what principles sustained it, or what made an Abyssal existence fundamentally different from something born in ordinary reality.

His attempt created another empty layer.

Lucien stared at it for several seconds.

Then he laughed.

"At least I’m getting very good at making places with absolutely nothing in them."

The empty layer did not appreciate the criticism.

Lucien dismantled most of it.

Yet the failures were not useless.

Every attempt had made the Omnigenesis Vessel react.

That was the part he could not ignore.

Whenever Lucien forced himself to create a structure the inner universe had never possessed before, the Vessel responded more strongly than it did during ordinary training. His body adapted to the strain, but the reaction went deeper than durability.

It felt as though the Vessel was learning alongside him.

The harder Lucien pushed against the limits of his understanding, the more clearly he could sense the inner universe in return.

That discovery changed the nature of his experiments.

He stopped trying only to succeed.

Sometimes he deliberately tested concepts he suspected would fail simply to understand why.

He stretched temporal differences farther than before, then carefully relaxed them before stability suffered.

He altered the way gravity expressed itself in isolated worlds.

He created regions where familiar environmental conditions behaved differently while ensuring the Laws beneath them remained coherent.

He experimented with how Life adapted when Space became unusually dense and how living ecosystems responded when the passage of Time differed across neighboring regions.

Some experiments produced useful results.

Others produced worlds Lucien quietly erased before anyone could ask what he had been thinking.

Through all of them, the Omnigenesis Vessel grew more responsive.

The relationship gradually became obvious.

The Vessel did not react most strongly when Lucien produced destruction or raw power.

It reacted when he changed the possibilities available to the universe.

That realization stayed with him.

•••

One day, Lucien stopped.

He had been standing above a newly formed world where he had spent several weeks altering the interaction between environmental Laws when a thought surfaced.

There was one thing he had never seriously attempted.

Lucien had created plants.

He had created animals.

Living Creation could shape bodies, ecosystems, and species with frightening ease when he understood what he wanted.

But he had never created a truly intelligent people.

Not something that merely followed implanted instincts.

Not a creature created with a predetermined purpose.

A person.

Or at least something capable of becoming one.

Lucien’s expression changed.

The Omnigenesis Vessel reacted immediately.

He had not even done anything.

The thought alone was enough.

Lucien remained suspended above the world for a long time.

’Of course it would react.’

If his recent understanding was correct, then this was fundamentally different from creating another beast.

A genuinely intelligent lifeform could choose.

It could surprise him.

It could make decisions he disliked.

It could become something Lucien never intended.

That made the idea considerably more uncomfortable.

He could create a body easily enough.

He could place memories inside it.

He could shape its instincts, its temperament, perhaps even its loyalties.

And that was exactly why he did not want to do any of those things.

Lucien had no interest in producing people whose personalities were simply another extension of his authority.

The thought felt wrong.

For all the control he possessed inside this universe, there were boundaries he had imposed on himself long before he understood what that control might eventually mean.

If he created intelligent life only to decide what they thought, what they valued, and who they should become, then the result would not prove his universe could create anything.

It would only prove Lucien could make complicated puppets.

He looked across the unfinished world beneath him.

The Omnigenesis Vessel pulsed again.

Stronger this time.

Lucien closed his eyes.

Perhaps that was the actual test.

Not whether he could create someone, but whether he could create the conditions for someone to exist without needing to dictate who that someone became.

That was much harder.

Naturally, Lucien became interested.

•••

He spent several internal days considering the idea before acting.

For once, he did not begin immediately.

There were implications he could not casually ignore.

A new intelligent race would not be an experiment he could simply erase because the outcome disappointed him.

Once they truly lived, they would belong to themselves.

Lucien had to accept that before he started.

Eventually, he did.

The decision felt surprisingly simple once he reached it.

He would not create a finished person.

He would create the beginning.

Everything after that would be left to the universe.

The moment he settled on that principle, the Omnigenesis Vessel responded so strongly that Lucien opened his eyes.

His entire body seemed to resonate with the inner universe.

Lucien smiled faintly.

"Fine."

Apparently, he had found the next experiment.

This one, however, would require far more patience than creating another empty dimension.