100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 803 - Caught Off Guard

For several days, nothing happened.

That silence bothered Lucien more than an immediate attack would have.

Lootwell’s forces were already spread across the five continents.

Ancient beasts waited within reach of the most important formation regions, while the Eternal monster army covered the wider gaps between them. Aquatic forces had entered the seas, Tidewatch had expanded its watch beneath the surface, and Lucien’s Split Bodies occupied positions chosen specifically because they allowed rapid response to more than one possible target.

He had deliberately refused to leave an obvious weakness.

The divinations had become unreliable wherever the Primordial Incarnations were involved, so Lucien treated every important region as a possible battlefield.

The continental reunification continued throughout the wait.

The formation arrays gathered energy.

The seas slowly narrowed.

Lilith and the Lunarians continued strengthening the connections already established beneath the water.

Nothing suggested that an attack was imminent.

Then, one afternoon, Tidewatch screamed.

Not from one direction.

From almost everywhere.

Lucien’s attention spread across the world at once.

Something descended over the western sea.

Another presence appeared near a continental joining region.

Then a third emerged thousands of kilometers away.

A fourth appeared inland.

The alerts multiplied before the first one had even fully resolved.

More signatures followed from the northern waters.

Then the south.

Then the eastern coastline.

The pressure carried by them was unmistakable.

Primordial authority.

Lucien’s expression changed.

"They actually came."

And they had come exactly as he feared they might.

Not as one army.

They had scattered themselves across the world.

•••

More than a dozen Primordial Incarnations appeared within moments of one another.

None had chosen the same battlefield.

That alone revealed part of their intention.

They had expected the five continents to divide their attention.

They had expected local defenses to become overwhelmed while the strongest forces rushed toward whichever Incarnation appeared first.

They had expected distance to work for them.

Instead, the first Incarnation descending toward an ocean formation found an ancient beast already waiting beneath it.

Astraea lifted her head.

Tempest spread across the sky.

The Incarnation slowed.

Elsewhere, another emerged near one of the major continental anchors and found rows of Eternal monsters already positioned around the formation.

A third appeared above open water.

Aquatic monsters surfaced beneath it in numbers large enough to turn the sea black.

Then one of Lucien’s Split Bodies arrived.

The Incarnation stopped.

Across the world, the same thing happened again and again and again.

The Primordial Incarnations hesitated.

Lucien noticed.

At first he assumed they were simply reassessing the battlefield.

Then he saw the expression of the one facing his Split Body.

It was brief, barely noticeable.

But Lucien knew surprise when he saw it.

The Incarnation had not expected them to be there.

That was strange.

The enemy had interfered with divination.

They had deliberately created misleading futures and concealed their movements well enough that even Aurelia could not confidently identify where the attacks would occur.

Lucien had assumed that meant their own information about the future was at least comparable.

Yet they looked genuinely caught off guard.

A second Incarnation reacted the same way when Vaelcar emerged from beneath the clouds.

A third abruptly changed direction after discovering several Extinction-Grade ancient beasts within response range.

Lucien’s thoughts accelerated.

’They did not know...’

The realization struck him in the middle of the opening exchange.

They had not known these forces would be here.

•••

Lucien’s Split Body blocked a descending wave of authority before it could reach the formation beneath him.

The impact twisted the sky.

Space folded outward from the collision, and the sea thousands of meters below sank briefly under the pressure before Tidewatch’s surrounding formations stabilized it.

Lucien did not take his eyes off the Incarnation.

A possibility had entered his mind.

Most of the army standing outside today had been somewhere else when the Primordial Incarnations made their preparations.

Inside him.

His inner universe.

Lucien’s thoughts moved faster.

The ancient beasts had trained there.

The monster army had developed there.

Most of the forces he had deployed had spent years beyond the normal structure of the Big World.

What if external divination simply could not reach them properly?

The possibility was uncomfortable.

And extremely useful.

Lucien immediately found a flaw in the theory.

Aurelia could divine events involving people who had spent time inside his universe.

So could Elunara.

They had been doing exactly that.

Which meant the answer was not simply that the inner universe blocked all divination.

Then he realized the difference.

Aurelia had entered it.

So had Elunara.

The Grandmaster had also interacted directly with Lucien and his structures repeatedly.

They possessed a connection to what existed inside.

The Primordial Incarnations did not.

They had never entered his inner universe.

They had never established any direct relationship with its causality.

If Lucien’s universe had truly begun developing its own independent time, reincarnation, spatial structure, and recognition of existence, then perhaps beings outside it could not simply look inward through divination as though it were another region of the Big World.

That would explain the surprise.

Perhaps they could divine Lootwell.

Perhaps they could divine what happened after his forces entered the Big World.

But while those forces remained inside his universe, the information surrounding them might have been absent, incomplete, or distorted.

Lucien almost smiled.

He stopped himself.

One battle was not enough to prove anything.

It was a theory.

A very interesting theory.

And if it was correct, his inner universe had just revealed another strategic value he had never considered.

The Incarnation attacked again.

Lucien raised one hand.

"Later."

He would investigate after they survived the present.

•••

The Primordial Incarnations abandoned subtlety quickly.

Their first advantage was gone.

What followed was destruction.

One wielded an authority that fractured everything its presence crossed. The ocean beneath it split into enormous trenches as though something invisible had struck the water with a blade.

Another radiated a crushing force that turned mountains into collapsing fields of stone.

A third released waves of burning authority that continued consuming energy even after ordinary flames would have died.

The Incarnations that had come were clearly suited for direct devastation.

That made their original plan obvious.

They had intended to strike widely, destroy several critical structures before reinforcements could arrive, and force Lucien to choose which regions mattered most.

That plan had already failed.

Every battlefield had resistance waiting.

The Incarnations were individually terrifying.

They were also isolated.

Astraea met one beneath a sky filled with storms.

Every collision between Tempest and the Incarnation’s authority turned enormous stretches of cloud into expanding rings.

She did not try to overpower it recklessly.

She kept it occupied.

That was enough.

Two Eternal beast formations closed from the sides while another ancient beast arrived from the rear.

The Incarnation immediately understood what was happening.

Elsewhere, Vaelcar endured a direct strike that would have erased most ordinary Eternals.

His scales cracked.

He answered by wrapping his immense body through the surrounding space and denying the Incarnation the open battlefield it wanted.

The Eternal monsters beneath him attacked in coordinated waves.

One group pressured.

Another withdrew.

A third replaced it before the Incarnation could exploit the opening.

They had trained for exactly this kind of fighting.

The same lesson repeated across the continents.

The Incarnations possessed better authority, better instincts, and techniques that sometimes made raw comparisons of strength almost meaningless.

What they did not possess was numerical superiority.

They had spread themselves too widely.

And now every isolated Incarnation had discovered that Lootwell could answer one powerful enemy with another powerful enemy and an army behind it.