100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 812 - Darkness

Aurelia found him first.

Elunara and the Grandmaster were with her.

Lucien knew immediately that something was wrong.

None of the three had the expression of someone bringing an ordinary warning.

Aurelia looked unsettled.

That bothered him most.

"What happened?"

She hesitated.

"We found something."

Then she shook her head.

"No. That isn’t right."

Lucien frowned.

Aurelia looked toward Elunara.

Elunara’s expression was equally grim.

The Grandmaster said nothing.

Aurelia finally faced Lucien again.

"We stopped finding something."

Lucien’s frown deepened.

That was worse.

•••

They moved to a quieter chamber before continuing.

Aurelia opened a projection of her divination first.

Possible futures unfolded around them.

Lucien had grown accustomed to the sight.

Aurelia moved through those possibilities.

Wars appeared.

Continental reunification completed in some.

In others it stalled.

The Black Mass transformed differently depending on circumstances.

Lootwell survived countless disasters.

It failed in others.

Nothing about that surprised Lucien anymore.

Then every visible future stopped.

The projection became dark.

Lucien stared.

"Where is the interference?"

"There isn’t any that I can identify."

Aurelia’s voice remained quiet.

She pushed another branch forward.

The same thing happened.

Another darkness.

She changed earlier choices.

The path shifted.

Different wars.

Different survivors.

Different decisions.

Eventually, the same absence waited ahead.

Lucien’s expression gradually hardened.

Elunara stepped forward.

"I tried following individuals instead."

That had been her most reliable approach since the return of the Parallel Timelines.

Broad futures could become chaotic.

Individual fate usually gave her something narrower to follow.

She selected people with no direct connection to one another.

Soldiers.

Researchers.

Civilians.

Commanders.

People from different continents.

Their futures continued normally.

Then every thread disappeared.

The timing varied slightly.

The result did not.

"I thought they were dying," Elunara said.

Lucien understood why.

A fate ending could mean death.

"But?"

"The endings don’t feel like death."

That made the room colder.

The Grandmaster finally spoke.

"I looked for the danger causing it."

Lucien turned toward him.

"There isn’t a point of collapse I can follow."

That was extremely unusual.

The Grandmaster specialized in finding where a future became dangerous.

This time, he found no final failure.

The road itself simply stopped existing.

•••

Lucien looked back toward Aurelia’s darkness.

Something about it bothered him.

Not merely the absence.

The texture of it.

He had seen something similar before.

Aurelia realized it at almost the same moment.

"This place feels familiar."

Lucien looked toward her.

Her face had gone pale.

"The dead planes."

Silence followed.

Lucien’s thoughts accelerated.

The planes where the small worlds had once rested had possessed a particular emptiness.

They were not ordinary vacant dimensions.

Something fundamental had ended there.

The darkness before them carried the same impression.

Lucien stood very still.

"You’re saying the future becomes a dead plane?"

"I don’t know."

Aurelia answered immediately.

That mattered.

She was frightened, but she was not guessing beyond what she could see.

"It could mean every future we can reach ends there."

Elunara continued carefully.

"Or it could mean we no longer exist beyond that point, so none of us can follow fate farther."

The Grandmaster looked toward the dark projection.

"There could also be a boundary none of our methods can cross."

Lucien listened.

All three explanations were possible.

None were comforting.

If the diviners themselves ceased existing, their observations might naturally end.

If causality changed into something their current methods could not follow, the result might also appear blank.

But the resemblance to the dead planes bothered Lucien too much to dismiss.

He remembered Alanthuriel’s warning.

A competing timeline.

A history deliberately recreated by the Abyssal Arch-Lords.

A continuation designed from the beginning to challenge the one they currently inhabited.

Now Lucien was staring at a future in which every divination ended in something resembling a causally dead plane.

The coincidence was terrible.

•••

Lucien walked closer to the projection.

"Can you find any future that continues beyond it?"

Aurelia shook her head.

"I’ve tried changing the conditions before the darkness."

"How far?"

"Very far."

She had examined futures where the continents reunited early.

Others where the process stopped.

Futures where the Black Mass attacked sooner.

Futures where the Thousand Races withdrew from entire regions.

She had even followed branches where Lucien made completely different strategic choices.

The endpoint persisted.

Elunara had done the same through individual fate.

The Grandmaster had searched for paths around the danger.

There was nothing to move around because he could not locate the point at which the danger began.

Lucien felt pressure building behind his eyes.

Then another thought occurred.

"What about me?"

The room became quieter.

Aurelia looked at him.

"I cannot follow you cleanly."

That was not new.

Lucien’s increasingly unusual existence had made direct divination around him difficult for a long time.

He stared at the blank future.

Perhaps this was the consequence Alanthuriel had been warning him about.

Perhaps the enemy succeeded in creating the historical divergence they wanted.

Perhaps the Arch-Lords succeeded in establishing their forged timeline as the new Main Timeline, then destroyed the current one once it lost its place.

There were too many unknowns for Lucien to call that fact.

He did not need certainty anymore.

The risk alone was enough.

•••

That night, Lucien returned to the Makeshift Universe.

He stood before the empty regions where the recovered worlds would eventually be placed.

The evacuation routes were ready.

The gates were reinforced.

The spatial arrangement had been calculated.

Inside him, armies continued squeezing every advantage they could from the remaining accelerated time.

The Aevan world continued developing, unaware that its creator was preparing to walk into an age that had already ended.

Lucien looked toward the distant boundary of the plane.

It carried the same faint isolation he remembered from Aurelia’s projection.

For the first time, that protection no longer felt entirely comforting.

He thought about the dead planes.

About futures that stopped.

About Alanthuriel telling him that the current continuity could one day lose its place.

Lucien had hoped his mission would be about preventing a possibility.

Now he had seen something that looked disturbingly like the aftermath of failure.

He still did not know whether the darkness represented destruction.

He still did not know whether their timeline truly ended there.

But Lucien no longer needed the universe to hand him certainty before he acted.

If Alanthuriel opened a path into the past, Lucien would enter it.

He would find the enemies.

He would prevent the interference.

And whatever history the Abyssal Arch-Lords were trying to rebuild, he would make sure they did not receive it without a fight.

Lucien looked back toward the gateway leading home.

Somewhere ahead of him waited a future nobody could see.

Somewhere behind him waited a past someone was trying to change.

For the first time, the direction that frightened him more was not obvious.