100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 817 - Continuum Sea

Lucien’s first instinct was to close his eyes.

He did not.

For one breath, he looked.

That was enough.

The place beyond Nihility was larger than anything his senses had been built to understand.

There was no sky.

No ground existed beneath him.

Instead, existence stretched in every direction as luminous currents too vast to measure.

Some flowed like rivers.

Others resembled threads when seen from impossibly far away, only for Lucien to realize that every thread contained worlds, histories, lives, choices, and ages layered together.

Past and future did not sit neatly on opposite sides.

They curved, intersected, separated, and approached without touching.

Countless streams moved beside one another, each carrying possibilities that sometimes remained distinct and sometimes disappeared into distances Lucien could not perceive.

His mind tried to turn the sight into Space.

It failed.

Then it tried to interpret it as Time.

That failed too.

Lucien finally understood why Alanthuriel had never described the Prime Continuum as a simple collection of timelines.

This was the structure within which those timelines possessed meaning.

Later, Lucien would privately call it the Continuum Sea.

For now, he barely had enough attention to remain standing inside it.

Every luminous current carried an impossible scale.

Some appeared close enough to touch.

Lucien knew instinctively that reaching one without the correct authority might require crossing distances that did not exist in ordinary Space.

Others passed through what looked like the same position while remaining completely inaccessible to one another.

The returned Parallel Timelines were visible here in a way Lucien had never imagined.

They were not copies stacked side by side.

They were complete continuities moving through the Prime Continuum under their own histories.

And among them was something wrong.

A wound.

Lucien’s gaze found it immediately.

A dark opening had been carved through the currents.

It was not a hole in Space.

It was a path forced through sequence.

The opening touched the continuity Lucien recognized as his own.

From there, it extended backward.

Far backward.

It pierced through layers of history like a needle driven against the natural direction of Time.

Around its edges, the surrounding currents warped.

Some possible futures vanished before touching it.

Others bent away.

A handful formed brief, unstable echoes and disappeared.

Lucien felt his stomach tighten.

That was the road the Arch-Lords had built.

The road into the past.

Then something noticed him.

•••

Lucien’s instincts screamed.

He tore his attention away from the temporal wound.

Presences surrounded the region.

Calling them large was meaningless.

Size belonged to Space.

These beings imposed themselves on more than Space.

Lucien recognized one immediately.

Oblivion.

The memory of their previous encounter returned before Lucien could stop it.

A gaze.

Death.

Then awakening through the measure that had saved him.

Lucien did not stare.

Even so, he felt Oblivion’s presence like an absence large enough to swallow concepts around it.

Several other figures occupied the Continuum Sea.

Lucien had never encountered them before.

His perception tried to understand one.

Something inside him immediately recoiled.

He stopped.

Alanthuriel’s warning had been correct.

Looking at them felt reciprocal.

Recognition created a route.

The longer Lucien attempted to define one of the Arch-Lords, the more strongly he felt something on the other side beginning to define him in return.

He lowered his perception.

He did not need to understand them.

Not today.

His Nihility thread remained faintly present inside him.

Alanthuriel stood nearby.

Except standing was no longer the correct word.

His Abyssal form had fully emerged.

Nihility spread around him in enormous sheets of absence that refused to interact normally with the Continuum Sea.

Lucien finally understood another part of Alanthuriel’s strangeness.

The other Arch-Lords occupied this place by imposing their existence upon it.

Alanthuriel moved through the spaces the structure failed to occupy.

A voice crossed the Continuum.

"Nihility."

Lucien knew the speaker.

Oblivion.

"So you appeared."

Several of the surrounding presences shifted.

Their attention passed over Alanthuriel.

Then some of it touched Lucien.

Lucien’s Omnigenesis Vessel tightened.

He did not move.

Another voice followed.

This one felt like the ending of something that had not yet happened.

"So you resist until the end."

Lucien knew the name without needing to look.

Finality.

More awareness gathered.

Lucien felt painfully small for the first time in years.

He was Extinction Grade.

He could fight ancient beasts capable of terrifying ordinary Eternals.

He had opposed Primordial Incarnations.

Here, none of that gave him the slightest desire to announce himself.

This was a gathering of beings whose disagreements shaped structures most worlds never knew existed.

His instincts continued screaming.

Lucien listened to them.

He kept his attention on the temporal wound.

•••

Movement appeared near its entrance.

Primordial authority.

Lucien sensed the Incarnations.

Several of them.

Multiple Incarnations approached the opening.

Their forms were difficult to see through the distortion, but Lucien recognized the weight of their authority.

They had already committed.

Alanthuriel looked at him.

The Arch-Lords noticed.

Nihility expanded.

For an instant, the entire region seemed to lose its edges.

Lucien felt the thread inside him tighten.

Alanthuriel spoke only once.

"Go now."

Space vanished beneath Lucien.

He did not move through the Continuum Sea.

Alanthuriel removed the separation.

One moment Lucien stood beside him.

The next, he was at the mouth of the temporal wound.

The Incarnations had already entered.

The current seized Lucien immediately.

Behind him, the Continuum convulsed.

Lucien turned his head once.

He saw Alanthuriel spread through Nihility.

Oblivion moved.

Finality answered.

Other presences unfolded.

Then Lucien’s perception failed to distinguish individual actions.

The collision was too large.

It did not explode.

There was no ordinary shockwave.

Entire sections of the surrounding Continuum simply changed shape as their authorities met.

One luminous current dimmed.

Another bent around an impossible absence.

A region that seemed infinitely distant appeared beside Alanthuriel and disappeared again.

Lucien saw Nihility open like a wound through everything.

Then the temporal current dragged him away.

Alanthuriel vanished from sight.

•••

Lucien lost control almost immediately.

His body remained intact.

His soul remained intact.

His sense of direction did not.

The temporal passage did not carry him backward the way a river carried something downstream.

It pulled at the order of his existence.

Present moments peeled away from his perception.

Earlier possibilities appeared around him.

His Omnigenesis Vessel held.

Lucien seized his own continuity exactly as he had practiced.

He remembered who he was.

More than thirty years of life.

The worlds he had created.

The people he had left behind.

The inner universe whose Time remained his own.

The current failed to redefine him.

It still made him dizzy.

As the passage carried him farther, the structure around it began brushing against neighboring continuities.

Lucien noticed the first one without understanding what he was seeing.

Lucien saw Lootwell.

For one impossible moment, the five continents were completely joined.

Roads crossed boundaries where oceans had once existed.

The Black Mass was gone.

Children from races that had once lived on opposite sides of the world argued over food in the same marketplace.

Lucien barely had time to process it before the scene slipped away.

Another continuity passed close enough for him to see.

Lucien sat beneath a quiet tree.

Seraphine was beside him.

There was a ring on her hand.

Lucien stared for half a second too long.

The current shifted.

Lilith appeared in another future, shouting at him because he had apparently built something inside one of her forges without permission.

The argument somehow ended with her wearing a wedding ring too.

Lucien blinked.

Another future arrived.

Eirene stood beside him while Lunarian children ran through a garden.

Lucien immediately decided the Continuum was becoming unnecessarily personal.

It became worse.

Vivian appeared in ceremonial clothing beside him.

Lucien’s mind froze.

The implication registered.

His expression twisted violently.

"No."

The future vanished.

Lucien nearly welcomed the temporal turbulence.

Of all the possible futures available to an infinite Continuum, it had apparently decided to show him that one.

He felt betrayed by causality itself.

Another branch appeared.

Clara was holding a child.

Lucien recognized himself in the child’s face.

Clara looked so unbearably pleased that Lucien felt genuine fear.

He turned his attention away.

"Absolutely not looking deeper into that."

The current ignored him.

Another future showed him sitting on a throne surrounded by chapels.

Clara stood below with an expression suggesting she had somehow converted half the universe while Lucien was distracted.

That one felt alarmingly plausible.

The vision changed.

Skittles occupied an enormous hall.

Lucien initially thought the Rainbow Slime had become some kind of ruler.

Then he realized hundreds of powerful monsters were waiting patiently while Skittles inspected food placed in front of them.

Apparently, in at least one future, civilization had reorganized itself around catering to a slime’s standards.

Lucien could not decide whether that represented progress.

Another future flashed past.

Marie, Kaia, Sylra, and Marina stood together over a world that had changed beyond recognition.

Earth, fire, air, and water moved around them with effortless familiarity, yet the four were still bickering over something Lucien could not hear.

He smiled.

Some things apparently survived every future.

Then came a future where Lucien had retired.

Actually retired.

He wore ordinary clothing and stood in a field holding a farming tool.

The sight disturbed him more than several apocalyptic branches.

He stared.

A familiar voice from somewhere beyond the vision complained that he was accelerating the crops again and ruining the point of farming normally.

Lucien almost laughed.

The current pulled him onward.

•••

The continuities passing beside him were not all peaceful.

One drew close enough for Lucien to see Lootwell burning beneath a sky choked with smoke.

Another carried the five continents under spreading miasma while ancient beasts lay motionless across shattered land.

A different continuity showed entire worlds inside Lucien’s universe growing dark.

Then another passed where the five continents had reunited beneath banners he did not recognize.

In the next, they had never reunited at all.

Some continuities remained near his path for barely an instant before separating again. Others came close enough that Lucien felt the emotions connected to them with disturbing clarity.

For a moment, he wanted to reach toward one.

He stopped himself.

These possibilities were not waiting for him.

They were separate roads passing near the route the Arch-Lords had forced through the Prime Continuum.

Some had become stable histories somewhere beyond his understanding.

Others might only be possibilities that had survived long enough for the temporal passage to brush against them.

Lucien had no reason to find out which was which.

Alanthuriel had already warned him about forming unnecessary connections.

So Lucien narrowed his perception.

He stopped following the worlds passing beside him and focused on the continuity he carried within himself.

His own history remained clear.

So did his purpose.

The Primordial Incarnations were somewhere ahead.

As Lucien held onto that thought, the neighboring continuities gradually moved farther from his path.

Their details became harder to distinguish.

The peaceful Lootwell disappeared.

The ruined continents faded.

All the lives he had briefly glimpsed slipped beyond his perception as the temporal passage continued pulling him backward.

The current grew stronger.

Lucien felt the distance from his present increasing.

Centuries passed beyond his ability to count them meaningfully.

Then even that measure stopped being useful.

The path was narrowing.

Earlier, it had cut through a region where countless continuities existed close enough for Lucien to perceive them.

Now those possibilities were falling away.

The Arch-Lords had never built this passage to wander through history.

They had chosen a destination.

A specific point in the past where one interference could produce the future they wanted.

Lucien felt the route tightening around that moment.

His expression hardened.

Whatever futures he had seen no longer mattered.

Peaceful ones, absurd ones, and catastrophic ones all belonged somewhere else.

The only history that mattered now was the one ahead of him.

Lucien gathered Living Creation around his body and reinforced the temporal reference he had spent so long learning to understand.

The Nihility thread remained faintly present within his existence, stretching back toward Alanthuriel across a distance that could no longer be described by Space alone.

Then the passage changed.

The pull became violent.

The surrounding continuities vanished from Lucien’s perception as the route committed completely to one point in history.

Something appeared ahead.

A sky.