100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 818 - Ancient World
Previously on 100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full?...
The ground struck Lucien hard enough to throw dust across the plain.
He landed on one knee.
For several breaths, he remained there while the last remnants of the temporal passage disappeared above him.
The sky closed.
The pressure that had carried him backward through history vanished with it.
Lucien slowly raised his head.
Nothing moved.
A broad plain stretched toward distant hills beneath a pale blue sky. Sparse trees broke the grassland at irregular intervals, their branches shifting beneath an ordinary wind.
There were no cities. No roads cut through the earth.
Lucien stood.
His perception spread immediately.
Several kilometers.
Then farther.
Forests appeared beyond the hills. Rivers wound through valleys untouched by artificial channels. Animals moved between the trees.
Lucien extended his senses until the horizon itself became meaningless.
Nothing was familiar.
No Lootwell.
No ancient ruins he recognized.
No geographical feature that allowed him to identify where he had landed.
Lucien frowned.
That’s when he noticed what was actually wrong.
He froze.
The world was empty.
Lucien’s perception swept through the atmosphere again.
There was no mana.
He reached deeper.
Still nothing.
There was no Divine Energy in the environment either.
Even miasma.
None of the familiar energies that had become so ordinary throughout his life existed anywhere around him.
Lucien raised one hand.
He attempted to draw mana from the atmosphere out of habit.
Nothing responded.
Not even a trace.
His expression slowly changed.
"What the hell..."
Lucien tried again.
The result remained the same.
The air was simply air.
The earth contained ordinary minerals.
The vegetation carried life, yet none of the spiritual qualities Lucien had learned to recognize existed within it.
Even the animals he sensed in the distance were completely mundane.
Lucien had known he was going into the past.
He had not expected the past to feel this foreign.
Then something stirred inside him.
Lucien’s attention immediately turned inward.
The Tree of Creation moved.
Its branches trembled despite the complete stillness of his conceptual space.
Lucien watched closely.
The Tree was responding to something.
Lucien extended his perception outside again and searched more carefully.
There was still nothing he could identify.
Yet now that the Tree had reacted, Lucien could almost feel it.
Something was present.
It existed beneath the categories he understood, faint enough that his ordinary senses had ignored it completely.
The sensation was strange.
It felt ancient and unformed.
Lucien tried to grasp it directly, but it slipped away.
The Tree of Creation reacted again.
Lucien stared at the surrounding plain.
"So you recognize it."
The Tree offered no explanation.
Of course it did not.
Lucien sighed.
Whatever existed in this era had not yet become anything he could name.
That alone told him how far back he might have traveled.
•••
Lucien checked himself next.
His body had survived.
His soul remained stable.
The Omnigenesis Vessel had taken the temporal transition without damage.
His internal universe was intact.
The Laws within it continued functioning according to their own continuity.
Most importantly, Lucien could still feel the thread.
It rested along the boundary of his existence, almost impossible to perceive until he deliberately reached for it.
Alanthuriel was still there.
Far away.
Far enough that distance no longer had any useful meaning.
But the connection had survived.
Lucien’s shoulders loosened slightly.
"Good."
That was one uncertainty removed.
His practice with Time had worked as well.
The era around him had not overwritten his existence.
Lucien remembered the present clearly.
Nothing had blurred.
Nothing inside him had been forced to match this era.
He remained himself.
There was a subtle difference around his existence, however.
The world did not quite know what to do with him.
Lucien could feel it whenever his Laws touched the surroundings.
His existence belonged here physically, yet his continuity did not originate here.
The sensation was faint and stable.
For now, it caused no problem.
Lucien stopped examining himself.
There was a much more immediate concern.
The Incarnations.
He searched the surrounding region again.
Nothing.
Lucien narrowed his eyes.
Three Incarnations had entered ahead of him.
They had been given only a brief lead.
Either the temporal passage had released them somewhere else, or they had already moved.
Alanthuriel had never told Lucien exactly what they intended to change.
That had bothered him before.
Now it mattered.
His mission was simple only in wording.
Stop them.
First, he needed to find them.
Lucien reached into his Inventory.
The Spatial Compass appeared in his hand.
He focused.
"Find the Primordial Incarnations that entered this era through the temporal passage."
The needle trembled.
Lucien waited.
It rotated once.
Then twice.
For a moment, he thought the artifact had failed.
The needle suddenly stopped.
It pointed toward the distant horizon.
Lucien stared at it.
Then a smile slowly appeared.
"It worked."
He almost felt bad for doubting his own drops.
The Compass had not found them because this world conveniently revealed their locations.
It had caught the fresh spatial-temporal disturbance attached to their arrival.
That meant the trail could weaken.
Lucien needed to move.
Before he did, his gaze swept across the empty landscape one more time.
If this truly was the same Big World in an unimaginably ancient era, then the difference was absurd.
There was not even mana here.
Lucien had spent most of his life treating mana as part of nature itself.
People built civilizations around it.
Beasts evolved through it.
Entire systems of Magic depended on its existence.
Looking at a world without it felt like looking at a familiar person before they had learned their own name.
Lucien wondered how anyone powerful could exist in an era like this.
Then he remembered the Tree of Creation reacting to something he could not identify.
His expression became thoughtful.
Perhaps that was the wrong question.
He stored it for later.
The Incarnations came first.
•••
Lucien moved.
The unfamiliar world blurred beneath him as he followed the Compass.
He did not draw energy from the surroundings.
There was nothing useful to draw.
Fortunately, he did not need it.
His inner universe came with him.
Divine Energy remained stored in quantities that would have once seemed ridiculous.
The Tree of Creation continued functioning.
His Laws remained available.
His Omnigenesis Vessel carried its own foundation.
Even the Aevans continued their lives inside him, unaware that the sky beyond their world now existed in a history unimaginably older than anything they knew.
Their faith continued reaching Lucien.
The amount was small compared with his reserves.
Its existence still made him smile.
The Primordial Incarnations did not possess the same advantage.
They carried enormous authority.
They were still vessels.
Whatever energy they had brought into this era was finite unless they discovered another way to replenish it.
This world offered none of the familiar resources of Lucien’s age.
If prolonged conflict became necessary, that mattered.
Lucien’s smile widened slightly.
For once, dragging an entire universe around inside himself seemed almost practical.
Just then, the Spatial Compass moved.
Lucien stopped.
The needle shook violently.
It pointed forward.
Then turned.
A second direction appeared.
Lucien frowned.
The Compass rotated again.
A third.
He stared at it.
The artifact settled into an unusual state, its indication dividing between three separate bearings.
Lucien understood immediately.
"They split up."
That changed the situation.
Three Incarnations.
Three directions.
Either they were searching for something, or their intended alteration required several locations.
Lucien looked from one direction to another.
The distances were already growing.
Waiting would only make the problem worse.
Fortunately, the Incarnations had also created an opportunity.
They were no longer together.
Lucien smiled.
"That works for me."
Three Primordial Incarnations surrounding him would have been troublesome.
Three Primordial Incarnations scattered across an unfamiliar world were much more manageable.
Lucien closed his eyes.
Divine Energy moved.
His body divided.
One Lucien became two.
Then three.
The Split Bodies stabilized beside him.
The three Luciens looked toward three horizons.
No discussion was necessary.
They moved.
•••
The landscape changed rapidly beneath Lucien.
Grasslands became forest.
The forest gave way to stone valleys untouched by roads or settlements.
Everything looked young in a way Lucien found difficult to explain.
The world was ancient.
Yet civilization had barely left fingerprints upon it.
As he traveled, Lucien prepared.
Drops shifted within his Inventory.
Emergency artifacts moved into positions where he could reach them instantly.
Several measures he had deliberately withheld during earlier battles were made ready.
Then his attention settled on something he had not used for a long time.
Morphis responded.
Lucien felt the familiar presence awaken from dormancy.
He smiled faintly.
There was no reason to conserve his advantages now.
The Arch-Lords had sent three Primordial Incarnations into history to create a future capable of replacing his own.
Lucien had no intention of fighting politely.
If an artifact worked, he would use it.
If a Skill gave him an advantage, he would use that too.
If splitting himself allowed him to reach all three enemies before they accomplished their objective, then three Luciens would hunt them.
He had spent years accumulating absurd resources.
It would have been embarrassing to become conservative during the one mission that might determine whether his timeline continued existing.
The thought almost amused him.
Then Aurelia’s blank future returned to his mind.
The amusement disappeared.
He remembered the branches ending.
Elunara’s fate threads vanishing.
The Grandmaster searching for a point of collapse and finding only the place where the road itself stopped.
Lucien’s expression hardened.
He still did not know whether that darkness represented failure.
Alanthuriel had refused to tell him.
Perhaps Alanthuriel genuinely did not know.
It no longer mattered.
Lucien had already made the decision before entering the rift.
He would stop the Incarnations.
He would stop the Arch-Lords from replacing the Main Timeline.
He would do everything he could to ensure that the future he had left behind continued to exist.
The Nihility thread remained inside him.
A road home.
Lucien was grateful for it.
He also understood that there might come a point where returning safely and completing the mission became incompatible choices.
If that happened, he already knew which one he would choose.
He did not need to dramatize the answer.
Everyone he cared about existed at the other end of this history.
Their lives were not an abstract timeline.
They were the reason the timeline mattered.
Lucien accelerated.
The ancient landscape blurred beneath him.
Far ahead, the spatial trace became clearer.
One of the three Incarnations was moving fast.
Lucien’s eyes narrowed.
The direction had changed slightly.
It was not wandering.
It was heading somewhere.
That realization erased the last of Lucien’s hesitation.
The Incarnations might know this era better than he did.
They had a destination.
Lucien did not.
For now, that was enough.
He followed.
And somewhere beyond the untouched horizon, the first Primordial Incarnation continued toward whatever the Arch-Lords had sent it back through history to find.