100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 829 - 839 - Familiar

A few days passed before Lucien could finally move without feeling as though every muscle in his body had been beaten with a hammer.

The recovery itself was almost more frustrating than the pain.

He had grown so accustomed to injuries closing within moments that waiting for bruises to fade and strained muscles to heal felt absurdly slow. Even the small cuts along his arms had taken days to disappear completely.

On the fourth morning, Lucien sat outside the modest wooden house and stretched one leg carefully.

A dull ache answered.

He stared at it.

"So this is what normal recovery feels like."

Cienna, who was sorting herbs beneath the shade nearby, glanced at him.

"Darling, you sound surprised."

Lucien immediately looked away.

"Just complaining."

"You have always been good at that."

Lucien almost protested before another memory surfaced and informed him that she was correct.

He decided silence was safer.

The past few days had given him time to settle into the life he had inherited.

The village was small enough that everyone seemed to know one another, yet large enough that Lucien could spend several hours walking through it without seeing every household.

Houses of timber, packed earth, and stone followed the uneven road running beside the river. Most families tended fields outside the wooden perimeter, while others worked as hunters, carpenters, potters, weavers, or traders.

Nothing moved through enchantment.

No formations warmed the houses.

No magic carried water from the river.

No enchanted tools worked the fields.

Everything depended on hands, animals, ropes, wheels, fire, and techniques passed from one generation to the next.

Lucien had known intellectually that he had arrived before mana became usable.

Living here made the difference much harder to ignore.

People spent hours doing things that someone in his era could accomplish with a trivial spell.

A broken roof meant climbing onto it personally.

A heavy cart needed several people or a draft animal.

Illness could confine someone to bed for weeks.

A harvest could be ruined because rain came at the wrong time.

The world suddenly felt fragile in ways Lucien had nearly forgotten.

Yet there was something pleasant about the village too.

People depended on each other because they genuinely had to.

That was especially obvious whenever Luke appeared.

Lucien had known his father as a capable man in the future, but seeing him here was almost ridiculous.

Luke seemed unable to walk across the village without someone asking him for help.

One morning, Lucien watched him repair a collapsed section of roofing before breakfast. By midday, Luke was helping reinforce a cart axle for an elderly farmer. Later that afternoon, he joined several hunters who had found fresh boar tracks near the fields.

The next day, he was repairing a waterwheel.

Lucien leaned against a fence and watched Luke fit a wooden support into place with practiced hands.

There was no Skill assisting him.

Luke simply understood what he was doing.

That was somehow more impressive.

A boy nearby handed Luke the wrong tool.

Luke looked at it, looked at the boy, then accepted it anyway.

"This will work."

It did.

Lucien narrowed his eyes.

"Of course it does."

Luke heard him and grinned.

"You could learn something instead of standing there."

"I am still recovering."

"You have been recovering very enthusiastically."

Lucien ignored him.

Cienna was not much different.

Her competence simply expressed itself elsewhere.

Arguments rarely lasted once she became involved. She had a way of listening until both sides ran out of anger and then pointing out the obvious solution everyone had somehow missed.

She also knew more about herbs than Lucien expected.

During his recovery, she had treated the lingering soreness in his muscles with a bitter-smelling paste and several infusions that Lucien had initially regarded with suspicion.

They worked.

Not quickly, but they worked.

Lucien eventually asked the System about several of the herbs and discovered that Cienna’s methods were remarkably efficient for the materials available in this age.

She did not know anything about medicinal energy, alchemy, or magical refinement.

She simply knew plants.

Which ones reduced fever.

Which ones stopped bleeding.

Which ones should never be mixed.

Which roots could be dried for winter.

Which leaves became dangerous after flowering.

Villagers came to her for advice often enough that Lucien quickly understood how much trust his parents had earned.

That made his own reputation slightly more embarrassing.

Young Lucien had not inherited either parent’s social standing.

People treated him politely, and some clearly cared about him because of Luke and Cienna, but the memories told Lucien that he had always been regarded as a little strange.

He had been quiet even as a child.

He wandered alone frequently.

He stared at empty spaces for long periods and sometimes failed to respond when people called his name.

Several villagers had apparently concluded that he simply preferred his own company.

They were not entirely wrong.

The reason was stranger.

Young Lucien had been hearing something.

Lucien had found that memory repeatedly during the past few days.

It was not a voice.

He could not even describe it properly as music.

It had been a pleasant sound somewhere at the edge of perception, faint enough that the young Lucien had never been certain whether it truly existed.

Sometimes it appeared while he sat beside the river.

Sometimes while he walked through the forest.

Sometimes when he happened to be near particular people.

Whenever it came, he stopped whatever he was doing and listened.

He had never understood why.

The sound simply made him feel that something far away was calling.

Lucien had searched the inherited memories repeatedly.

There was no clear pattern.

Worse, he had not heard it once since taking over the body.

That bothered him.

If the sound had been connected to the young man’s fractured spirit, Fracture might have damaged whatever allowed him to perceive it.

Lucien did not like that possibility.

For now, there was nothing he could do except pay attention.

Once his body recovered enough to walk without Cienna ordering him back into bed, he began spending more time around the village.

That was when the first truly disturbing coincidence appeared.

Several men were repairing part of the wooden wall damaged during the confusion surrounding Hunger’s attack. Lucien had wandered over mostly because Luke was helping there and because remaining inside the house had become unbearable.

He was halfway through wondering why one of the support posts had been placed at such an inefficient angle when a young man climbed down from the scaffolding.

Lucien stopped walking.

The young man wiped sweat from his forehead, then reached for a hammer beside a pile of replacement boards.

His shoulders were broader than Lucien remembered.

His clothes were rougher.

His hair was longer.

But Lucien knew that face.

"Tavian..."

The name escaped before he could stop himself.

The young man looked over.

For a moment, Tavian seemed surprised.

Then he smiled.

"You finally remember I exist?"

Lucien stared.

Apparently, the two had spoken before.

The memories provided just enough context to make Lucien feel slightly guilty.

Young Lucien had known Tavian since childhood, although they had never been especially close. Tavian had left the village some time ago to apprentice under a blacksmith in a nearby city and had only recently returned.

Lucien watched him return to work.

Tavian fitted a warped plank against the frame, studied it for several seconds, then adjusted the support beneath it until the pressure distributed more evenly.

Something about the movement felt painfully familiar.

In Lucien’s era, Tavian had possessed a System that allowed him to reinforce anything he claimed. Fragile structures became harder to break, unstable forces became steadier, and anything placed under his protection could be strengthened far beyond its original limits.

Lucien looked at the hammer in Tavian’s hand, then at the wall.

A blacksmith.

Of course.

The connection was subtle enough that Lucien might once have dismissed it.

He did not dismiss it now.

Tavian noticed him still staring.

"What?"

Lucien shook his head.

"Nothing."

Tavian gave him a suspicious look.

"You are acting stranger than usual."

Lucien chose not to answer.

..

The next day destroyed any remaining hope that Tavian was merely an isolated coincidence.

A covered wagon entered the village shortly before noon.

Several villagers gathered as crates were unloaded, and Lucien recognized the young woman supervising the entire exchange before he even heard her name.

Mirelle.

She was younger than the woman Lucien remembered bringing back to the Big World, but her manner had barely changed.

She checked every crate herself.

When one merchant attempted to argue that the agreed payment had been lower, Mirelle produced a small marked tablet and calmly reminded him of exactly what had been promised.

By the time the discussion ended, the merchant looked vaguely ashamed and Mirelle had somehow secured an additional sack of salt because several bundles of cloth had arrived damp.

Lucien watched from beside a fence.

That was definitely Mirelle.

The System she possessed in Lucien’s era ensured that things under her possession never truly diminished. Resources replenished in strange ways, value accumulated even while she did nothing, and wealth seemed almost unnaturally reluctant to leave her hands permanently.

Here, centuries before any of that existed, she was already responsible for selling the village’s excess goods in nearby settlements and returning with whatever the community needed.

Lucien rubbed his forehead.

"This is getting worse."

"What is?"

He turned.

Auren was standing beside him.

Lucien nearly swore.

The young man looked much less imposing than the Liberator Lucien remembered. His clothes were dusty, and a piece of straw had somehow become tangled in his hair.

Behind him waited a wagon with two tired horses.

Auren followed Lucien’s stare and removed the straw.

"I was under the cart."

"I wasn’t going to ask."

"You looked like you were."

Lucien looked away before his expression betrayed him.

Auren had been another Liberator.

His System allowed him to anchor places and return to them instantly. Once enough locations had been marked, distance became little more than a suggestion.

Here, he was the village coachman.

The inherited memories supplied the rest.

Auren had grown up traveling with his father, who regularly carried goods and messages toward the capital. By the time he was old enough to drive alone, he knew roads that many professional merchants had never heard of.

He knew mountain passes, river crossings, seasonal routes, places where wheels became trapped after rain, villages willing to shelter travelers, roads that attracted bandits, and shortcuts through forest paths that saved half a day.

Lucien stared at him for several seconds.

Auren raised an eyebrow.

"Did the mushroom damage you permanently?"

Lucien closed his eyes.

Apparently everyone knew about the mushroom.

"I’m fine."

"That sounded convincing."

Lucien waved him away.

Auren laughed and continued toward Mirelle.

Lucien remained where he was.

One familiar face could have been coincidence.

Three could not.

Tavian.

Mirelle.

Auren.

All three had been Liberators in Lucien’s era.

All three already displayed lifestyles and talents that reflected the Systems they would eventually possess.

The implications settled slowly.

The Liberators had not appeared from unrelated small worlds by accident.

Their origins reached back here.

To this village.

To this age.

Lucien searched the young man’s memories again and discovered something almost frustrating.

Young Lucien had known all of them.

He simply had not known them well.

Tavian had invited him to watch forging more than once.

Mirelle had occasionally asked him to help sort goods.

Auren had offered rides whenever their paths crossed.

Young Lucien had rarely accepted.

Whenever he spent too much time around them, that strange pleasant sound had often returned.

Then he would become distracted.

He would wander away or stop listening to the conversation entirely.

Lucien’s expression changed.

That was new.

He searched more carefully.

The pattern was not absolute.

The sound sometimes appeared elsewhere too.

Yet it had surfaced around these people often enough to matter.

Lucien looked across the village.

Tavian was still helping with the wall.

Mirelle was arguing cheerfully with an old farmer about how much grain he was actually allowed to give away.

Auren was checking one of the wagon wheels.

Three future Liberators stood within sight of one another.

Lucien waited.

Nothing.

No distant sound.

No strange resonance.

Only hammers, voices, animals, and the ordinary noise of village life.

His disappointment surprised him.

Whatever young Lucien had been hearing, it had stopped after Fracture shattered his spirit.

Lucien did not know whether that was temporary.

He did know one thing.

Young Lucien had spent years keeping everyone at a distance.

Lucien had no intention of repeating that mistake.

If these people truly became the Liberators he knew in the future, then the answer to why they had always felt strangely familiar might be standing directly in front of him.

Perhaps Lucien had not merely recognized something about them.

Perhaps somewhere beneath memory, he had been remembering people he had already known.

That thought stayed with him for the rest of the afternoon.

When Tavian eventually called for another pair of hands, Lucien walked toward the wall before he could reconsider.

Tavian looked surprised.

"You are helping?"

Lucien picked up one end of a timber beam.

"I thought I should try something new."

Auren laughed from nearby.

"You nearly die once and suddenly become social."

Lucien gave him a flat look.

"I can still change my mind."

Mirelle, who had somehow appeared with a ledger under one arm, smiled.

"Don’t scare him away. This might be the first time he willingly joined us."

Lucien paused.

Something about that sentence stirred faintly within the inherited memories.

Not the mysterious sound, but something warmer.

He tightened his grip on the beam.

Perhaps the history he needed to preserve had already begun long before Fracture arrived.

He simply had not understood it yet.