100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 830 - 840 - Direction

The days that followed became strangely peaceful.

Lucien helped where he could, although the limits of his new body remained irritatingly obvious.

He had once fought beings capable of destroying kingdoms, yet now carrying two sacks of grain at the same time was enough to earn Cienna’s disapproval.

He had once crossed enormous distances by folding Space, but walking to the farthest fields now took long enough for him to become annoyed with roads.

The worst part was knowing exactly how many easier methods existed while being unable to use any of them.

Eventually, Lucien stopped complaining aloud, mostly because Luke had started enjoying his frustration far too much.

Instead, he treated the village as something worth studying.

The more he observed, the more he understood just how far back he had traveled.

There was no hidden magical class beneath ordinary society, nor any secret group of people capable of manipulating energy.

Lucien tested the air repeatedly and examined plants, animals, stone, water, and even human bodies whenever he had the chance.

The conclusion never changed.

The forms of energy he knew simply did not exist here in any usable state.

People survived through physical strength, knowledge, cooperation, and whatever resources the land could provide.

The era reminded Lucien of descriptions of medieval civilizations from Earth, although even that comparison was imperfect.

The kingdoms here had their own customs, technologies, and geography, but the underlying limitations were familiar.

A sword was simply metal shaped by a blacksmith. Fire came from fuel and friction. A wound remained dangerous because healing depended almost entirely on the body’s own ability to recover. Travel could take days or months, while weather and harvests could determine whether entire communities prospered or suffered.

Lucien found that simplicity almost unsettling.

This was the Big World before everything that would later define it. There were no Transcendents or Celestials, and the Void had not yet become part of ordinary history. Monster tides, formations, mana vessels, Divine Energy, miasma, and the countless systems of power that would eventually fill the world had not appeared.

Sometimes Lucien stood beside the river and wondered how something this ordinary could become the world he knew.

The System helped him answer smaller questions.

It had survived the transfer with very little functionality, yet the knowledge stored within it remained extensive.

Lucien quickly discovered that it could answer questions about the present era as long as the answers concerned established information rather than events that had yet to happen.

It could tell him the name of the kingdom, the approximate year according to the local calendar, basic geography, known settlements, common crops, trade routes, metallurgical techniques, medicinal plants, and methods for preserving food.

When Lucien asked what he was supposed to accomplish, however, the answer was far less useful.

[Insufficient basis for objective determination.]

Lucien stared at the message.

"Helpful."

He tried again.

"What major event happens next?"

[Future event data unavailable.]

Lucien frowned.

"What historical milestone should I prepare for?"

[Future event data unavailable.]

He hesitated before asking the question that had been bothering him more than the others.

"Do you know who the Human Ancestor is?"

There was a longer pause before the response appeared.

[Insufficient contextual record.]

Lucien leaned back against the wall of his house.

"So you know how to make soap, but you don’t know who changes the world."

[Correct.]

Lucien almost laughed.

The System had apparently become an extremely knowledgeable encyclopedia that had no interest in solving his actual problem.

Even so, Lucien quickly realized how useful that knowledge could become in an era like this.

He could ask how to improve crop rotation, produce stronger mortar, refine steel more efficiently, prevent certain infections, preserve grain against moisture, or construct better water systems.

Lucien already possessed an enormous amount of knowledge after everything he had experienced, but much of his life had been spent in a world where magic filled gaps that ordinary technology could not.

The System knew methods that required nothing more than materials that already existed in this era, and that alone made it incredibly valuable.

Lucien was tempted to begin improving everything immediately.

Then Alanthuriel’s warning returned to him.

Do as little as necessary.

That was enough to restrain him.

Lucien had come here to preserve history, not drag an ancient civilization forward by centuries simply because he disliked inefficient farming tools. He limited himself to small suggestions and simple improvements that could reasonably be explained through observation.

The restraint frustrated him more than he expected.

Lucien had spent much of his life identifying problems and solving them. Seeing an inefficient method and deliberately leaving it alone felt unnatural, but the larger mystery demanded caution.

That mystery became harder to ignore with every passing day.

The sound young Lucien had heard throughout childhood still had not returned.

Lucien tested every condition he could think of.

He sat beside the river at the same time of day recorded in several memories and walked through the same areas of forest where the sound had once appeared.

He spent an afternoon near Tavian while the young blacksmith repaired farming tools and later traveled with Mirelle to the edge of the fields while she inspected goods.

He even endured several hours inside Auren’s wagon while the coachman enthusiastically explained every terrible section of road within half a day’s travel.

The mysterious sound remained absent.

Lucien did not tell anyone why he had started spending more time around them. From their perspective, he had simply become more sociable after nearly dying in the forest.

The change surprised them at first, but nobody seemed unhappy about it.

Tavian eventually stopped asking whether Lucien was feeling well, Mirelle started handing him small tasks without asking first, and Auren simply decided that they were friends now and behaved accordingly.

Lucien found their familiarity increasingly difficult to ignore.

There were mannerisms he recognized, expressions he remembered, and little habits that somehow seemed to have survived across an impossible stretch of history.

Once, Mirelle became annoyed because Auren misplaced a bundle of cloth during unloading. Their argument lasted less than a minute, yet Lucien found himself staring afterward because he remembered hearing almost the same exchange thousands of years later.

The place had been different and the problem had changed, but the way they reacted to each other had been almost identical.

Perhaps this was why the Liberators had always felt so familiar to him.

Perhaps it had never been instinct at all.

Somewhere beneath everything Lucien understood about memory and reincarnation, part of him might have remembered them.

The idea should have sounded impossible, but Lucien had stopped relying on that word a long time ago.

He began paying closer attention to everyone in the village.

If Tavian, Mirelle, and Auren were already here, then perhaps others were as well. The thought changed the way Lucien looked at the people around him. Any ordinary young man carrying timber might one day become someone he knew. Any girl collecting herbs could possess a future Lucien remembered.

The Liberators had always seemed scattered across impossible circumstances, yet now Lucien was beginning to suspect that their stories had never truly begun separately.

Their story might have started here.

That realization left him with another question.

Why?

•••

One evening, Lucien sat beside the river while the setting sun turned the water copper.

The village behind him was settling into night. Smoke rose from chimneys, animals were being brought into pens, and somewhere in the distance someone was arguing about a missing bucket.

Lucien barely noticed any of it.

His thoughts had moved far beyond the village.

He had traveled back to an era before usable energy existed. The Liberators were here, Luke and Cienna were here, and a young man bearing his name and appearance had been targeted by Primordial Incarnations.

There had to be something connecting those facts.

As Lucien stared at his hand, another possibility entered his mind.

The Origin Core.

Lucien became very still.

In his own era, he had only ever known the Origin Core through its fragments. Those fragments had been powerful enough to sense one another across enormous distances and valuable enough that ancient powers had fought over them.

The Origin Core fragments displayed abilities involving the transformation and regulation of fundamentally different energies. Mana, Divine Energy, and miasma could be converted, redirected, or reconciled through it.

Lucien had spent years collecting pieces of the Origin Core without ever seeing what the original whole had been like.

This era was different.

This was the ancient world, before the great wars and before most recorded history. If the Origin Core had already existed when the universe was young, then somewhere in this world it might still be whole.

Lucien’s expression slowly changed.

"A complete Origin Core..."

The fragments he had known were already extraordinary, which made it difficult to imagine what the original Core could accomplish before it was broken.

The more immediate problem was much simpler.

Where was it?

Lucien looked toward the distant horizon and remembered something he had almost pushed aside.

When he first arrived in this era, before giving up his original body, he had sensed something within the world.

It had been faint and impossible to classify through any system of energy he understood. It was not mana, Divine Energy, or miasma, yet something unmistakably existed here.

Even the Tree of Creation had reacted to it.

At the time, Lucien had been too occupied with the Incarnations to investigate further. Now that the immediate threat was gone, the memory returned with much greater importance.

Could that strange presence be the raw state of the energy that later filled the world?

Could the Origin Core be the reason that raw presence eventually became something living beings could use?

Lucien’s breathing slowed as he remembered what the Origin Core had been capable of in his own era. Its fragments could convert incompatible energies and allow fundamentally different systems to interact.

If the complete Origin Core possessed the same function on a far greater scale, then perhaps the energy of this ancient world had never truly been absent.

Perhaps it simply had not yet been transformed into a form life could wield.

That possibility brought another piece of history to mind.

The Human Ancestor.

The figure associated with humanity’s earliest rise had been credited with making it possible for humans to wield energy.

Lucien stared at the river as the implications slowly took shape.

"What if the Origin Core was involved?"

The question sounded simple, but the possibilities behind it were enormous.

Perhaps the Human Ancestor had not merely taught humanity how to use mana. Perhaps something more fundamental had first needed to change within the world itself before mana could even exist as something people could wield.

Lucien looked down at the flowing water.

The strange sound young Lucien had heard throughout childhood returned to his thoughts.

Nobody else had been able to hear it. It had often appeared when he wandered near certain places and seemed to occur more frequently around people who would eventually become Liberators. But now, the sound had disappeared completely.

Lucien’s expression tightened.

Could that sound have been connected to the Origin Core?

Perhaps young Lucien had been sensing something ordinary people could not perceive. It might have been a resonance with the Core itself or with whatever raw force existed beneath this supposedly energyless world.

Lucien had no proof, and he knew better than to turn speculation into certainty simply because several pieces appeared to fit together.

Still, for the first time since waking in this body, he had something resembling a direction.

The Origin Core should exist somewhere in this era, and finding it might explain the strange presence permeating the ancient world. It might also explain the sound young Lucien had heard and why this seemingly ordinary person had mattered enough for Primordial Incarnations to cross history and kill him.

The possibility became even harder to ignore when Lucien thought about the Human Ancestor again.

If the Human Ancestor’s greatest contribution had truly been making energy usable by humanity, then the Origin Core might have been involved in that achievement.

Lucien stopped himself there.

He was not ready to push the conclusion any further.

He had already learned how dangerous it could be to force an answer onto a mystery simply because the pieces seemed convenient.

Lucien rose from the riverbank and brushed the dirt from his clothes.

For now, he would rely on what he actually knew.

A whole Origin Core should exist somewhere in this world. The young Lucien had been hearing something nobody else could perceive, and several people who would eventually become Liberators were already gathered around him without knowing what they would become.

Those facts were enough to begin with.

The rest would have to be discovered.

Lucien turned toward the village.

Lights from oil lamps glimmered behind wooden shutters, while Luke’s voice carried faintly from somewhere near their house. A moment later, Cienna told him not to burn dinner again.

Lucien almost smiled.

He had traveled into the distant past expecting to stop three enemies, only to find himself living in a village filled with people he already knew from a future that had not yet been born.

Now one of the oldest mysteries in the world might be waiting somewhere beyond that village.

Lucien looked once more toward the darkening horizon.

If the Origin Core was truly whole in this age, he intended to find it.

He had no magic, Spatial Compass, Inventory, or convenient way to search an entire world, which meant he had no idea where that search should begin.

Strangely, the uncertainty did not discourage him.

For the first time since arriving in the ancient world, Lucien finally had a direction.