100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 834 - 844 - Sound

Nobody spoke.

The roar had come from deeper within the forest than the boars, yet it had carried clearly across the open ground and through the damaged village walls.

Lucien forced himself to stand despite the protest from every muscle in his body. The pain barely registered anymore because his attention remained fixed on the trees.

A shadow moved behind them.

At first, Lucien could not judge its size because the trunks broke its outline apart. Then the shadow shifted again, and one of the trees bent violently to the side before another snapped beneath the weight of something moving behind it.

Several villagers raised their weapons again.

Lucien almost told them not to bother, but the words never left his mouth.

Something lowered itself behind the tree line.

A massive eye appeared between the branches.

It was golden brown, with a vertical pupil large enough that Lucien could see the reflection of the open field across its surface.

His blood went cold.

The creature was looking directly at them.

Nobody moved.

The spear in Lucien’s hand suddenly felt ridiculous.

The creature shifted again, slowly revealing more of its head from behind the trees. Dark scales covered its long face, thick and uneven enough to resemble natural armor. Two horns curved backward from its skull, both carrying old scars near their bases.

Blood stained its jaws.

A deer hung between its teeth.

The creature bit down, and the sound of breaking bone carried across the field.

Several villagers flinched.

Lucien stared at it while extending what little perception remained available to him.

He felt nothing.

There was no mana, no Law, and no magical pressure surrounding the creature. It simply existed with a body enormous enough to dwarf everything around it.

That disturbed Lucien more than an overwhelming aura would have.

Its scales were hard because something about its nature had made them hard. Its muscles supported that massive frame without the assistance of any energy Lucien could detect.

The creature had developed in a world where magic did not yet exist in a usable form and had somehow become something capable of terrifying an entire village through sheer physical existence alone.

The creature swallowed what remained of the deer.

Its gaze moved slowly across the damaged wall, the dead boars scattered beyond it, and the exhausted villagers standing inside the settlement.

Then its enormous eye settled on Lucien.

For a moment, Lucien forgot to breathe.

His old instincts immediately began assessing what he saw. His attention moved toward the eye, the throat, the joints beneath the wings, the legs, and the possible gaps between those heavy scales.

Then reality caught up with him.

He was holding a wooden spear tipped with ordinary iron.

The creature’s eye alone was nearly wider than his torso.

If it decided to attack, there would be no clever duel and no exchange of Laws. Lucien had no idea how the villagers could stop something of that size with the weapons available to them.

A low sound rumbled from the creature’s throat.

Several villagers stepped backward.

Lucien could not tell whether the noise was a warning, irritation, or simply the sound of its breathing.

Then the creature huffed.

Warm air rolled across the field, stirring grass and dust between the broken sections of wall.

Something about the way it looked at them made Lucien feel that it found their presence more inconvenient than threatening.

His mouth twitched despite himself.

Being treated as an annoyance was still preferable to being considered food.

The creature finally turned away.

Its full body emerged from the forest, and Lucien’s eyes widened when he realized how badly he had underestimated its size.

Its shoulders rose above several nearby trees, while its long tail dragged through the undergrowth and scattered broken branches behind it.

Then a pair of enormous wings unfolded from its back.

The span covered so much of the forest edge that the light beneath them dimmed.

The villagers gasped.

The creature lowered itself.

Lucien understood what it was about to do.

"Brace!"

His warning came barely in time.

The creature leapt from the ground.

Its wings struck downward with enough force to send a violent gust across the field. Dust, leaves, and broken grass rushed toward the village while several exhausted villagers lost their footing.

Lucien drove the spear into the ground and held tightly to the shaft.

The creature climbed into the sky.

For several heartbeats, its enormous silhouette filled the space above the forest.

Then it turned away from the village.

Another powerful beat of its wings carried it higher, and its massive form gradually shrank against the horizon until it finally disappeared toward the distant mountains.

Nobody moved.

Lucien remained gripping the spear long after the wind had settled.

A trembling voice eventually broke the silence behind him.

"Was that..."

The man could not finish.

Another villager did it for him.

"A dragon."

The word spread through the gathering.

Several people began speaking at once as the tension that had held them motionless finally broke.

"The stories were true."

"My grandfather swore he saw one beyond the eastern ridge."

"The hunters said there had been tracks."

"I thought they were lying."

"So did I."

Someone laughed nervously while another crossed his hands over his chest in a gesture Lucien did not recognize.

The village chief looked pale enough to collapse. Even Tavian had forgotten whatever attempt he had been making to appear calm.

Auren continued staring toward the horizon.

"I think I preferred the boars."

Lucien finally released his spear.

His knees gave way beneath him, and he sat heavily on the ground.

"Ridiculous."

Tavian looked toward him.

Lucien kept his eyes on the distant sky.

"This is ridiculous."

The villagers were frightened, but the fear was mixed with something Lucien had not expected.

Awe.

Many of them had grown up hearing stories about dragons. Hunters occasionally claimed to have seen enormous shadows moving over distant forests or discovered tracks too large to belong to any known animal. Travelers brought stories from mountain villages about creatures crossing the sky at dawn.

Most people had treated those accounts as exaggerations.

Now an entire village had seen one.

Lucien listened quietly as the conversations spread around him.

Dragons were apparently not completely unknown in this era.

They existed in stories, scattered sightings, and old claims that most people had never been able to verify.

Until today.

Lucien pressed both hands against his face.

He had made a mistake in how he understood this world.

The absence of mana had made him unconsciously compare the era to Earth. He had seen a medieval civilization populated by ordinary humans and animals using simple technology and assumed the rest of the world followed the same limits.

That comparison no longer worked.

This was still the Big World.

The Origin Core existed somewhere within it, and life itself had first emerged here.

If anything, this ancient era might contain creatures closer to the world’s earliest conditions than anything Lucien had encountered in his own time.

The existence of dragons before mana suddenly seemed much less impossible.

That realization did nothing to improve his mood.

Lucien looked toward the dead boars scattered near the damaged wall.

They had clearly been fleeing something, and the dragon had been feeding on animals near the forest.

The simplest explanation was that its presence had disturbed the herd.

Lucien was not satisfied with that answer.

If dragons had always existed, why had the forest only begun behaving strangely now?

The tax collector had described similar disturbances across several parts of the kingdom. Animals were migrating, livestock were panicking, tremors were occurring in unfamiliar places, and forests were becoming restless.

One dragon could explain what happened near this village.

It could not easily explain everything happening elsewhere.

Lucien looked toward the forest again.

Perhaps the dragon had not caused the disturbance at all.

Perhaps something had disturbed the dragon as well.

That possibility was much worse.

Lucien rubbed his forehead and tried to push himself upright, but his body had already begun reaching its limit.

Auren noticed.

"Are you all right?"

"No."

"Because of the dragon?"

Lucien looked at him.

"Mostly because I was already having trouble with the boars."

Auren stared at him for a moment before laughing.

Lucien did not join him.

"If that thing becomes hostile, what exactly are we supposed to do?"

Auren’s laughter faded.

"Hide?"

"Excellent strategy."

Lucien closed his eyes.

He was far too exhausted for this conversation.

The villagers slowly began turning their attention back toward the aftermath of the battle. The dragon had left, but the wounded remained, and the broken walls would not repair themselves.

Just then, the ground moved.

It was faint enough that most people did not seem to notice.

Lucien did.

A shallow tremor passed beneath him, barely strong enough to disturb the loose dirt around his boots.

Something inside his spirit reacted.

Lucien’s eyes opened.

For one suspended moment, the exhaustion disappeared beneath a sensation he had never personally experienced before, yet recognized instantly.

A sound reached him.

It was faint at first, almost buried beneath the voices around him, but the young Lucien’s memories surged in response before he could question it.

The same sound.

The one he had heard since childhood.

Lucien stopped breathing.

It did not feel like ordinary hearing anymore.

The sound seemed to pass through the fractured spirit itself, touching pieces that had remained silent ever since Fracture tore them apart. Memories stirred with it. Years of sitting beside the river, wandering alone through the forest, and stopping in the middle of conversations simply to listen rushed through Lucien all at once.

Until now, he had only inherited memories of the sound.

This was the first time he heard it himself.

And it was beautiful.

That realization unsettled him more than he expected.

The sound did not come from the sky where the dragon had disappeared.

It came from somewhere much deeper.

Lucien slowly turned toward the forest.

Another faint tremor passed through the ground.

The sound strengthened.

For a heartbeat, Lucien felt something almost impossible to describe. It was as though something buried unimaginably far away had shifted, and the damaged spirit inside this body had somehow heard the movement.

The sensation vanished before he could grasp it.

Lucien remained staring between the trees.

The sound had been gone since Fracture shattered the young man’s spirit.

It had not returned beside Tavian, Mirelle, or Auren. It had not returned near the river or along the old forest paths where young Lucien once heard it most often.

Yet now, with animals fleeing across the kingdom, the earth trembling, and a creature from legend driven into the open, it had broken through again.

Lucien’s expression slowly changed.

Whatever was happening to this world, young Lucien had been sensing some part of it long before anyone else noticed.

Cienna reached him before he could pursue the thought further and immediately caught his face between both hands.

"You’re bleeding."

"Most of it isn’t mine."

"That does not make me feel better."

Lucien tried to stand.

The world tilted beneath him.

Cienna caught him before he fell.

Luke called from several meters away.

"He’s finally learned what happens when he overworks himself."

Lucien turned his head.

Luke raised one hand while keeping the other pressed near the bandages around his side.

Lucien wanted to respond, but his body had finally exhausted whatever adrenaline had kept it moving.

His vision began to darken.

Just before consciousness slipped away, another tremor passed beneath the village.

The sound returned with it.

Then Cienna shouted his name, and everything disappeared.