100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? Chapter 845 - 855 - Discovery

Lucien remained seated on the bed with his eyes closed.

The question had changed.

Lucien stopped looking at what had been there.

He followed the memories farther.

The river came first.

Young Lucien had visited it often. There was nothing unusual about that. The water passed close enough to the village that children played near the shallows, adults washed tools along the bank, and people occasionally crossed to gather plants growing on the opposite side.

The strange sound had appeared there more than once.

Young Lucien had never questioned why.

He simply liked listening to it.

Lucien followed one particular memory.

Young Lucien had spent an afternoon sitting on a flat stone near the bank, staring toward the water while the pleasant resonance drifted at the edge of his hearing.

Nothing happened.

He went home.

Lucien frowned.

If he had stopped there, the memory would have been meaningless.

So he continued.

Several days later, Mirelle came to the river with two other children.

Young Lucien was already there.

Luke and Cienna had followed him.

That part had once seemed ordinary enough.

His parents had grown accustomed to finding him staring blankly toward places where nobody else could hear anything, and the river made them nervous.

Young Lucien had never been reckless, but a child sitting too close to flowing water while distracted by something invisible was enough to worry any parent.

Cienna had been calling him away from the bank when Mirelle stepped backward.

Her heel landed on a smooth stone hidden beneath damp grass.

She slipped.

The bank dropped more sharply at that point than it appeared from above.

Mirelle disappeared into the deeper current.

Young Lucien remembered shouting.

Luke moved first.

He entered the river without hesitation and caught her before the current carried her around the bend.

The incident had frightened everyone badly enough that Mirelle avoided the river for weeks.

Lucien opened his eyes.

He remembered the event now.

Young Lucien had never connected it to the sound.

Why would he?

The resonance had begun days before Mirelle fell.

Lucien’s breathing slowed.

He closed his eyes again.

Months later, the strange resonance returned.

Once more, young Lucien began spending time near the river.

Luke and Cienna followed him more often because they had not forgotten what happened to Mirelle.

Then came the rain.

It had fallen farther upriver rather than directly over the village, so nobody initially thought much of it.

Luke noticed the water first.

The level had risen faster than normal.

Cienna saw debris moving downstream.

They warned the village.

People moved tools, livestock, and stored goods away from the lower ground before the river swelled beyond its banks.

It was not a catastrophic flood.

The surge lasted only a short time.

Had nobody noticed early, several low sheds might have been destroyed, and anyone working near the bank could easily have been swept away.

Lucien’s eyes opened again.

This time, he did not immediately dismiss it.

The sound had drawn young Lucien toward the river before Mirelle nearly drowned.

Then it disappeared.

It returned before another danger emerged in the same area.

After the seasonal surge passed, it faded again.

Lucien sat straighter.

"Was that really coincidence?"

The room remained quiet.

He searched farther.

The forest.

There was an old memory of young Lucien walking alone beneath the trees.

He had heard the sound strongly that afternoon.

Instead of continuing along the path, he stopped beneath a broad tree and listened.

Minutes passed.

Nothing appeared.

Then a hunter came from farther ahead.

The man’s clothes were torn, and there was dried blood along one sleeve.

He warned young Lucien not to continue.

A wounded boar had been driven from a hunting ground and was moving unpredictably through that section of forest.

Young Lucien returned home.

The boar was killed two days later.

Nobody was hurt.

Again, the sound disappeared from that path.

Lucien’s expression tightened.

He searched another memory.

Tavian.

Young Lucien had been standing near the forge one afternoon while Tavian worked beside an older blacksmith.

The strange resonance had distracted him so thoroughly that Tavian eventually threw a small piece of charcoal at him.

Young Lucien had remained there anyway.

Nothing happened.

Lucien almost moved on.

Then he followed the day farther.

Tavian had been repairing a pulley used to lift heavy grain sacks into an elevated storehouse.

While replacing one worn fitting, he noticed a narrow crack in the metal support beneath it.

The crack was difficult to see.

They removed the part.

A few days later, Tavian tested the old support with scrap weight.

It snapped.

Lucien slowly opened his eyes.

If it had remained in place, somebody could have been standing beneath several sacks when it failed.

Nobody had considered the discovery remarkable.

Tavian had simply noticed a damaged piece before it caused an accident.

Young Lucien had never connected that to anything.

He had only remembered hearing the sound.

Lucien searched again.

Then again.

The memories were scattered across years, which was why the pattern had remained invisible.

Young Lucien had never written them down.

He had never studied them.

To him, the resonance had simply been something pleasant that occasionally appeared and drew his attention.

Yet the more Lucien followed each memory beyond the moment when the sound appeared, the harder it became to dismiss what followed.

Sometimes the danger emerged the same day.

Sometimes it took several days.

Sometimes nothing dramatic happened at all because somebody noticed the problem first.

The sound had drawn young Lucien toward a path before a damaged tree collapsed across it.

It had held his attention near a livestock enclosure where a weakened latch was discovered before several animals escaped during the night.

Another memory involved Auren’s father changing a planned route after finding the ground near one trail unusually soft.

Rain later triggered a small landslide across the abandoned path.

No one died.

No tragedy entered village memory.

That was precisely why young Lucien had never recognized anything.

Lucien pressed both palms against his knees.

The realization arrived slowly enough that he almost resisted it.

Then it settled into place.

He laughed.

The sound was quiet at first.

It grew until Lucien had to cover his mouth with one hand to avoid waking anyone in the neighboring rooms.

He had been wrong.

Completely wrong.

Young Lucien had been wrong too, although the child could hardly be blamed for it.

He had thought the strange sound belonged to places because he heard it near places.

He had thought it might belong to certain people because it appeared around them.

Lucien had inherited that assumption and dressed it in more sophisticated theories about the Origin Core, hidden energy, fate, causality, and temporal significance.

The answer might have been much simpler.

The sound had always been giving him direction.

Lucien’s laughter faded.

He sat very still.

"Direction..."

The word felt different now.

The river had not mattered because the river itself was special.

The sound had directed young Lucien there because something was going to happen there.

The forest path had not carried some mysterious property.

Danger waited farther along it.

The forge had not necessarily been important.

Something connected to that place required attention.

Young Lucien had listened without understanding.

Because he lingered, Luke and Cienna often followed him.

Because they followed him, they noticed things.

Because he stopped in odd places, other people sometimes stopped too.

Without ever knowing why, young Lucien had altered small outcomes merely by listening.

Lucien leaned back slightly.

The sound had helped him far more than he ever realized.

That thought brought warmth to his expression.

Young Lucien had spent years believing he was simply strange.

People had found him absent-minded because he would stop walking, stare into the distance, or linger somewhere for reasons he could never explain.

Yet some of those moments had saved lives.

Lucien’s smile gradually faded.

There was still a problem.

People.

The sound had appeared around Tavian, Mirelle, and Auren. And now Seran and Aurelia.

If the sound was directional, then those people were not merely standing near the destination.

They appeared to be the destination themselves.

Lucien’s brows drew together.

Why?

What was the sound directing him toward?

Danger surrounding them?

Events they would become involved in?

Or the people themselves?

He remembered the market.

The resonance had appeared before Seran collided with him.

Tonight, it returned and led Lucien directly toward the warehouse where Seran and Aurelia were hiding.

There had been no immediate attack, no collapsing building, and no obvious disaster.

At least none Lucien had seen.

That meant something remained incomplete.

Lucien lowered his gaze.

Perhaps the sound did not point only toward danger.

Perhaps it pointed toward something that needed Lucien’s presence.

That idea was broader.

Too broad to trust yet.

He needed more examples.

He needed to determine whether the sound could be deliberately triggered, whether distance mattered, and whether following it always led toward something meaningful.

If he could understand even part of its conditions, the ability might become the greatest advantage he possessed in this era.

Lucien no longer had his old strength.

What he did have was a strange sense capable of pointing him toward places where something mattered.

In a world this large, while searching for something as elusive as the Origin Core, that could become invaluable.

Lucien closed his eyes again.

He tried calling the sensation.

Nothing happened.

He concentrated on the memory of the river.

Nothing.

He tried recalling the feeling from the warehouse, the faint direction inside the pleasant resonance.

Silence.

Lucien sighed.

"So much for controlling it."

He tried again anyway.

Time passed.

The room remained quiet.

Eventually, his thoughts became less orderly.

The ordinary exhaustion of his current body began asserting itself.

Lucien resisted for another few minutes before realizing that the memories were starting to blur together.

He lay back.

In his old body, a night without sleep would have been an inconvenience at most.

Now his eyelids felt heavy enough to qualify as another enemy.

Lucien stared toward the ceiling.

His last coherent thought returned to Seran.

If the sound had truly guided Lucien to him, then there had to be a reason.

Whether that reason was danger, destiny, or something Lucien had not yet considered, he intended to find out.

Sleep took him before he reached another conclusion.