100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full?-Chapter 345 - Discovery

They returned to the planet the gargoyles had claimed.

For a moment, none of them spoke.

The sky above was neither bright nor dim. It held a muted luster.

Lucien stood still.

His eyes, still faintly red, fixed on a single point in the distance.

The execution circle.

It was... complete.

Astraea noticed his gaze.

"That was the Regent’s final gamble," she said. "He completed it. But he never owned its conclusion."

Lucien looked at her.

She continued, unhurried.

"The Serpentile shed the foundation it was written upon. The circle bloomed into a lie. Every rune remained true, yet none of them touched each other in the same layer. Kharzun struck the final stroke, and the world answered with silence."

Lucien exhaled softly.

"The Law of Molting," he said. "It is more than escape. It is structural sabotage."

Velun scratched the back of his head. "I just made it... not be where it thought it was."

Lucien let out a slow breath. The Law of Molting is more formidable than he thought.

’A genius,’ Lucien thought. He looked at the Liberators one by one. ’All of them.’

Lucien gave a brief nod.

He stepped into the outer ring and let his mind sharpen.

Photographic Memory.

The runes became a city map in his eyes.

The circle was not a single mechanism, but a choir. One rune fed the next. A spiral of intent anchored into geometry, wrapped in blood authority, reinforced by petrified reality planes.

Lucien’s fingers traced the air above a symbol he did not recognize.

This was a machine designed to convince reality that refusal was impossible.

He saw sections that matched what he understood. Attributes. Elemental directives. Spatial bindings.

Then he saw the rest.

Law-geometry.

Those runes did not read like language. They read like behavior. Like the universe had been taught a habit and this circle was the trigger.

Lucien pulled his Magic Book from the Inventory.

It was already the complete version. And yet, when he searched for the unfamiliar runes, the book offered him blankness.

Lucien’s jaw tightened.

All attributes were unlocked because attributes were measurable.

Laws were different.

He closed the book again.

"So it still depends on what Law I learned," he murmured. "Sigh. The pages still demand tuition."

Lucien stared at the runes until they were engraved into him.

Then he stepped out of the circle and looked at Velun.

"Please destroy it," Lucien said.

Velun blinked. "Right now?"

Vaelcar, who had been silent, stood beside the Monolith. His gaze fell on the execution circle.

"It is not enough to scar a serpent," he said. "One must remove the fangs, or one day the scar learns to bite."

Velun swallowed, then walked forward.

He lifted his hands.

The air around the circle trembled.

Reality shed.

It was not flashy. It was intimate and wrong, like watching a page being pulled out of a holy book.

The execution circle did not protest.

It simply lost its foundation.

Lines that had been carved into the air blurred, then separated into layers that no longer agreed on what "touching" meant. The runes faded as if someone had breathed on chalk.

The circles became ghost-lines, then nothing at all.

Velun lowered his hands.

"That," he said, "was easier without an Emperor trying to hold it together."

Lucien nodded. "Good."

Only then did they truly look at the world.

It was beautiful. The air was clean, as though no battle had ever scarred the world at all.

Lucien remembered the gargoyle king’s words spoken earlier.

This world cannot be corrupted.

He turned to the others and said it aloud.

For a moment, no one reacted.

Then Astraea laughed, disbelieving. "A gargoyle’s boast."

Vaelcar’s gaze slid over the horizon. "Some boasts are born from observation," he said.

Astraea’s storm stirred. "If it truly cannot be corrupted, then this world is not a shelter. It is a weapon."

Kaia’s brows lifted. "A weapon?"

Astraea’s smile sharpened. "Against the Black Mass."

Lucien’s chest tightened. Valuable did not begin to cover it.

If this world resisted miasma, then it was not just a refuge. It was a fortress that the enemy had already tried to claim.

Which meant they had seen its worth.

And if they had seen its worth, they would return.

Soon.

Vaelcar’s Monolith hummed faintly.

"This is not coincidence," Vaelcar said. "When carrion birds gather, there is a corpse. When the Black Mass gathers, there is a prize."

Astraea’s gaze turned distant, scanning beyond horizon as if her sight could reach into the void and shake secrets loose. "Then we do not linger in ignorance. We divide. We learn."

And so they scattered.

Astraea rose first. She vanished into the sky.

Vaelcar drifted after.

The Liberators began to move too, keeping distance from places where petrified stone still lay in unnatural angles.

Lucien stayed behind.

He told them he would rest.

It sounded believable.

Only when they were out of sight did his face finally tighten.

Pain split behind his eyes.

His head did not ache. It cracked, as if someone had tried to wedge a blade into his thoughts.

Lucien sat cross-legged and forced his breathing steady.

Then he closed his eyes and turned his Spiritual Senses inward.

What he saw made him still.

His spirit does not look like a single form anymore.

It was a fractured constellation, held together by threads that looked like luminous ligaments stretched past their limit. Cracks spidered through the whole structure. Some were thin as hair. Some were wide enough that his senses could almost fall into them.

If not for those threads, he would already be dead.

Lucien moved closer with his senses.

The threads tightened the moment he approached as if they were guardians set to deny even him.

And inside the fractures, he saw it.

Golden glow.

It did not behave like power. It behaved like meaning. Like something too dense for his mind to hold.

Lucien tried to focus.

The threads rejected him.

He felt his senses slide off the fracture.

But for a split second, the glow formed shapes in his awareness.

Something familiar. Something that made his mind try to remember them and then forget them the moment it formed.

Lucien swallowed hard.

He remembered Arctyx’s words before.

Lucien opened his eyes, breathing slower now.

"Could it be," he whispered, "that I really am..."

He did not finish.

The world felt too quiet for that sentence.

He shook his head once as if refusing a prophecy.

Then the wind changed.

Astraea returned first.

She landed lightly.

"Little brother," she called.

Lucien stood, forcing his posture steady. "Did you find something, sister?"

Astraea nodded.

"This world is stitched," she said. "Formations are everywhere."

Lucien’s eyes narrowed.

"There’s also a formation that linked this world to the Black Mass. I erased it. And now.... They cannot return by the same path."

Relief struck Lucien and vanished instantly, replaced by suspicion.

Astraea continued. "The world is masked as well. From the void, it is a blank space. The Gargoyles have hidden it from sight."

She paused then added,

"Oath-Buried will understand that better than I. I can cut ropes. He can read knots."

Lucien glanced at the horizon.

"Sister, have you discovered why this world cannot be corrupted?

Astraea paused.

"No," she said after a moment. "I did not find the root of it. But the mana here is dense in an unnatural way. Not like the Big World, of course. Yet for a world this small, it breathes like something larger. Watch."

She pointed to the ruined battlefield.

Stone that had been shattered was knitting itself back together. Not quickly, but steadily. Fine dust rose and settled into cracks. Broken ridges shifted a hair at a time. The earth was repairing itself as if the planet refused to accept injury as permanent.

Lucien stared.

"This is..." he began. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

Astraea’s smile was thin.

"A refusal. The world refuses to stay wounded."

Lucien’s fingers flexed at his side.

A world that repaired itself.

A world that resisted corruption.

His mind began building plans faster than his body could tolerate.

"We wait for the Oath-Buried," Astraea said as if reading his thoughts. "If this place is what it smells like, then it will become a battlefield again."

Lucien nodded.

Then he reached into his inventory and pulled out the Organ Storage taken from the Covenant-Breaker.

He had noticed something important here earlier but at the time, he had dismissed it.

Now he opened it.

Scrolls slid into his hand.

Rough parchment. Ink that smelled faintly of blood and mushrooms. Goblin scriptures.

Lucien’s eyes moved over the first one and his throat tightened.

Coordinates.

Many.

Worlds claimed by goblins. Worlds taken quietly, marked, veiled, and hidden.

Some scrolls contained lists. Some contained diagrams. Some contained notes that read like inventory. Resources, hazards, resistances, populations.

It was not conquest. It was harvesting.

Lucien turned the scrolls so Astraea could see.

Her face changed.

Lucien’s voice came out hoarse. "It was not only this world that was taken by the monsters."

Astraea’s gaze lifted as if she could see the universe beyond the sky. "If goblins have done this..."

Lucien finished the thought for her. "What about the other Black Mass monsters?"

Silence stretched between them.

Because the answer was obvious and unacceptable.

They had been fighting what they could see.

Meanwhile their enemies had been building invisibly.

They had been claiming worlds the way a thief claimed pockets in a crowded street, one unnoticed cut at a time.

Lucien rolled the scroll back up.

For a moment, his red eyes looked almost calm.

Finally Lucien spoke.

"We survived an execution," he said. "Now we find out how many executions have already succeeded."

Astraea’s smile returned.

"Then we sharpen our knives," she said. "And we teach the universe to look behind veils."

Lucien nodded once.