100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full?-Chapter 363 - 3 Days

Three days passed.

Lucien had divided his tasks practically.

And the results were... satisfying.

The Lithrens stood in lines that would have made an academy instructor blink twice.

Their bodies had changed. Their eyes had changed more.

Most of the Lithrens had already stepped into the Transcendent Realm.

Lucien walked between them as thousands of spirit crystals floated in slow circles above the ground like pale moons.

Each Lithren received thousands of share.

"Do not waste them," Lucien said calmly. "You can have strength and still die if your mana reservoir is a puddle. Expand it and widen your vessels until they stop tearing."

Strength had been their first hunger.

Now he was teaching them the second.

Capacity.

•••

Lucien formed more pacts during those days.

One of them came from one of the black cube once again.

The Astral Testudon.

This one was different and far easier to communicate with.

He already knew the language of the Big World, and he even had a name of his own.

The Astral Testudon should have been an Extinction-Grade, a Threat Tier III.

But now, it had fallen to Threat Tier II.

When Lucien used Inspect, he felt the flaw immediately.

Something is missing.

Lucien’s gaze lifted toward the shell.

People had lived there. And now there was only silence.

He remembered what the Astral Testudon had said during the name exchange of the Concord Pact.

"My name is Morveth," he said. "In older tongues, I was called the Wandering Shelf. In newer ones... I was called home."

He was more than a thousand years old.

After the pact formed, the Testudon’s human form manifested before Lucien.

He was a hunched old man with a heavy tortoise shell strapped across his back like both armor and mourning. His expression was tired in a way only the abandoned could be tired.

Lucien smiled as he recalled the moment Morveth and Aerolith had met for the first time. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

"She smells like hunger," Morveth observed.

Aerolith blinked. "I do not smell like hunger. I smell like sandwich."

Morveth stared at her for a long moment, then looked back at Lucien as if quietly reassessing the kind of world this had become.

The reason such a creature had agreed so readily to form a pact with him made Lucien sigh.

When he showed Morveth the Goblin corpses, his reaction was immediate.

"They took them," Morveth said quietly. "The ones who lived on me. The ones who sang into my shell and made me strong."

Lucien’s eyes narrowed.

"So your strength depended on them."

Morveth nodded once.

"Life is not decoration," Morveth said. "It is reinforcement. A shell with no voices becomes only a shell."

Lucien understood.

The Testudon’s "fatal weakness" was emptiness.

A being built for cohabitation, stripped of the very thing that stabilized its existence.

The Concord Pact that followed did not feel like a contract.

It felt like two survivors agreeing that the world would not take from them again without paying.

When the ritual finished, Lucien felt the connection settle.

Aerolith leaned in and whispered, "Big Brother, do you think he tastes like rock?"

Lucien answered without looking at her. "Do not lick Morveth."

Aerolith pouted. "I will not lick the continent-man."

Morveth sighed as if he had lived long enough to accept strange omens.

•••

By the end of the third day, Lucien had learned something else.

Void beings shared a pattern.

The Law of Continuance.

Both Morveth and Aerolith had integrated that Law, and Morveth said that most void beings possessed it as well.

That was how they survived where survival was not permitted.

Lucien sat with that thought for a long time.

Aerolith could also speak fluently now. She could argue and bargain like a small merchant.

•••

Another thing was that Lucien formed three Concord Pacts in succession with Ancient Beasts.

The first was Condoriano. A Sky Condor.

It’s an ancient sky-beast that had nested above the clouds for so long that the sky itself had accepted him as part of its structure.

His Law was the Law of Horizon. It’s the authority of distance. The rule that all things could be seen, approached, and crossed if you had the patience to move.

The second beast was "Saber." His species is called Moonfang Smilodon.

It was an ancient predator whose fangs were curved like crescent moons and whose muscles moved with the brutal efficiency of a creature that had hunted practitioners for sport.

And its Law was the Law of Predation. The principle that the strong did not merely survive. They selected.

The third was a female insect beast, chitinous and elegant in a way that made the word "bug" feel insulting.

Her body was a smooth black-gold armor, segmented with fine lines of light. Her limbs were long and precise, and her wings folded behind her like sharpened glass.

Her name was Kira, an Ironweave Mantis.

And her Law was the Law of Metamorphosis. Change that rewrites the rules.

Lucien told them the truth about the Big World.

He described the collapse of arrays and the isolation of continents and the way the new era would grind the weak into resources.

Condoriano’s only response was to flex his wings once as if tasting the air of a more interesting world.

Saber’s eyes glittered with something close to joy.

Kira simply clicked her mandibles softly and said, "Finally."

They liked this era because it was honest.

And Lucien’s terms were simple.

Teach the monsters. Push them through Transcendence. Even guide them toward Ascension if possible.

In exchange, Lucien would not keep them inside his world forever.

They agreed and the Concord Pact was finished.

And so... monster training began.

Condoriano was assigned to the sky beasts like griffins and wyverns.

Saber took charge of the land beasts like drakes and wolfkin.

Kira oversaw the insect monsters, whose instincts were sharp, communal, and unforgiving.

The change was immediate.

Monsters were simply better at teaching monsters.

Lucien understood this quickly. He could explain Laws with precision, structure them into words and texts, and guide understanding step by step...

But monsters did not think in principles or definitions.

He could not force comprehension into them the way he had with the Lithrens.

The Ancient Beasts, however, were different.

They were intelligent, experienced, and most importantly, they had once been mortal themselves. They remembered what it meant to grow from instinct into awareness.

They reached the monsters in ways Lucien never could.

When Lucien handed the three mentors the Law Books, they accepted without hesitation.

There was recognition in their eyes. Approval.

They translated Lucien’s Law Books into motion, instinct, and sensation. A claw strike that carried meaning. A flight pattern that taught balance. A swarm formation that conveyed cohesion.

Understanding spread.

Even more, the Ancient Beasts requested permission to teach their own Laws to selected monsters.

Lucien agreed without hesitation.

If a monster kingdom was going to rise, it should not rise as a copy of humanity.

It should rise as itself.

•••

During those days, Kaia visited once.

Lucien kept his promise and allowed her to stand before the Bark of the Tree of Creation.

She was very happy.

She stood there in silence, staring at the ancient bark for five long minutes as if listening to something that had no voice.

Then the air shifted.

A new flame bloomed at her fingertips.

It was pale and keen like a candle flame forged from clear glass.

Kaia blinked, then let out a soft laugh.

"This one is mean," she murmured.

Lucien tilted his head slightly. "What does it do?"

Kaia’s smile was small.

"It burns lies," she said

She held the flame near the air and the air shivered as if something unseen had just been judged.

Kaia named it on instinct.

"Testament Flame," she said.

Lucien nodded once.

"That is a useful fire."

Kaia looked so happy she nearly hugged Lucien.

Lucien promptly evicted her from his inner realm.

•••

During those days, Lilith did not visit. Not once.

When a representative finally arrived, Lucien’s suspicion proved correct.

She was crafting. She was trying to forge something the world had never seen before.

And for once, Lucien was grateful for the silence.

It gave him the time he needed.

It was finally time for him to grow stronger himself.

Back in the present, Lucien sat before the Bark of the Tree of Creation.

It was only a slab of bark and yet, it pressed on the world like a memory too large to forget.

Lucien swallowed unconsciously.

Even after three days of building momentum, the Bark still made his instincts lower their voice.

If life truly began from the Tree of Creation...

Then even this fragment was not just material.

It was origin.

It was the first agreement existence ever made with itself.

Lucien’s fingers flexed once.

He smiled faintly.

"Alright," he murmured. "Let me see what you are made of."

He activated the Law of Creation.

The world peeled into strings.

The Bark did not become simpler.

It became terrifying.

Now that he stared longer, the Bark’s strings did not look like something that had been written.

They looked like something that had been there before writing existed.

Lucien’s smile thinned into focus.

He leaned forward slowly.

His perception sank deeper into those ancient strings.