100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full?-Chapter 351 - Return

The meeting room held its quiet.

The air remained heavy with the goblin scrolls’ implication as if the parchment had released a poison that did not burn the lungs but tightened the mind.

Lucien sat still, watching the angles of the room as if the walls might answer him.

Finally, he asked the simplest question.

"Is your leader here?"

Darian’s laugh came out quick, then stopped halfway when he remembered what "here" meant in this conversation.

"No," Darian said. "If the leader were on this planet, we would not have been in trouble in the void."

Kaia leaned closer, lowering her voice as if secrets traveled faster than sound. "Uncle Moltsage has a way to contact him. The leader is still in the Big World."

Lucien paused.

Contact across that distance.

’A message that ignored distance?’

His eyes shifted toward the ceiling as if he could see the invisible network stitched into the planet.

He exhaled once.

Even their methods were frightening.

An organization built from people who carried cheats did not only possess power. It possessed infrastructure. The kind of infrastructure that made distance, and therefore most threats, negotiable.

Lucien’s gaze softened into calculation.

Soon...

The door opened.

Moltsage returned.

He did not stroll this time. He moved like a man who had seen a knife in the dark and decided he would not blink again until the knife was gone.

His expression was urgent, but controlled. The kind of control that only existed in those who had survived too many close calls.

He looked at Lucien first.

"Little friend," Moltsage said, "the leader wishes to meet you. If you permit it."

Lucien’s mouth curved slightly.

He turned his head toward Astraea and Vaelcar.

Astraea’s nod was calm.

Vaelcar’s nod was smaller.

Lucien returned his gaze to Moltsage.

"That is fine, Uncle Moltsage."

Moltsage’s tension cracked into a grin for a heartbeat. "Good. Very good."

Lucien’s tone stayed polite. "Where?"

Moltsage answered without hesitation.

"The Big World. Our headquarters. Middle Continent."

A pulse of relief ran through Lucien.

The Big World.

He could finally return and meet the Liberator leader as a bonus.

Moltsage’s grin faded as quickly as it had appeared.

"We must leave now," he said. "Not later."

He turned toward the others and his voice sharpened into command.

"Our diviner saw danger if we delay. The path may be sealed if we hesitate. Let’s prepare now."

The room changed.

Even Kaia’s usual mischief vanished.

Darian’s posture straightened.

Velun’s face went blank in the way it always did when his mind was already rehearsing procedures.

Rhazek rose without a word.

Seryth’s eyes narrowed as if venom itself had learned to listen.

Lucien’s attention sharpened at one word.

Diviner.

The black-robed Liberator had spoken of a diviner once. A person whose predictions were never wrong, he said.

That alone was enough to make Lucien’s spine tighten.

Moltsage continued.

"Let’s seal the planet. Full veil and full misdirection. We leave no trail for anything hungry."

No one questioned him.

They moved precisely like a body that had practiced emergency motions until the motions became instinct.

The Liberators spread through the building and beyond it with synchronized purpose. Through the crystal wall, Lucien watched figures become lines, then vanish behind layers of formation light.

The city responded.

Invisible circuitry flared in the air for an instant, then folded into the sky like patterns being stitched into cloth.

Lucien could feel arrays activating one after another, each one slotting into the next like a lock closing.

Kaia and the others led Lucien’s group out.

As they walked, Lucien sensed the planet tightening.

Earth Two Point Zero was not merely a home.

It feels like a device. A crafted refuge that could seal itself like a fist when threatened.

They reached a wide plaza.

And Lucien finally understood what "Liberator" looked like at scale.

Thousands had gathered.

Not civilians in panic but people in readiness.

Some were human. Some were were from the Thousand Races.

They stood in ranks that were not quite military. More like a practiced assembly of conspirators who knew the difference between noise and action.

Moltsage held the Teleportation Disc.

Then, h stepped into the center.

He raised one hand.

The formations answered.

The disc began to glow.

Lucien felt the mechanism wake.

The air above the disc split.

A corridor appeared, a straight wound through distance. It was the same principle as the corridor they had traveled earlier but heavier. Anchored. Planet-bound.

Lucien felt the pull.

It was not a force dragging him. It was an agreement that his location was no longer valid.

Moltsage’s voice cut through the plaza.

"Stay within the corridor. Do not reach outside its edge. Do not test it. The void is patient, and mistakes are loud."

Thousands stepped forward together.

The moment they entered the corridor, the world behind them blurred. The plaza faded. Earth Two Point Zero became a distant thought.

Stars rushed toward them. Not as objects but as lines.

The corridor became a tunnel of stretched night, and the universe outside it smeared into pale streaks as if space itself could not keep up.

Mere seconds. And they crossed a distance that would have taken ordinary drifting longer than civilizations.

The corridor’s sides shimmered with condensed law.

They traveled in silence.

Moltsage stood at the front with one hand lifted. He was feeding steady mana into the disc’s governing script.

His face was different now.

He looked like a man walking through a battlefield he could not see.

Lucien stared forward.

Soon, the Big World came into view.

It filled the corridor’s mouth like a rising god.

A sphere of impossible scale, continents curved across its surface like the backs of slumbering beasts. Oceans glinted. Cloud systems turned with slow majesty.

And then the Black Mass stained it.

Half the world was veiled in that unnatural darkness, a smear across beauty like oil across a painting.

Even from this distance, Lucien felt the wrongness.

It made the world around it look like reality was trying to forget how to be clean.

Just then...

The corridor flared.

Lucien expected acceleration.

Instead, the travel slowed.

Unnaturally.

As if something had caught the corridor’s throat.

Moltsage’s eyes snapped forward.

He poured more mana in, jaw clenched.

The disc’s glow brightened.

The corridor should have answered with speed.

But...

It slowed again.

The silence became sharp.

Even those with less sensitivity felt it now. The corridor’s pull was losing its certainty.

Somewhere ahead, distance was no longer obeying.

Suddenly...

Every Eternal’s attention snapped forward. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

Astraea’s voice came out low.

"This is... impossible."

Lucien heard something in her tone he had never heard before.

A thread of disbelief.

Vaelcar’s voice followed.

"No," he murmured. "It cannot be here."

His Monolith rotated. Scripture flared then dimmed, like an eye blinking rapidly as it tried to understand what it was seeing.

Astraea’s storm tightened around her shoulders.

"Why is it here," she whispered. "How did it escape the seals?"

Moltsage swallowed audibly.

Unlike Astraea and Vaelcar, he was not a relic of the millennia war.

He had not lived when the old terrors still walked openly.

He was a newer Eternal.

And the fear in his posture was not the fear of a weak man.

It was the fear of a man realizing that history had just stepped out of its grave.

The Liberators behind them shifted, confused.

Thousands stared into the corridor’s forward mouth.

They saw nothing.

Only space.

Only the curve of the Big World beyond.

Only silence.

Then the void ahead was cut.

A line appeared, thin as a blade.

It widened.

At that moment, something stepped out.

A figure.

Indifferent, calm, and wrong.

Law oozed from it as if the universe itself belonged to its bloodstream.

The corridor’s edge trembled, not from pressure but from recognition.

Lucien’s heartbeat spiked.

His face turned grim.

"No," he muttered, almost without meaning to.

The others reacted late. Their instincts caught up to their eyes.

A ripple of unconscious gulps moved through the crowd like a wave.

The figure drifted closer, and the corridor slowed further as if the path itself was trying to become a kneeling thing.

Lucien’s thoughts ground to a halt.

The figure was familiar. Far too familiar.

He had seen it before back in the Mural World.

A terror that should not have existed.

Lucien’s voice carried through the corridor, clear and sharp.

"Why is an incarnation of a Primordial here?"

The words landed like a bell struck in a temple.

Every hair on every spine rose.

Even Astraea’s storm went still.

Even Vaelcar’s scripture hesitated as if it did not want to write the next line.

Moltsage’s hand trembled above the disc.

And ahead, the indifferent figure stared at them as if deciding whether their existence was worth acknowledging.

The corridor continued to slow.

The Big World waited beyond.

And between them and home stood something that should not have been able to find them at all.