100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full?-Chapter 399 - Experiment

Lucien invoked Structural Insight.

The world peeled open.

He tilted his head upward.

At first he saw nothing unusual.

Then his perception slipped one layer deeper, into the framework beneath.

And he saw it.

A distortion threaded through the sky like an invisible net.

A presence.

It was everywhere at once, but not in the way an ocean was everywhere. This was more precise.

Lucien’s breath caught.

This method was familiar.

It was the same principle Kaia used when she became flame, when her "self" stopped being a body and became a phenomenon.

But this was different in a way.

Kaia’s transformation was an intensification. Her existence tightened into a single element until the world could only define her as fire.

This Liberator’s method was the opposite.

Instead of condensing, she had stretched.

Lucien’s eyes narrowed as Structural Insight mapped the clauses.

A being was normally held together by dense strings of existence.

Those strings were meant to stay taut.

If you pulled them too far, the definition snapped.

Yet the Liberator had done it anyway.

The dense strings that composed her being had extended to their limit, thinning into hair-fine filaments until each strand could mingle with the air itself.

She was not hiding within the air. She had become indistinguishable from it.

Lucien understood the difference at once.

’Only someone with a cheat could pull this off,’ he thought.

And because she was spread, no direction pointed to her.

The compass had not failed.

It had obeyed the truth.

Just then—

Lucien’s mind hit a sharp, sudden epiphany.

The strings of existence were not fixed.

They could be stretched.

And if they could be stretched... then Creation did not only mean forging new forms.

It could also mean redefining how a form occupied reality.

A new tier of understanding opened in his mind like a lock turning.

Lucien split another thread of thought at once and set it to work, dissecting the revelation. Parsing what it meant and what it allowed.

They continued walking, but Lucien barely felt the road.

Knowing how the Liberator hid was one thing.

Taking her was another.

If she did not reveal herself willingly, they could walk past her a hundred times and never meet.

Even now, without Structural Insight, he would have mistaken her presence for ordinary wind.

Lucien glanced upward again.

The air itself was her disguise.

And she had written it with such elegance that the world accepted it as natural.

A genius method.

It was the kind of genius Lucien had no intention of merely admiring from afar.

He intended to claim it.

His mouth curved faintly.

"Of course," he murmured, more to himself than anyone. "So that is how you survive."

As they walked, the split thread in his mind finished its work.

The epiphany settled into function.

If existence-strings could be stretched, then everything changed.

A whole array of possibilities opened before him.

Lucien’s eyes sharpened.

’This was a structural principle.’

A way to turn identity into territory.

And that... brushed dangerously close to higher Creation.

Lucien stopped walking.

He froze mid-step as if the world had pressed pause on him alone.

The others halted almost immediately.

Kira turned first.

Condoriano’s face tilted, amused.

Morveth looked back with the calm patience of something that had watched continents erode.

Aerolith hovered, waiting for whatever strange thing Lucien was about to do this time.

Lucien closed his eyes.

He let the understanding sink all the way down.

His aura fluctuated.

For a breath it thinned, then tightened, as if it was being braided into a denser strand.

Then it surged.

The air around him pressed outward in a smooth wave. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Mana nearby responded like iron filings around a magnet.

Lucien’s presence climbed.

Eighth stage of the Ascendant Realm.

Just like that, standing in place, as if progress was a casual habit.

Silence held the group.

They exchanged glances and... they simply shrugged.

Condoriano shook his head with quiet resignation, as though this had become routine.

Anvil-Horn, however, wore a strange smile. His eyes glowed faintly with something between approval and anticipation.

The rest no longer questioned it. By now, they had accepted that Lucien’s growth rarely followed normal timing.

So they waited, giving him space to let the new stage settle into place.

Lucien opened his eyes.

The epiphany had settled.

The Liberator’s method had become a key in his mind.

And keys were meant to open things.

He looked up again at the sky.

At the air.

Lucien’s smile returned.

"Everyone," he said, "I want to try something first. If it works, we will not need to reach the split-open site."

No one asked how.

They had watched him bend disasters into procedures.

At this point, curiosity was optional.

Lucien then drew the Covenant of Pathless Sovereignty from his Inventory.

"For the meantime, please help me charge it again," Lucien said.

Morveth took the disc without ceremony. Then he began feeding mana into it.

Aerolith hovered closer, lips pressed into a pout.

Lucien sighed and pulled food from his Inventory. He offered it to her like an offering to a tiny tyrant.

Aerolith’s pout vanished instantly. She grabbed it, chewed once, then brightened as if the world had apologized.

She willingly poured her energy into the disc too, happy again.

Lucien watched the disc drink mana, then sat down.

He wanted to put his new discovery to the test.

Of course, he chose caution over pride.

If his new understanding was wrong, he would rather lose a tool than lose his main body.

He invoked Split Body.

A small Lucien appeared, no larger than a fist.

Lucien shifted his consciousness to the small body.

His awareness poured into the split body.

The small Lucien hovered in place.

The others watched without speaking.

There were a few things even Eternals learned not to interrupt.

Lucien invoked Structural Insight.

He looked at himself.

The split body’s strings were different. After all, it was just divine energy given form.

This made it the perfect opportunity for a test.

Still, the split body existed because a thread connected it back to Lucien. That tether was why the split did not drift into nonsense.

Lucien narrowed his eyes.

He began.

He loosened the strings, one anchor at a time.

He softened the boundary clause first, the agreement that said, "this shape ends here."

He tried to stretch it outward.

The split body trembled.

The strings resisted like taut wire.

Lucien adjusted. He fed in a stabilizing clause from his Law of Stillness.

He stretched again.

The split body’s outline wavered.

For half a breath it looked like it was trying to become fog.

Then the definition buckled.

The split body detonated into harmless sparks of divine energy.

Lucien’s main body exhaled once. A portion of his divine energy diminished permanently.

Fortunately, the loss was small enough to avoid any serious backlash. He felt only a faint sting when the tether snapped.

He recreated the split immediately.

A new fist-sized Lucien formed, hovering again.

This time he did not repeat the same mistake.

Perfect Calculation recorded the failure. Perfect Loop prevented him from wasting the same angle twice.

He tried again, altering the order.

He stabilized the circulation clause first, then loosened the boundary, then stretched the anchor.

The split body held longer.

It trembled like a candle flame in wind.

Lucien pushed.

The strings thinned.

For one shining moment, the split body became wider than it should have been, like Lucien had smeared himself across a larger area.

Then the world rejected it.

The definition snapped.

Explosion again.

He recreated the split again.

Again.

And again.

Each failure cost him divine energy.

Each failure gave him information.

He did not rage. He did not rush.

Anvil-Horn watched silently, eyes glowing faintly, as if seeing a smith work with concepts instead of iron.

Morveth’s gaze remained calm, but it carried approval.

Kira’s scythes clicked once. She could see the pattern. Lucien was not flailing. He was iterating.

Saber’s expression did not change at all. Predators understood stubbornness.

Finally...

The split body held.

Lucien felt it before he saw it.

The tether did not strain. The definition did not snap.

The strings of existence thinned and stretched, but the core identity remained pinned like a nail through cloth.

The split body...

It redistributed.

Its strings fanned outward in a controlled spread, forming a shallow sphere of presence around a small, stable center.

Lucien’s eyes gleamed.

He tested it.

He shaped the distribution into a disk.

The split body’s "self" became broad and thin.

He shaped it into a narrow line.

The split became a filament of existence.

He shaped it into a lattice.

The split became a mesh of faint presence, each strand still Lucien but none thick enough to be caught by ordinary senses.

Nothing snapped.

The world accepted it.

Lucien laughed softly, once, in pure satisfaction.

So this was the rule.

A being could occupy reality in different geometries, as long as the identity clause remained intact and the tether had a stable center to return to.

This was topology.

And now he could do it at will.

He returned his awareness to the main body, opened his eyes, and stood.

The others stared at him.

Condoriano shook his head slowly, the way someone did when they had run out of words.

Aerolith yawned, then brightened when she saw Lucien stand, as if standing meant action.

Anvil-Horn’s strange smile deepened.

Lucien did not indulge their reactions.

He already knew what he wanted next.