100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full?-Chapter 400 - Clues

Lucien then mimicked the Liberator’s principle.

But he chose ground.

He stretched his split body’s strings of existence outward, thinning them into filaments and letting them seep into dust and stone.

The fist-sized Lucien vanished.

His presence became a shallow layer inside the soil’s definition. The world no longer called it a body because it no longer behaved like one.

Lucien’s eyes narrowed.

Then he felt it.

He felt the ground.

Every step miles away became vibration. Every buried secret became tension in the rock.

A slow curve lifted the corner of his mouth.

’Is this what Marie feels when she uses Absolute Earth Governance?’

He breathed in once, steadied himself, and moved.

They did not need to walk into the split-open site anymore.

He could approach it as the ground itself.

Lucien pushed the distributed split body forward. It glided on the surface without leaving a trail.

Just then—

Far ahead, something changed.

The vibration pattern sharpened.

Fear.

Someone was hiding beneath the earth.

And someone else had found them.

Lucien felt it in a clean, ugly sequence. Bodies pressed into a shallow pocket with a treasure’s thin veil masking their breath, and above them the scrape of tools and Law intent digging down like teeth.

His main body reacted instantly.

"North," Lucien said. "Enemies are digging humans out. They are ambushing survivors hidden underground."

Morveth answered without hesitation.

"I’ll go. Stay here and guard the little shelf-maker."

Continuance surged.

Morveth vanished.

Lucien’s split body kept moving through the soil-thread.

He was surprised those humans had lasted this long. It must have been because of that relic, capable of blurring their presence and masking their heat.

And hiding below ground was smart.

It was Marie’s method, too, when she first arrived in the Big World.

The land ahead shifted, and Lucien continued forward without interruption.

Moments later...

The vibrations intensified.

The land began to tighten.

Lucien knew he was close.

He reached a cliff and let his awareness rise.

And he saw it.

The split-open site lay ahead.

Lucien stopped.

He stared.

It was beautiful in the way a wound could be beautiful when it revealed what the world tried to hide.

Reality was torn open in mid-air like a curtain ripped by an invisible hand. The edges did not fray like cloth. They crystallized, shimmering with layered colors that did not belong to any sky. Thin strands of light ran along the tear’s rim like nerves, pulsing slowly as if the world was trying to heal and failing.

Inside the split was another plane.

The small world.

Lucien saw a landscape that looked too clean. Fields that held an impossible green. A river that ran like liquid glass. Farther in, faint structures like pale stone ribs rose from the land.

The air near the tear twisted gently. Space folded wrong and then corrected itself. The boundary breathed.

Lucien watched without blinking.

He burned every detail into memory.

He studied the tear’s thickness, the way the rim reacted to pressure, the small flickers where the world tried to stitch itself closed.

He pressed his distributed split body into the ground beneath it and felt the stress-lines running through stone, the strain of two realities disagreeing about where "here" ended.

He could see through the tear.

He could feel its edges.

He could almost taste the mechanism.

And then he sensed disturbance.

Factions.

Many of them.

Practitioners stood in rings around the rift, some in open armor, some in robes that carried sect symbols, some masked with artifacts that turned faces into forgettable shapes.

The air crackled with restrained violence. Words were exchanged, then replaced by technique.

A duel was already in progress.

A claim dispute.

They were fighting over ownership of the small world as if it were a mine, a fortress, a training ground, or a future throne.

Lucien moved closer, careful, keeping the distributed split body shallow. He listened with his eyes and felt with his earth-thread.

He understood enough.

This place was a resource to them.

A base.

And that was why everyone wanted it.

Lucien slid closer to the torn edge, hungry for one more clue.

Just then—

A few Eternals snapped their gazes toward him.

At the subtle wrongness in the ground.

Lucien stilled instantly.

’They are sharp.’

He did not push his luck.

He did not attempt entry.

He held the image of the tear in his mind and withdrew his distributed split body in a smooth retreat, letting the ground become ordinary again.

He retraced his path back toward the others.

Behind him, the torn reality continued to glitter like an open secret.

And Lucien’s mind continued to measure it like a craftsman measuring a lock he intended to open later.

•••

The earth shook.

Morveth arrived like a verdict.

The ambushers were not weak. They were confident. A mix of mid-stage Celestial-realm experts and some arrogant Ascendants. They were the kind that thought mortals were cargo and the ground was their tool.

They were digging with Law hooks, carving through soil, dragging people up like roots ripped from dirt.

Morveth’s Continuance rolled over them.

Everyone froze.

Then they moved at once.

The first enemy raised a hand to strike and found that the moment refused to complete. His attack hung in the air, unfinished, as if time itself had decided to yawn.

Morveth walked through the suspended motion and placed his palm on the man’s chest.

Continuance insisted the impact did not end.

It carried on.

It pushed.

It kept pushing long after a normal blow would have stopped.

The enemy folded backward, not once but repeatedly, as if the same strike was happening again and again inside the same breath.

He hit the ground and did not get up.

Another ambusher tried to flee.

Morveth’s gaze shifted.

Continuance wrapped around the ground beneath the runner and made the soil remember that it was stone.

The man’s foot struck "earth" and met immovable certainty. His ankle snapped. He screamed.

Sound escaped here. But it did not matter.

Morveth moved like a mountain choosing where the world was allowed to exist.

Another enemy arrived late, furious, swinging a law-blade meant to cleave space itself.

Morveth did not dodge.

He made the moment of his body being "elsewhere" continue.

The blade passed through where Morveth had been, and Morveth was already behind the enemy, because the world could not agree on when Morveth had left. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

Morveth’s voice rumbled low.

"You dig at graves and call it harvest."

He struck once.

Continuance made the strike last.

The enemy’s defenses cracked under repetition that was not repetition, under a single event that refused to finish being true.

The enemy fell.

The remaining ambushers broke.

Morveth did not chase.

He did not need to.

He walked beneath the earth, placed one hand on the soil, and let Continuance soften the boundary. The ground became willing. The survivors were lifted gently, not dragged, as if the earth itself had decided to release them.

They emerged blinking, coughing, and clutching each other.

Alive.

When Lucien’s range brushed the scene, drops pinged into his system and vanished into storage without ceremony.

Morveth stood amid broken enemies and trembling mortals. His aura was calm and heavy.

Extinction was not always a roar.

Sometimes it was a quiet decision that nothing weak was allowed to touch what you protected.

•••

Lucien’s split body returned to the group a short while later.

He drew its dispersed strings back in, compressing the stretched filaments until the presence regained its familiar, compact shape.

The transition felt smoother this time.

He was already growing accustomed to manipulating the geometry of his own existence. There was a strange satisfaction in it.

The split body hopped once, then folded back into him.

Lucien’s main body absorbed it seamlessly.

His eyes snapped open.

The others read the tension in his eyes and did not ask trivial questions.

He looked around.

Morveth was already here too.

Lucien then looked once toward the direction of the split-open site.

His mind replayed the rim of the tear, the pulse of its edge, the geometry of space correcting itself.

Then he looked up.

The air above remained calm as if nothing lived within it.

He still needed a way to claim the Liberator hidden there.

For now, there was no immediate danger.

He chose not to reach out to her yet. Not until he had devised a method to anchor her without alerting her.

After all, the moment he spoke to her, those hunting her might notice her presence as well.

Soon he turned away.

"Let’s move," he said.

Lucien took one more breath and felt the extinction-grade mark on his spirit pulse faintly, as if reacting to the way he had spread through earth.

Unease tightened in his chest.

He kept walking anyway.