100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full?-Chapter 455 - Leader?

A week passed.

The campaign in the West moved more smoothly than even Lucien had expected.

The cure met less resistance now.

Lucien kept receiving good news.

More settlements stabilized. More supply chains bent in their favor. More healers and intermediaries quietly aligned themselves with the Liberators.

Then came the most significant report of that week.

The Dawnblade Order had joined them.

They were a major faction in Nareth. They were one of the forces that had once joined the Stillness ruin expedition.

Their entry into the campaign gave the cure legitimacy in places where rumor alone would have taken longer to root.

Once Dawnblade joined, Nareth shifted much faster.

Too fast, perhaps, for comfort.

By the end of the week, Nareth was stabilizing ahead of expectation.

And beginning the next day, the cure would start surfacing in more random regions across the West.

That randomness was important.

It made the Liberators harder to map.

•••

While the campaign moved outside, Lucien and the others remained in Lootwell.

They trained. They refined. They built.

The elemental women were progressing well.

Their leap into the Celestial Realm had been violent enough that the usual pacing of advancement no longer applied to them cleanly. They had not entered Celestial from its first step in the ordinary sense. They had crashed into its fifth stage directly.

Now, with stabilized foundations and a better understanding of what they had become, they were advancing again.

They had reached the sixth stage.

And they were not slowing.

Eirene and her subordinates returned most of their attention to cure production.

Shadow came back from time to time for supplies, carrying the pressure of campaign work with him and leaving with whatever the next region needed.

Lythrae also arrived frequently, either delivering the cures or taking back refined process adjustments for the Lunareth.

It had become routine.

For several days, there was no obvious problem.

Lilith, however, eventually came to Lucien with a matter of her own.

Lucien looked up.

"I need to go to our conquered world," she clarified. "The one in the Void."

That made his expression sharpen immediately.

She continued before he could interrupt.

"The main component for refining higher-grade Abyssal Core Shards exists there in abundance. The material we brought before was only the convenient part. The deeper veins remain untouched."

Then she added, a little more seriously, "With enough of it, the others’ progress can be accelerated further."

That explanation only made Lucien more worried.

Because he understood the value instantly.

And because he understood the risk just as quickly.

"No. It’s still dangerous. Severance might still be watching the border," he said.

Lilith fell quiet.

He went on.

"If you go there alone and it notices you, then you die first and explain later."

"Are you worried?"

"Of course I am."

That made her look down for a moment.

Then, despite herself, a small smile began forming at the corner of her lips.

Lucien noticed it and frowned faintly.

"This is not meant to be flattering."

"I know," Lilith said, still looking oddly pleased. "That does not make it unpleasant."

She did not argue anymore.

...

As for the Lithrens, their situation had improved greatly.

Because Lucien had relocated their world into an adjacent plane connected to the Big World, the old limitation binding them too tightly to their native realm had loosened.

They still could not travel arbitrarily far from it in the broader sense, but now they could live in the Big World without their existence becoming strained.

That was enough to change everything.

Riri and many of the Lithrens had already reached Ascendance.

They now helped openly in the construction and industrial work of Lootwell, and their strange instincts made them extremely useful wherever material logic, structural cohesion, and patient labor mattered.

Rurik, unsurprisingly, had taken this as a sign from the heavens that he should make more automata.

There were still plenty of Alloykin drops remaining.

Enough for several more bio-metal automatons.

The first finished unit was already assisting with construction and internal logistics. It obeyed perfectly, adapted well, and proved that the project had uses far beyond battle.

Under Rurik’s direction, the automaton could handle exacting repetitive tasks, load-bearing precision work, hazardous assembly, and even delicate reinforcement sequences that ordinary laborers would take much longer to complete.

Rurik had become insufferably pleased with himself.

No one had yet succeeded in changing that.

...

The Liberators, meanwhile, were also growing.

The training grounds, Law halls, repositories, and comprehension facilities inside Lootwell were no longer merely ideas Lucien was proud of. They were working. The results were visible.

More people learned faster. More practitioners refined themselves correctly. More growth occurred through structure rather than desperate improvisation.

Lucien still had not finished one part he wanted badly.

He wanted direct access doors into the Skillpedia and magic-book training grounds.

For now, he still had to manually bring people into his inner realm so they could study and train there.

He disliked inefficiency like that.

But there were too many other priorities.

He had brought the monsters out into Lootwell as well.

The the old separation between "people" and "creatures" had begun losing force.

Since reaching Transcendence, many of them had learned to understand human speech and eventually speak it.

Once Ascendance spread through more of them, that awkwardness disappeared almost entirely. They became fluent. Not merely in language, but in social rhythm.

Different races, different monsters, different peoples—

Coexisting. Working. Arguing. Growing.

Lucien sometimes stood in silence and watched it all.

There were children who no longer saw slimes as strange.

Craftsmen who treated a monster assistant the same way they treated a fellow worker.

Healers who spoke across species without pause.

Races that would once have only met through battle now standing in queue for the same tools, eating under the same roofs, and learning in the same districts.

Lootwell had become beautiful in a way he had not planned.

He had built for utility.

It had grown into something warmer.

Paradise was too large a word.

But sometimes, if he looked at it from the right distance, it came close enough to make his chest ache.

•••

Then, days later, Shadow returned.

At first Lucien assumed the visit was routine.

More supplies. More reports. More requests.

But the moment he saw Shadow’s face, that assumption died.

Something was wrong.

"There was trouble," Shadow said.

Lucien’s eyes sharpened instantly.

"Did something happen in the cure distribution?"

Shadow shook his head.

"No. Different trouble."

Lucien looked around the room once, then gestured toward the edge of the Stillness Palace.

They moved there alone.

Only when the palace’s quiet enclosed them did Lucien ask, "What problem?"

Shadow’s voice lowered.

"The leader spoke with me."

That made Lucien focus harder.

Then Shadow said the next words.

"You’re... in trouble."

Lucien’s heartbeat changed.

For the past weeks, unease had been sitting inside him like a splinter under the skin. He had ignored it.

Now it surged back.

Shadow continued.

"The leader said you’ve been noticed. And marked."

Lucien’s body tensed at once.

He checked himself immediately.

Body. Mind. Spirit. Soul.

But there was nothing.

No foreign mark. No inserted law. No branded will. No residue he could identify.

Shadow watched him and then shook his head.

"It isn’t that kind of mark."

Lucien swallowed.

Then the answer struck him.

From that one thing.

That one presence.

The unknown being he sensed in the interplanar gray space.

The one that had noticed him.

The one he had felt before he retreated.

Lucien’s expression hardened.

Shadow saw the realization land.

"The leader wants to meet you," he said. "If you agree."

Lucien fell silent.

He wanted Alanthuriel’s opinion first.

That was his instinct.

But Alanthuriel had been absent.

More than absent.

Hidden.

When Lucien had tried to find him recently, he could not. Alanthuriel had thinned his presence so completely that even Lucien, inside his own internal world, could not locate him properly.

That had already been worrying.

Now it felt worse.

He finally said, "Then we go."

Shadow gave a small nod.

"You do not need to worry about the Void Disc," he said. "The leader can refill it after."

Before Lucien could answer again, presences appeared behind him in rapid succession.

Eirene. Lilith. Then the elemental women.

"We’re coming too," Eirene said.

Lucien looked at her.

She met his gaze without yielding.

The Stillness Palace had long since become almost an extension of her awareness. She had heard enough. Once she knew Lucien was in danger, she had moved immediately.

Lilith noticed.

Then the others.

Now they all stood there, visibly unwilling to be left behind.

Lucien had no time to refuse them even if he had wanted to.

This was not a controlled expedition.

This was urgency.

So he only nodded.

Shadow activated the Void Disc.

The coordinates were already known to him.

The leap began.

•••

Moments later, they arrived in a corridor.

It was not grand.

Just simple. So simple it almost felt wrong after everything Lucien had been imagining.

Shadow stepped forward and knocked.

"Leader, it’s Shadow. I’ve brought Brother Luc."

"Enter," came the voice from inside.

Shadow glanced back at the group and gave a small nod.

Then he opened the door.

When Lucien and the others stepped inside...

They finally saw the leader.

And Lucien froze at once.

There was only a single presence in the room.

On top of the table inside...

...stood the Primordial Slime.

It looked at him and raised a wobbling little body-part like a hand.

"Hi," it said.

Lucien choked.

Then the words came out before dignity had any chance to interfere.

"Motherfucker," he said. "It was you all along?!"