100% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? - Chapter 286

Chapter 286: Chapter 286 – Revival Plan
Lucien crushed a Soil Crystal. Then, he spread it evenly across the Silverslumber Loam.

The reaction was immediate.

The Revenant Asphodel did not sprout leaves. It did not form a stem.

Instead, a thin black sheen surfaced at the soil’s center. Just a single dark petal, emerging soundlessly like an idea that had finally decided to exist.

Lucien’s breath slowed.

Then—

A second layer followed.

Gold. Soft and restrained like dawn pushing through a curtain that had not yet been opened.

The black outer petal absorbed presence. The golden inner petal stabilized it.

Lucien felt the resonance settle.

This was not growth through accumulation. It was reconstruction.

The seed was not consuming nutrients to become something new… it was rebuilding itself from a remembered state, guided by thresholds rather than time.

Lucien’s eyes sharpened as understanding clicked into place.

“As long as the seed remains intact…” he murmured, “…the flower will regenerate.”

Harvesting the petals would not kill it. Only delay the next bloom.

Lucien straightened.

“So I can harvest,” he said softly, “without ending it.”

Carefully, he marked the bed with layered formations.

Then he expanded the garden.

The rest was… simpler.

Compared to the Revenant Asphodel, the other flora from the Garden Where Breath Sleeps were almost cooperative.

Mosses rooted easily in the silverslumber loam. Herbs unfurled their leaves once the moonbreath mist reached them. Vines crept outward, weaving themselves into the garden’s perimeter as if they understood their role instinctively.

None of them resisted.

They were rare plants… but rarity was contextual.

Inside Lucien’s Divine Energy Core, under controlled conditions and with proper cycles replicated, rarity will lose its meaning.

“In time,” Lucien said quietly, surveying the growing garden, “they’ll be common.”

At least here.

•••

When the last formation settled and the moonbreath fountain resumed its steady rhythm, Lucien finally allowed himself to step back.

Lucien crossed the garden and sat near its edge. With a thought, he reached into his inventory and withdrew a stack of scrolls and annotated sheets.

The writings of the Eternal of Stillness. Specifically, the revival process utilizing the Revenant Asphodel, aka the Flower of Returning Paths.

Lucien entered a state of absolute focus.

Each passage was dissected. Every marginal note was compared. Diagrams were reconstructed mentally, then discarded, then rebuilt again.

Resurrection was not revival. It was reconciliation.

A soul fragment had to be acknowledged by causality. A body had to accept return. The world itself had to allow the contradiction.

The Revenant Asphodel was not a miracle cure. It was a mediator.

Used incorrectly, the result would be a hollow shell.

Used precisely—

Lucien’s fingers tightened around the scroll.

“…They can come back,” he whispered.

Lucien exhaled slowly, grounding himself.

He did not rush.

Lucien observed Luke and Cienna from afar. In a quiet region of his inner realm, two figures of light lingered.

They have spoken with him. They remembered him. They laughed, argued, and worried like a normal human.

To anyone else, it would have looked like a miracle.

But Lucien knew better than to confuse presence with wholeness.

They were not complete souls. They were anchored remnants.

Luke’s essence was bound to the Skillpedia while Cienna’s was bound to the Magic Book.

Those two tomes had become their spirit vessels.

And that distinction mattered.

Lucien exhaled slowly.

The soul was memory and accumulation. The spirit was definition and continuity.

A soul could fragment and still exist. Pieces could linger, echo, or be preserved.

But the spirit—

The spirit was the self.

It’s the thing that chose, the thing that decided, and the thing that remained coherent across change.

Luke and Cienna’s spirits had not dissipated. They were contained. That was why they could still recognize him and still think, despite existing only as soul-forms now.

They were preserved by the cheats that had once been extensions of their very being, reinforced by Lucien’s Origin Core fragment, which acted as a stabilizing authority. It allowed their remnant souls to manifest and communicate within his Divine Energy Core.

But they had no bodies.

And without a body, a soul could not anchor fully. Without an anchor, a spirit could not return.

That was why Lucien had not told them yet about his plan to revive them.

Not because he doubted himself.

But because he refused to offer hope that was not already engineered to succeed.

Lucien began to write into the air. Conceptual notes formed and dissolved as he refined them.

A complete revival required three pillars.

First. The Vessel.

A body was not just flesh. It was a permission structure.

A living framework capable of accepting identity, memory, and causality without rejection.

Creating a new body from nothing was possible but dangerous. Too perfect, and it would reject the past. Too crude, and it would collapse under the weight of a returning spirit.

The vessel had to be compatible, not optimal.

That meant—

Correct biological lineage. Proper material resonance. A body that could remember how to be alive.

This alone would take time.

Second. The Soul Anchor.

Their soul fragments bound to the Skillpedia and Magic Book were not enough.

They were references, not totals.

This was where the Revenant Asphodel came in.

Black petals to bind the soul to the fact of death… acknowledging that Luke and Cienna had ended.

Golden petals to stabilize return… allowing reconstruction without madness, erosion, or hollowing.

This stage was not resurrection. It was negotiation.

It’s a declaration to causality itself:

They ended. They are allowed to return.

Third. The Spirit Reinstallation.

This was the most dangerous step.

Spirits were not objects.

They resisted force.

Luke and Cienna’s spirits were stable only because they were at rest, bound to familiar frameworks. Removing them carelessly would cause dissociation or worse, irreversible loss of identity.

The spirit had to choose to inhabit the new vessel.

Which meant the process could not be abrupt. It had to be gradual.

Lucien stared at the floating notes.

Only now did he allow himself to calculate the price.

Energy. A massive amount of energy.

Lucien glanced toward the asset section of his inventory.

Spirit Crystals.

Billions of them, spanning multiple grades. Dense mana compressed into crystalline matrices, harvested from the Ruins of Stillness.

He had never used them on himself.

They had always been reserved for others… for his people, his territory, and his future foundation.

Lucien was a man of his word. What he decided to give to others did not circle back to him.

But this—

This was different.

Luke and Cienna were among the very people he had sworn to protect.

He didn’t know how much energy the revival would require. Only that it would be vast. Possibly millions of the highest-grade Spirit Crystals.

Lucien sighed.

Absorbing them would take time.

He had no mana vessels. His body did not circulate energy like others did. Absorbing their mana would take far too much time.

So he would use Division and Recombination again.

Split Bodies would absorb and refine the mana independently, relying on the Origin Core fragment to convert it into divine energy. Once stabilized, they would recombine with him.

It was safer and faster this way.

Lucien only hoped that the Origin Core fragment would not run dry while sustaining the conversion.

And so, while he laid the groundwork for resurrection…

He summoned multiple Split Bodies.

And set them to work.

•••

Lucien did not interfere with the Split Bodies.

They worked independently now, each refining Spirit Crystals in silence. The Origin Core Fragment handled the conversion on its own, transforming mana into divine energy at a steady pace.

Lucien trusted the process.

His attention was elsewhere.

He stood before an empty expanse within his Divine Energy Core.

This was where the first step would begin.

The body.

Lucien closed his eyes.

Creating life was not unfamiliar to him. He had already shaped his inner realm with grass, trees, and even marine life.

But this was different.

A body meant to accept a soul fragment, resonate with a preserved spirit, and survive the contradiction of returning from death was not simply life.

It was reconciliation.

Perfect Calculation activated. Perfect Loop followed.

Reality around him fractured into overlapping projections. Countless outcomes bloomed and collapsed in succession.

He did not begin with magic.

He began with biology.

Luke and Cienna were his parents.

That fact carried weight.

Their bodies had shaped his own. Their blood had written half of his existence. That connection was not symbolic… it was encoded, carried in every cellular memory he possessed.

Lucien raised his hand.

From his own body, he extracted something microscopic. Not flesh, not blood, but information.

“Shared origin,” he murmured.

Perfect Loop ran.

Thousands of reconstructions failed instantly.

Not because the bodies were unstable…

…but because they were wrong.

Using his genes as a foundation produced vessels that leaned toward him, not them. The proportions drifted. The resonance bent inward. The body acknowledged Lucien’s authority too strongly.

Rejection was absolute.

Lucien frowned.

“…Of course.”

He adjusted.

Replication was the mistake.

Instead, he turned to correspondence.

The Law of Reflection unfolded.

Reflection did not copy matter. It copied relationship.

Lucien restructured the process.

His genes would not define the body.

They would only complete it.

Perfect Loop spun again.

This time, the template did not originate from Lucien.

It originated from absence.

Luke and Cienna’s souls were incomplete but their spirits remained intact.

The Skillpedia and the Magic Book had once functioned as extensions of their being, frameworks through which their will, identity, and intent had been expressed.

They remembered. Not memories of events but memories of them existing. And now, both tomes belonged to him. Through them, he maintained a direct connection to Luke and Cienna.

Lucien anchored the reconstruction to that remembrance.

Not to flesh, but to form.

Bones emerged first. Not as matter, but as structure.

Muscle followed. Not as flesh, but as function and tension.

Organs took shape as permissions. Each one was defined by purpose before substance.

Only once the form stabilized did materialization begin.

And only then—

Genes entered as connective tissue.

Lucien’s genetic material acted as a stabilizer, a biological mediator. Familiar enough to be accepted and neutral enough not to overwrite. It ensured repair, continuity, and compatibility.

Lucien exhaled slowly.

“That works…”

This was not cloning nor was it creation ex nihilo.

It was restoration through lineage, guided by memory and completed by Creation.

The Law of Reflection had mapped the path.

The Law of Creation would walk it.

The resulting bodies would not be perfect replicas.

But they would be recognized. And recognition was what mattered.

Lucien opened his eyes.

He did not proceed further.

This was only the first step, and already the margins were narrow. Any misalignment between vessel and spirit would not fail immediately… it would fail later, after return.

That was unacceptable.

He made one final adjustment.

The bodies would not be alive. Not yet.

They would be assembled into a latent state. Vessels prepared to receive, not vessels forced to contain.

Lucien let the projections dissolve.

Silence returned.

“…Good,” he said quietly.

Only then did he allow himself to glance toward the distant figures of light.

He did not approach them. Not yet.

‘This had to succeed first.’

Lucien turned back to the empty space, already shaping the chamber where the vessels would one day rest.

The impossible was no longer a question of whether.

Only when.