100% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? - Chapter 291

Chapter 291: Chapter 291 – Eirene
Eirene placed her palm against the ruin’s heart.

The response was immediate.

The ancient structure did not resist her will. Its foundations loosened as if they had never been meant to remain buried forever. Stone that had slept beneath sand and time lifted in perfect balance. The grains of desert slid away without disturbance.

And then… the ruin rose.

Eirene guided it upward, higher and higher, until the ruin floated openly beneath the sky.

Then she reached inward.

Deep within the ruin, mechanisms long dormant aligned themselves. Runes once etched for preservation awakened.

A field unfolded.

It spread outward in a slow, expanding veil, descending over the Karesh Desert like a held breath. The barrier did not press against the land. It did not seal it away. Instead, it synchronized with it.

Sand continued to shift. Life continued to endure. Time continued to pass.

But upheaval ceased.

Within the barrier, violent change lost its momentum. Erosion slowed. Catastrophe dulled. The desert steadied, held within a state where survival would no longer be a constant gamble against collapse.

Eirene watched the field complete its spread.

“As promised,” she said softly as a faint smile touched her lips, “this land is yours.”

The words were not a declaration. They were fulfillment.

Only after the barrier stabilized did she allow herself to exhale. The tension she had carried since awakening eased, just enough to let something lighter surface.

Excitement.

She reached into her robes and drew out the Waystone Fragment.

Her fingers closed around it eagerly.

And yet… the surface remained inert.

No direction emerged. No distance etched itself into perception. No pull answered her intent.

Her breath caught.

She tried again, aligning her presence with the fragment’s resonance.

But nothing.

The Waystone remained blank.

For a heartbeat, unease threatened to rise. Her hand drifted instinctively toward the necklace at her throat.

Equivalent Exchange activated.

A set of balance scales manifested before her. One pan represented her assets, the resources she accumulated over centuries.

The other pan remained empty.

Eirene did not hesitate.

She placed her demand upon the scale.

Truth.

Why the Waystone Fragment showed nothing. Why the connection it sought did not answer.

The scales tipped.

The cost appeared. It was high but not unbearable.

Eirene allowed the deduction without flinching. Her wealth drained away in measured loss. Converted.

This had always been the reason.

The merchant consortium had never been about profit. Nor power for its own sake. It had been a reservoir, a means to ask questions the world would not answer freely.

The scales settled.

And the answer came.

The Waystone Fragment had not failed. Its counterpart was simply no longer within this world.

The connection reached beyond the boundary of the Big World itself. There was no path to show, because the separation exceeded what the Waystone was ever meant to measure.

Eirene released a long breath she had not realized she was holding.

Relief washed through her.

She had not missed it. She had not arrived after everything was already lost again.

Her gaze drifted toward the horizon where desert met sky beneath the veil of stillness she had placed.

Her memory stirred once more.

•••

The war did not arrive with banners or warnings.

Eirene remembered only the moment the world hesitated. Wind stalled mid-breath. Heat forgot how to rise. Even sound seemed uncertain as if reality itself had realized it was about to be corrected.

In that instant, Eirene understood a terrifying truth.

There were beings who used Laws. And then there were beings who were the Laws.

That was when she learned the word “the man” had avoided for years.

Primordials.

They did not practice Laws. They embodied them. The world did not obey them out of fear or reverence… it aligned with them the way shadows aligned with light.

That was the day Eirene realized how small everyone truly was.

Including herself.

She also came to understand the man’s true identity and his role in the Big World.

The Human Ancestor.

Only then did she realize how little she truly knew about him.

Even so, her view of him never changed.

In time, he chose to move away and act independently. Wherever he went, trouble followed, and distance was the only way to keep others from being drawn into it.

Peace never returned after that.

What followed was later named the Millennia War, though calling it a war was generous. It was a prolonged unraveling. A millenia that forgot how to end.

Frontlines shifted like weather patterns. Alliances hardened, fractured, reformed, then broke again.

Humans fought because they had to.

Others fought because they could.

Eirene never made a dramatic vow. She simply stayed where humans stood.

Because they were the ones “he” wanted to protect the most.

She worked endlessly.

The Moon Beasts that were once drifting instincts bound to lunar tides had long since crossed into consequence.

When they became Lunarians, they did not abandon their origins. They refined them.

They built.

They created weapons that did not shatter under divine pressure. They created devices that stabilized mana flow during collapses. They created anchors that could hold reality together longer than nature allowed. And many more…

Seconds mattered.

They preserved knowledge the world would have otherwise forgotten.

It was the Lunarians who discovered how monsters remembered themselves. And how identity could be carried.

From that came the first deliberate fusion of monster essence with human form.

The Lunareth Race was born.

Then others followed.

The Thousand Races were not miracles.

They were solutions.

Still, it was not enough.

Eirene felt it every time another betrayal unfolded. Every time an alliance collapsed from fear. Every time she stood still while cities burned beyond her reach.

She was powerful. And yet, powerless.

The Primordials did not care how many she saved.

And she could not reach where “he” went.

That was when Eirene did something.

She withdrew.

She locked herself away. She stripped motion from thought, impulse from desire, until all that remained was awareness.

She searched for the universe’s quiet places.

She sought what existed beneath cause.

If becoming an Eternal was possible, then maybe… just maybe… she could stand beside “him” instead of chasing his shadow.

When she returned, the war had not waited.

And “he” was gone.

The news came from the only being capable of speaking it without dying halfway through the truth.

The Primordial Slime found her beneath a fractured archway.

“He is gone,” it said.

Eirene stared at it, waiting for the correction.

When none came, she felt the world tilt.

“No,” she whispered.

The Slime’s voice did not soften. The truth was already cruel.

“His body can be rebuilt,” it said. “His pattern can be traced. His incarnations can be arranged.”

Eirene’s hands clenched until her nails cut her palms. “Then do it.”

The Slime’s gaze, if it could be called that, settled on her.

“His soul was erased,” it said. “I can only patch the route his existence took through time. I can give him a path to return, but he will not remember. He will wake as someone new.”

Eirene’s breath hitched.

“Are you prepared,” the Slime continued, “to meet him as a stranger wearing his shadow?”

Eirene opened her mouth.

No sound came out.

She had practiced stillness for so long she had forgotten what it meant to fall.

She sat down on the sand as if her legs had decided they were done. Her mind tried to reach for denial and found nothing to hold.

Finally, she managed to speak. “Will you bring him back?”

The Slime’s answer came without hesitation.

“I will bring back my only friend,” it said. “Whatever it takes. I don’t have much time in this world. But I will make it happen.”

That promise should have comforted her.

Instead, it terrified her because she could hear the cost hiding beneath it.

Days later, when the war’s endgame began to take shape… the final plan that would determine what survived of reality… Eirene met the Slime again.

This time she did not plead.

“When you show him the truth,” she said, “remove my existence from it.”

The Slime paused. “You are asking to be forgotten.”

“I am asking to be free,” Eirene replied. “If the new him walks the same road and finds my footsteps waiting, he will never need to surpass them. The Law of Stillness will remain mine in his eyes, and I will remain trapped inside the version of myself he remembers.”

“That is vanity,” the Slime said.

“That is mercy,” Eirene corrected. “For him and for me.”

The Slime’s presence rippled, the closest thing it had to a sigh.

“You are being reckless.”

Eirene lifted her chin. “I want to meet him again as someone new. An equal. Not a relic. Not a story attached to his first life.”

Silence stretched between them.

At last, the Slime moved.

It reached into the world’s record and peeled away the threads that connected her to him, leaving only what the world could accept without breaking.

In the mural that would later reveal truths, the Eternal of Stillness remained as a figure who aided humanity and its rising races.

The companionship. The promise that had built her law.

All of it became hers alone.

When the Millennia War finally ended… if “ended” was even the right word for a scream that simply ran out of breath… the Primordial Slime vanished.

She stayed.

She helped the survivors rebuild meaning from ruin. She watched new races bloom from old wounds. She kept stillness alive so history could finally settle.

At her throat hung the balance-scale necklace.

She had believed “the man” had given it to her.

The Slime had told her the truth. It was delivered after his death, an inheritance passed through hands.

Eirene held it sometimes when she was alone, feeling the weight of the question it represented.

What is the price of truth?

…

Years passed. Decades. Centuries. Millenia.

Then, when the world was stable enough to survive her absence, Eirene did something only a being of stillness would dare.

She split her soul.

One part remained to hold her law, to keep the old obligations from collapsing.

Another part she sent forward to reincarnate naturally, to live without the shadow of the Eternal, to grow in ways a fixed title never could.

It was slow work. Careful work.

It required patience measured in eras.

And now…

After absorbing the missing part of herself in the ruins, Eirene could feel both halves aligned at last.

Stillness returned to her hands like an old language.

Equivalence sat beside it like a new blade.

Two Laws.

One heart.

It was unprecedented and it was dangerous, because a mind that tried to hold two absolutes usually cracked.

Eirene did not crack.

She had already broken once.

She had already learned how to put herself back together without pretending the fracture never existed.

Somewhere beneath her calm, grief still lived.

The kind that stayed, the way the moon stayed, watching a world that kept changing.

And now, Eirene finally understood the shape of her own return.

The man would come back as someone new.

She would meet him as someone new.

Not because fate was kind.

Because she had chosen, long ago, to pay the price for an honest second beginning.