100% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? - Chapter 292

Chapter 292: Chapter 292 – Layers
Time moved.

Nearly a year had passed since Lucien entered the Big World.

He was nineteen now.

He stayed hidden within his Divine Energy Core, deliberately laying low.

Lucien drifted through his inner realm, observing the results of patience rather than haste.

The Monster Cultivation Plan had reached its first true milestone.

Every original monster within his core, those that had survived the earliest, most unstable phase… had completed the same critical transformation.

Their souls had fully merged with their beast cores.

They were complete.

That fact changed everything.

A monster without a fused core relied on instinct. A monster with a fused core became self-sustaining. They were now capable of refinement, memory, and long-term growth.

Lucien allowed himself a quiet breath.

It had worked.

The Soilwyrms were the clearest proof.

They were no longer worm-sized creatures. Their segmented bodies had grown massive, dense with compressed vitality and earthen mana. Some were already as large as the Karesh Desert specimen he had once seen.

Lucien watched several of them coordinate instinctively, carving stable tunnels without collapsing the surrounding space.

They were learning.

‘Good,’ he thought. ‘They’ll be ready when I release them.’

He had already planned their role. The Soilwyrms would undermine enemy territories from below, draining the land of its nutrients until the ground itself could no longer sustain resistance.

He turned his attention to the others.

The monsters as a whole had grown disturbingly intelligent.

They still lacked true speech and structured language. That barrier could only be crossed upon reaching the Transcendent Realm.

But their decision-making had become layered. They anticipated threats. They adapted to failure. They conserved energy.

They were no longer beasts.

They were forces.

That raised the problem Lucien had been circling for months.

‘How do I push them into Transcendence without breaking them?’

Learning Laws could not be rushed.

For people, forced enlightenment led to madness. For monsters, it led to collapse.

Lucien would not waste what he had built.

So instead of pushing upward, he expanded outward.

He gave a single command.

Procreate.

The logic was simple and efficient.

More monsters meant more shared experience. More shared experience meant denser instinctual memory. Denser memory meant a stronger foundation for eventual transcendence.

Power multiplied faster through population than through reckless ascension.

And truthfully, Lucien simply wanted more forces.

Day by day, the monster population within his core increased steadily.

This was no longer a collection of pets.

It was an army in incubation.

The slimes were the exception.

And Lucien wasn’t worried about them.

Their progress was slower, but stable in a way that defied normal monster logic. Their symbiotic fusion with the Abyssal One had altered their path entirely.

They adapted without fragmenting.

They waited.

Lucien understood the reason.

‘They don’t need my help.’

When the Abyssal One fully stabilized its Law, the slimes would break through naturally.

Whatever Law the Abyssal One had integrated…

They would inherit its echo.

The thought quickened Lucien’s pulse.

‘When that happens… things will change.’

For now, he remained unseen.

The world believed him gone, irrelevant, or dead.

Let them.

•••

Over the past months, Lucien did not waste even a single second.

He had absorbed every remaining record salvaged from the Ruin of Stillness’ library.

The records were not limited to technology. In fact, technology was the least important thing he found.

What the Eternal of Stillness had preserved were truths that the world had forgotten. Knowledge that could not survive common circulation because it reshaped how reality was understood.

Formations were among the first things that changed his thinking.

They were not mere arrays of symbols or energy lines. They were expressions of Law arranged into stable logic. The Eternal of Stillness had mastered them to a terrifying degree, weaving cause and effect together with such precision that even hostile Laws could be neutralized.

Lucien also noticed something else.

Many formations referenced a rare attribute.

Eclipse.

The Eternal of Stillness had used it not just because she wielded it innately, but because she understood it.

As Lucien continued reading, he found something far more valuable than techniques.

He found hints.

He found fragments of references scattered across unrelated texts. Observational notes. Incomplete coordinates. Theoretical paths that were never followed to completion.

All of them pointed toward the same conclusion.

The small worlds created by the Primordial Slime were not random.

They were placed.

Hidden.

They were anchored to rules only someone deeply familiar with causality would understand.

Lucien connected the implications almost immediately.

‘The Eternal of Stillness was linked to the Primordial Slime in more than ideology.’

The thought lingered.

He did not pursue it further. Not yet.

One section of the records forced him to stop entirely.

Space.

The records described space as having three vast layers. Truthfully, calling them layers was inaccurate, but it was the closest mortal language could manage.

The first layer was the one Lucien knew.

The observable universe.

The place where matter, energy, time, and causality functioned within rules that could be measured, even if not fully understood. Stars, worlds, civilizations. This was where life operated.

The second layer was called the Abyss.

The records were careful when describing it.

It was not merely dangerous. It was unapproachable.

Only a handful of beings had ever entered it, and fewer had returned. Even the Primordials treated it with caution.

The Abyss did not obey the Laws the Primordials embodied. It distorted them. Reflected them. Sometimes erased their authority entirely.

It was the reason the Primordials could not cross freely into the Big World.

The Abyss stood between them.

Lucien understood the implication immediately.

The world was protected not by strength, but by distance that even absolutes could not easily cross.

The third layer was barely described at all.

It was simply referred to as the Primordial Domain.

It’s a place where Laws did not govern existence, because existence itself was an extension of Law. The records did not attempt to explain it further, as if even writing about it risked drawing attention.

One detail, however, stood out.

Only one Primordial had ever crossed the Abyss into the observable universe.

The Primordial Slime.

Lucien exhaled slowly as the weight of the records settled in his mind.

A realization took shape.

The Primordial Slime had altered causality because the balance of the world demanded it.

The other Primordials, existing as the embodiments of Law, exerted influence simply by existing. As long as Laws persisted within the universe and the Big World, their presence echoed through reality itself.

That pressure could not be ignored.

The Primordial Slime acted within causality to preserve stability, fully aware of the cost such an action would demand.

The consequence was absolute.

The adjustment did not remain confined to a single place or moment. The correction spread outward, touching every structure bound to existence.

The strain accumulated until the Primordial Slime could no longer sustain its original state.

Aware of this outcome, it acted in advance. Using what power remained, it set measures in place to preserve what could still be protected and to ensure that what followed would not be left without guidance.

What endured was only an echo.

And within that echo remained the Primordial Slime’s trust in the generation that would come after it.

Lucien sighed.

“The Primordial Slime is truly a lunatic,” he thought.

Another truth followed.

The Big World was not merely a large world.

It was the origin point. The first place where life stabilized. The center from which the universe expanded. The birthplace of the Origin Core, proof that the universe itself had been born rather than always existing.

…

Lucien was silent for a long time.

He closed the records and sat in silence.

For the first time since entering the Big World, he felt truly small.

Yet instead of despair, something else settled in his chest.

Clarity.

He understood now why rushing Laws was foolish. Why power demanded patience. Why beings like the Eternal of Stillness chose restraint over dominance.

He entered meditation, enlightened.

Weeks passed.

When Lucien finally opened his eyes, the change was subtle but absolute.

His soul stabilized at a deeper resonance. His awareness expanded without fragmenting. His control over internal energy sharpened into precision.

He had reached the seventh stage of the Transcendent Realm.

Lucien did not smile.

He simply accepted it.

Beyond his core, the universe continued to move. Laws continued to press inward. Primordials continued to observe from beyond the Abyss.

Lucien remained still.

For now.