100% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? - Chapter 293

Chapter 293: Chapter 293 – Cosmic Storm
Weeks passed after Lucien’s enlightenment.

He had just begun to settle into the rhythm that followed clarity when the Obsidian Tower shook.

He felt it first as pressure. It’s not a violent impact but a deliberate disturbance that traveled through the Obsidian Tower’s structure.

The vibration was uneven, playful in a way that made no sense for something so massive.

The tower was being shaken.

No. It was being handled.

Lucien opened his eyes.

The Obsidian Tower had endured far worse than environmental turbulence. For it to respond like this meant the source was neither accidental nor small.

He moved toward the entrance.

The moment his vision aligned with the outer threshold, Lucien stopped.

From beyond the gaping maw of the tower, something stared inward.

An eye.

It filled his field of view.

It was larger than the entrance itself. It’s so vast that its curvature could not be perceived at once.

The surface reflected distant starlight in distorted patterns as if space itself bent around it. Veins of pale luminescence pulsed slowly beneath a membrane that looked neither organic nor artificial.

The sight was unprecedented.

And deeply unsettling.

Lucien was grateful that his mind did not recoil instinctively. Had he suffered from megalophobia, his body would have betrayed him already.

The eye did not blink.

It examined.

Lucien knew immediately what he was seeing.

Space monsters.

They are entities born in open space, shaped by pressureless void, cosmic radiation, and environments that rejected conventional life.

Creatures like these did not just adapt to space. They belonged to it.

That made them far more dangerous than monsters born within worlds.

And by drifting here, Lucien had crossed into what the records referred to as an Echo Zone.

They are zones where space anomalies overlapped with recorded monster activity. Where signals reflected without origin. Where space monsters were known to inhabit, drawn by lingering distortions and remnants of ancient causality.

In such zones, the rules of the Big World weakened.

And creatures born there were stronger than any monster shaped by land, sea, or sky.

This was not a random encounter.

This was their territory.

Lucien did not move.

He suppressed his aura, compressing it inward until even his own presence felt distant. The Obsidian Tower assisted him in that regard. Its structure sealed perception, preventing anything outside from sensing what lay within unless the tower itself failed.

The eye remained.

The tower continued to shake.

•••

Days passed.

The vibrations varied in intensity. Sometimes the tower rocked gently as if nudged out of curiosity. Other times, it trembled with pressure that suggested testing. Lucien did not respond to any of it.

He waited.

Space monsters did not think the way terrestrial creatures did. Their curiosity was not driven by hunger alone but by resonance. They probed anomalies the way predators tested weaknesses.

Lucien refused to become one.

Nearly a week later, the shaking stopped.

Silence returned.

Lucien waited longer.

Only when the absence stretched unnaturally long did he allow himself to approach the threshold again. He peered outward carefully, maintaining suppression.

The eye was gone.

So were the others.

The reason revealed itself moments later.

In the distance, space had begun to distort.

Light stretched and folded in slow, violent arcs. Colors that did not belong to the spectrum bled into one another. Entire starfields warped as invisible currents dragged them sideways.

A cosmic storm was forming.

It was not a simple energy surge, but a convergence of radiation, spatial shear, and gravitational instability. It’s the kind of phenomenon that tore apart lesser constructs and erased unanchored entities without leaving debris.

Lucien withdrew into the tower.

There was nothing he could do now.

He braced himself as the storm approached, trusting in the Obsidian Tower’s integrity and the laws that governed its construction.

Outside, space screamed without sound.

Currents of distorted force crashed against the tower’s surface, dragging light and debris across it in endless streams. Reality twisted, then corrected itself, only to twist again.

Distance lost meaning. Direction became suggestion.

The tower held.

Lucien remained still.

In that moment, he understood space more clearly than any record had described.

It was not empty.

It was hostile, indifferent, and endlessly strange.

And it did not care who survived.

•••

The cosmic storm did not behave like violence.

It behaved like flow.

Space outside did not roar the way oceans did, yet the Obsidian Tower trembled as if an unseen current had wrapped around it and begun to pull.

The storm was vast. It was a river of charged particles, radiation, and warped flow, moving along invisible lanes that only the universe seemed to know. It carried the Obsidian Tower the same way a flood carried a stone that finally lost its footing.

Lucien did not gamble with pride.

He retreated into his Divine Energy Core.

Time blurred.

Days became weeks.

Then a full month passed.

The storm did not weaken. It did not tire. It continued as if it had been traveling long before Lucien was born… and would continue long after entire star systems aged into dust.

Inside the tower, time felt wrong. The tower swallowed the worst of the external violence, but the constant vibration never stopped. The Obsidian Tower creaked like a living thing clenching its teeth.

Lucien understood then that they were no longer moving through ordinary distance.

The storm was a convergence current, a region where spacetime gradients collapsed direction and distance into motion alone. The tower was not accelerating in the traditional sense. It was being translated across an enormous span by riding a slope in reality itself.

Lucien sent his consciousness outward in short pulses, observing the tower’s internal stress patterns and inertial feedback.

Then gradually… the vibration changed.

The pressure along the tower’s outer layers began to shear sideways rather than forward. The tremor lost coherence, breaking into overlapping vectors that no longer reinforced one another.

The current was dispersing.

Lucien waited.

Only when the Obsidian Tower drifted into an eerie calm did he allow himself to emerge from his Divine Energy Core.

He opened his eyes within the tower.

Silence.

The endless vibration was gone.

Lucien moved toward the outer threshold and cautiously stared outside.

He believed the worst had passed.

The next moment proved him wrong.

In the distance, space curved inward.

A galaxy hung ahead of them.

It was vast and luminous. Its spiral arms turned with glacial patience around a dark, unseen center. Countless stars burned within it, bound together by gravity’s endless arithmetic. Even from this distance, it radiated mass.

Lucien’s breath slowed.

They were already inside its reach.

The storm had not ended.

It had released them at a boundary where its driving gradients collapsed… where radiation density, spatial shear, and inertial flow no longer aligned strongly enough to sustain translation.

They had exited the current.

And now they were drifting.

…

Months passed.

At first, the galaxy seemed unchanged. Then gradually and imperceptibly, it grew.

Lucien activated Perfect Calculation.

He compared the relative drift of distant star clusters against the tower’s internal reference lattice. He tracked curvature in their trajectory so subtle it would have been meaningless to any lesser perception. Gravity left signatures, even where distance refused to offer landmarks.

The conclusion was unavoidable.

They were being drawn inward.

Inevitably.

A cosmic storm could scatter matter across incomprehensible spans.

A galaxy did not scatter.

It claimed.

Gravity asserted itself not as force, but as certainty. The Obsidian Tower’s immense mass responded accordingly. Its path bent along invisible curves dictated by accumulation over astronomical scales.

Lucien did not resist.

There was no resisting a gravity well whose pull had been shaping stars for billions of years.

Another month passed as the galaxy filled more of his perception. Its outer halo resolved into dense starfields and diffuse clouds of gas, faintly luminous under constant radiation. Space here felt crowded layered with motion too slow to feel, yet too massive to ignore.

Then the pull changed.

Lucien felt it before he calculated it.

The Obsidian Tower lurched decisively as their trajectory intersected with a tighter curvature nested within the galaxy’s outskirts.

A planetary system.

One body in particular aligned too precisely. Its orbital path intersected theirs with the cold inevitability of converging solutions.

Lucien observed in silence as the planet grew larger over weeks, then months. Its presence resolved through the tower’s sensors into form.

A curved horizon.

Atmospheric bands.

The faint shimmer of cloud layers reflecting distant starlight.

They crossed the atmospheric boundary days later.

Lucien sensed the moment the void gave way to resistance.

The Obsidian Tower flared as its outer layers encountered atmosphere. Molecules struck its surface at extreme velocity. Heat rose sharply as kinetic energy converted into friction. Ionized trails ignited along its edges, wrapping the tower in a sheath of burning light.

To the world below, it became a falling monument.

A black star tearing through the sky.

Lucien entered his inner realm again, waiting for the impact.

The collision did not shatter the tower. It absorbed the shock, diffusing the force through layers designed for this kind of calamity. Even so, the tremor that followed was immense.

Then… stillness.

Lucien waited.

The Obsidian Tower rested.

The storm was gone.

The galaxy had claimed them.

And now, beyond the tower’s walls, a world waited.

Lucien opened his eyes inside the Tower again.

The Big World had taught him caution.

Space had taught him humility.

This place would teach him something else entirely.

And whatever it was—

it would not care whether he was ready.