100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full?-Chapter 328 - Fracture

Darkness took Lucien without mercy.

Not the gentle dark of closed eyes. Not even the deep dark of sleep.

This was a dark that remembered him.

Lucien drifted through it like a thought pushed under black water, and the first thing he saw was himself.

He stood on a plain of ash where the horizon was stitched with burning worlds. Planets hung in the void like lanterns with their flames turned inward and their skies were inverted into bruised auroras. Every star above him looked dimmer as if the universe had learned to avert its gaze.

And Lucien... was walking.

Conquering.

He wore his own face in the same way a blade wore a reflection. Familiar, but wrong. His eyes were hollow, glazed with a joy that did not belong to a human. His aura was a crown of pressure that crushed kneeling continents flat before he even stepped on them.

Billions of worlds were behind him.

Not in distance.

In ownership.

In his wake, rivers ran red and then ran dry as if even blood had exhausted itself. Cities were erased, leaving behind a clean emptiness that felt like an insult.

He watched himself raise a hand.

A single edict rolled from his mouth like a bored sigh.

"Submit."

And reality did.

Not because it feared him. But because it had forgotten there was any alternative.

Lucien tried to speak.

No sound came. He had no mouth here. He had no lungs. He was only awareness, forced to watch.

Then from deeper in the dark, someone laughed.

It was not laughter made by a throat.

It was laughter that vibrated through the bones of existence. The void itself seemed to ripple with it, delighted.

A shape unfolded.

At first it was only a silhouette, a wrong outline in the darkness. Then it grew, and Lucien’s mind failed to hold it properly. Every time he tried to understand what he was seeing, the image changed, and the meaning slid away like oil.

It was bigger than a world.

Bigger than a sky.

A thing with too many joints and not enough angles, with claws that did not end so much as they continued. Its body was a vastness pretending to have edges. Its eyes were not eyes. They were holes where laws went to die.

It leaned toward the conquering Lucien with obscene affection. As if it had been waiting. As if it had been cultivating.

The creature’s claws reached down, not to kill but to claim. To hook into Lucien’s aura and pull him closer like a tethered beast.

And the Lucien he saw did not resist.

He welcomed it.

He smiled with a devotion that made Lucien’s stomach twist even though he had no stomach here.

The thing laughed again, delighted.

Lucien felt the darkness tighten around him. Like a noose.

And then the dark cracked.

A fissure of impossible white split it open.

Divine light poured through as if the universe had finally remembered how to breathe.

...

Lucien gasped.

Air slammed into his lungs. Pain returned in a rush so sudden it felt like a punishment.

He opened his eyes.

He was on the ground. Fire crawled over him like living silk.

It should have burned. Instead it soothed.

It sank into his wounds, closed torn tissue, and knit broken skin with gentle heat.

Then he felt another wave. A familiar signature, the same clean pressure the Origin Core fragments had always given him.

"He woke up!" the human woman shouted in relief as she controlled the healing flame.

"Finally," the spearman Serpentile muttered. He sounded like a man trying to convince his heart to slow down.

Astraea stood nearby. She watched the healing flame of the human woman with a narrowed gaze.

"Curious," she said. "The Law of Fire was meant to devour. You have refined it into a hearth."

Lucien tried to answer.

His throat moved.

Nothing came.

His tongue felt too heavy. His mind felt too slow as if he had woken from a lifetime, not a nap.

He reached something from his Inventory.

Then, the Obsidian Necklace rose above his chest. Inside it, the Origin Core fragment pulsed. The moment his awareness touched it, power spilled into him in waves.

Warmth filled his veins.

Strength returned to his limbs.

And yet...

Something was wrong.

A fog lingered behind his eyes, a stubborn haze that refused to clear even as the fragment fed him.

It was not fatigue. It was not pain.

It felt like something inside his spirit had been scuffed and forced back into place.

Lucien closed his eyes and turned his spiritual sense inward.

What he saw made him go still.

His spirit was fractured. Fractured like a continent after an earthquake.

And between those fractures were threads.

Thin, pale strands that did not look like his own essence. They were too steady. Too... deliberate. Like stitches placed by an unseen hand.

They held him together.

Lucien focused on one fracture.

The edges trembled, opening and closing like a wound trying to decide whether it wanted to heal or rot.

He guided the healing fire inward, pushed Origin energy into the crack, and watched the fracture begin to narrow.

Slowly. Agonizingly.

He held it closed for a breath. For two.

Relief started to form—

Then the fracture reopened. As if it had never been closed at all.

Lucien went cold.

His body could heal in minutes.

His spirit did not obey the same rules.

...

He opened his eyes again.

His vessel felt restored. His muscles were responding. His wounds have sealed.

But behind his eyes, the fog remained.

The fractures remained.

He swallowed once, gathered his voice, and forced his throat to obey.

"How long," he rasped, "was I out?"

"Three hours," Astraea answered. "Near enough."

Lucien tried to push himself up. The human woman immediately crouched beside him, ready to help, but he waved her off and sat on his own.

That was when the words finally came.

The kind of praise survivors gave a man who had stood between them and extinction.

"You moved like a commander," the human man said. "I have seen warbands fall apart with less pressure than that. You held us together."

The spearman Serpentile nodded. "You did not just fight. You made us fight better."

The other Serpentile man gave Lucien a tight grin. "I thought you were a monster when your eyes went red. Turns out you were a monster on our side."

The Serpentile woman smiled too. "Your timing saved my throat twice," she said. "I do not like debts. I will repay it."

Astraea watched him a moment longer, then spoke in that thunder-layered cadence.

"You were tempered in calamity," she said. "Not many can stand beside an Emperor and still choose their steps. Fewer still can bleed and keep thinking. You did not break. You adapted."

Lucien let the words land.

Then he exhaled and offered a small, tired smile.

"Thanks," he said. "But it is not finished."

Silence followed at once.

Lucien’s gaze hardened.

"The Covenant-Breaker is not truly dead."

No one argued.

They had heard his warning. They had felt the weight behind it.

They did not doubt the Covenant-Breaker’s words.

A Monster Emperor would not perish so easily. And yet... the goblin had fallen.

But Lucien could feel it. The weight of its essence had been real. There was no mistaking that pressure.

Otherwise, there would have been no such drop.

But that also meant one thing.

If there were hundreds of such vessels...

Then the future would be bleak indeed.

The human man broke the tension first, trying to drag the mood back from the cliff.

"Brother," he said carefully, "do not let the future steal the victory of today. We are alive. That matters."

The spearman Serpentile gave a dry laugh. "I did not expect to see another sunrise. I am still negotiating with that fact."

Lucien’s eyes drifted to the shattered remains of the Void Corruption Staff, lying in the ruined earth.

The Serpentile woman stepped forward and held it out with both hands.

"We recovered it," she said. "Its core is cracked."

Lucien took it.

The artifact felt wrong even in ruin.

Just then—

The system chimed.

[Ting!]

[Detected Origin Core Fragment at the Staff’s core.]

Lucien froze.

A beat passed.

Then without ceremony, he tightened his grip and drove divine pressure into the cracked crystal.

The core shattered.

A brittle, sharp sound.

Astraea’s eyes widened. Her brows drew down.

"What have you done?" she snapped. "If you had no use for it, you could have offered it. Even in ruin, such a staff—"

The crystal fell apart completely.

And something small and impossibly dense dropped into Lucien’s palm.

A fragment.

The human woman stared. "There is a fragment inside that staff?"

Then her eyes widened further, and her voice lowered as if the thought itself was dangerous.

"And you have one too... do you not? Could you be—"

Lucien did not answer immediately. He stored the fragment first in his Inventory.

Then he looked at the five of them.

And asked the question that had been sitting behind everything since the first moment he saw the human woman glow.

"Are you from the Liberators?"

He reached into his inventory and produced a black card.

The reaction was instant.

The molting Serpentile man’s eyes widened. "That is—"

The spearman Serpentile stepped forward, stunned. "You are one of us?"

The human man let out a breath like he had been holding it for hours. "So you were not just a passerby. You were... assigned?"

The human woman stared at Lucien as if the world had suddenly rearranged itself.

Then she barked a laugh. "All this time you were a Liberator too, and you still looked at me like I was about to stab you."

Lucien’s lips curved faintly.

It answered enough.

The organization was real. It was broad. It was not species-bound.

He felt a quiet relief upon realizing they were not human supremacists.

They recruited trusted allies regardless of race.

Astraea, however, looked entirely unimpressed.

"What are these Liberators?" she asked.

The human woman puffed out her chest like someone who had rehearsed this line in front of a mirror.

"It is the organization that will one day save the world."

Astraea stared at her.

Then said, with frank honesty that cut deeper than any insult.

"A bold claim, considering you were captured by mere goblins."

The five of them stiffened.

The words hit like cold water.

They were not offended because Astraea was wrong.

They were offended because she was right.

The spearman Serpentile grimaced. "Senior, goblins are not mere. They do not fight fair."

The molting Serpentile man nodded quickly. "We struck without the leader’s approval. We moved early. That was our mistake."

The Serpentile woman’s jaw tightened. "We underestimated their preparations. The staff’s corruption was new. It ate our mana channels before we could react."

The human man added quietly, "And we assumed they could not have an Emperor’s backing so close. That assumption almost killed us."

Astraea listened, then gave a small nod as if accepting the logic.

Lucien watched the exchange, amused despite the fog in his head.

For the first time since the battle, it felt like the world had slowed enough to let them be people again.

Names came next, introduced with the awkward sincerity of survivors.

The human woman wiped soot from her cheek and offered her hand toward Lucien.

"I am Kaia," she said. "I hit first and ask questions later."

The human man nodded once, more reserved. "I am Darian. Sister Kaia’s younger brother. I am better at keeping people alive than looking heroic."

The Serpentile woman’s posture was precise. "Seryth. Law of Venom"

The spearman Serpentile tapped the butt of his weapon to the ground. "Rhazek. Law of Constriction."

The molting Serpentile man gave a brief grin. "Velun. Law of Molting."

Lucien listened then tilted his head slightly.

"Just call me Luc," he said.

Astraea folded her arms as if the introductions were an old ritual she had no patience for. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"I am known as The Song Before Lightning," she said. "The strongest Storm Roc. For now, I stand as this human’s ally."

The air felt heavier after she said it.

Then, Lucien’s fogged mind tried to push back into the fractures and failed again. He swallowed it down.

’Later.’

For now, there were still pressing matters.

Lucien looked at the horizon where the land still smoked.

Then he looked at his new allies.

And despite the calm, the sense of inevitability did not fade.

It only changed shape.

The quiet after a battle was never peace.

It was simply the world inhaling before the next strike.