100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full?-Chapter 472 - Death

Actually—

Lucien had printed the array beneath the battlefield using Imprint Manifestation.

He had done it before entering Abyss Mode.

But against beings like these, it would be noticed easily.

So Lucien had done something worse.

He had invoked the authority of his title.

The Unwritten One.

Once per cycle, he could command the law of the world to Forget a single event.

And he had used it here.

He had made the world forget that he had laid down the modified Execution Circle.

The battlefield itself had forgotten it.

The ground still held the pattern. The hidden channels still existed. The future fuel still had somewhere to go.

But every line of causality tied to the circle had been made unwritten. That meant anything connected to it became harder to foresee, harder to notice, and harder to conclude correctly.

Even Convergence had not seen it.

That was why the fallen Luciens’ divine energy had kept sinking into the earth unchallenged. That was why each death had become nourishment instead of waste. The final requirement had been his Essence.

Lucien had just given it.

And now—

the world remembered too late.

The last few surviving Luciens moved at once.

Before Convergence or Severance could react properly, Lucien reached into the Crown of Creation and pulled forward one more integrated answer.

Manacle Crown — A floating chain-ring that can bind one target’s movement for a brief moment, scaling with the user’s aura.

At that exact instant, Lucien did something else.

He released his full Aura of the Unyielding Sovereign.

Not just his own.

All the remaining Luciens did the same.

Hundreds of sovereign auras overlapped in one catastrophic wave of pressure.

The air trembled. The ground groaned. The world itself seemed to flinch.

If an ordinary practitioner had been present within range, they would not have fainted.

They would have broken.

Because this was not merely pressure.

It was a declaration of existence so fierce that even the two Primordial Incarnations felt it.

Convergence’s expression sharpened. Severance’s posture changed.

For one breath, both of them were forced to acknowledge the same truth.

The auras in front of them had risen to a level comparable to their current incarnated states.

That was enough.

The Crown of Creation changed shape.

A ring of floating black-gold chains emerged from it and shot across the battlefield.

It locked onto the nearer of the two.

Severance.

The Manacle Crown closed around him like a judgment already decided.

Severance moved at once.

Or tried to.

The chains held.

His scythe shifted. Severing force tore outward. He tried to cut the binding apart at its law-root, but the Manacle Crown was scaling off the combined sovereign force of Lucien and his temporal selves. Every struggle only made the chains scream tighter for one terrible moment longer.

That moment was all Lucien needed.

Convergence lunged toward Severance to tear the ring away.

The last Luciens intercepted.

The final struggle of selves that knew exactly what they had been born for.

They latched onto both Primordial Incarnations and activated the same skill at once.

Bear Hug.

The force of it was absurd.

Draconic, sovereign-infused bodies locked them together.

Claw to limb. Arm to torso. Shoulder to shoulder.

One last coordinated refusal.

That was when Lucien acted.

He completed the Execution Circle.

Below him, the light intensified until the earth itself looked like it was remembering how to become a weapon.

Then, with the last remnants of movement left in him, Lucien mimicked an old trick he had once seen Condoriano use.

His cracked lips moved.

"Switch."

Space bent.

Lucien vanished from the center of the circle and appeared where the final cluster of his temporal selves had been moments before.

The others appeared in his place.

Lucien, meanwhile, was thrown high into the air by the exchange. His body was too ruined now to stabilize himself properly.

He could not move anymore.

He was only falling.

Below—

Severance was still bound.

The Manacle Crown held.

Even when Severance severed the chains, he could not sever them off himself fast enough. The effect was scaling too violently, and its brief moment of authority had become long enough to matter.

Convergence reacted faster.

He tore free of the Bear Hug pile through sheer brutality, breaking temporal selves apart with his hand, ripping himself out of the tangle of draconic bodies and sovereign pressure.

He escaped the bind.

But not the timing.

Because the Execution Circle did not require him to stand still.

Only to stand within the designated range when judgment arrived.

It arrived.

The ground shook.

Then split with light.

An entire procedural death-logic awakened beneath the battlefield.

The modified Gargoyle array did not kill like a bomb.

It executed.

Every hidden line Lucien and Seran had rebuilt from stolen Gargoyle scripts and old execution geometry activated at once. Ancient conditions, preserved in silence and fed by the deaths of Lucien’s own temporal selves, surged upward in layers.

Flame came first. Then lightning. Then rotating blade-rings. Then crushing pillars of force. Then void-weight. Then concepts sharpened into verdict.

Anything that could kill.

Anything that could conclude.

Anything that could force unfinished injury into finality.

And all of it contained inevitable laws that could kill the unkillable.

The surviving Luciens died first.

Their bodies burst apart into returning divine energy before they could even cry out. Each death fed the circle one last time as the array climbed toward its true targets.

Then it reached Severance.

And for the first time—

Severance screamed.

In pain.

Real pain.

His shell convulsed under the simultaneous force of too many forms of death resolving together. The Manacle Crown held him just long enough that the array’s execution stages could lock, stack, and complete before his severing authority found the correct place to cut.

Lucien heard his voice clearly for the first time.

It was hideous.

And unmistakably dying.

That sound alone made Lucien smile through blood and ruin.

Because that was not an injured voice.

That was a death-voice.

Convergence was caught too.

But he had been luckier.

Or perhaps merely quicker.

He had already torn himself partly free before the central stages of the circle finalized. So when the execution sequences rose, he was no longer at the dead center of the judgment the way Severance was.

Still—

what escaped was not a victor.

What staggered out of the outer range of the Execution Circle looked less like a Primordial Incarnation and more like a corpse that had refused burial out of spite.

One arm was gone.

Half his face had been flayed into ruin.

Bone showed through the red mess where flesh had failed to keep up.

His shell was missing whole pieces of itself. Some of its organs were visible. One leg dragged a half-beat behind the other as though it no longer fully trusted the body it belonged to.

At first glance, he looked pitiful.

Then he moved.

And that ended the pity.

Because anything that could still walk after that—

was monstrous.

He turned back toward the circle.

Then he saw Severance.

And something in him finally understood.

His eyes widened.

"This can’t be," he rasped, voice rough from damage. "Why did I see this too late?"

Inside the circle, Severance howled again.

His shell was not merely injured.

It was being broken apart in stages.

The array had been modified for exactly this purpose. Lucien and Seran had known a normal destructive formation would not be enough against a Primordial Incarnation. So they had not made a normal one.

It can even refuse regeneration long enough that those concluded wounds could not simply be argued away.

Every scar, every severed path, every redirected injury, every half-healed wound, every strain... All of it was being dragged into one simultaneous answer.

The shell began coming apart.

Layer by layer. Authority by authority. As though every piece of the incarnation had suddenly been informed that its right to remain assembled had been revoked.

Severance’s scream weakened.

Then broke.

Then vanished.

And when the circle’s light finally began to fade—

Severance was gone.

Not wholly. Not forever.

But the shell was dead.

Where he had stood, a rainbow-colored drop hovered in the smoke.

Lucien lifted his head just enough to see it.

Then he laughed.

He laughed until tears spilled from his eyes.

He had done it.

He had killed an impossible.

No—

more precise than that—

he had killed an incarnation.

At the Celestial Realm.

Against things that should have erased him from relevance long ago.

The laughter tore out of him like blood from a reopened wound.

It was not sane.

It was not pretty.

It was victory.

Then he heard it.

A dragging sound.

A body forcing itself across the ground.

Convergence.

He was coming toward him.

When Lucien saw him, the laughter only deepened.

Convergence paused at that.

Just for a second.

Then kept dragging himself forward.

"I still don’t know," he said, voice ruined but intelligible, "how you delayed my sight of inevitability there."

His one remaining hand flexed.

"But laugh while you can. This is your last laugh."

He drew closer.

"You are very expensive to kill. More expensive than I expected. But losing one incarnation to remove a future threat like you..."

His ruined mouth twisted.

"...is absolutely worth it."

Lucien smiled at him.

Then shook his head once.

"Aren’t I amazing?" he asked simply.

And laughed again.

Convergence froze.

Only for a moment.

Then he resumed moving.

"I am sorry," he said, almost gently, "but you need to die."

He reached Lucien.

Then lowered himself over him.

And with his one remaining hand—

he began to punch.

Lucien felt the first one immediately.

Not because it was the worst.

Because there was nowhere left in him that did not already hurt.

The punch caved into his face. His skull rang. His head snapped to one side. White burst across his vision.

Then another.

His nose broke.

Another.

One eye burst.

Another.

Teeth flew from his mouth and scattered red into the dirt.

Convergence kept punching.

The shell of his remaining hand was failing too. Each blow ruptured more skin. Bone shifted. Flesh tore. His regeneration was no longer keeping up properly.

Still he punched.

And Lucien—

still smiled.

He did not fight back anymore.

Not because he had yielded.

Because he could not.

Every part of his body was already screaming. His insides had been broken too many times. His muscles barely obeyed him now. His nerves were fire.

The Crown of Creation shifted weakly and offered another shape.

Samsara Crown.

He could have used it.

He could have spent years of life to defy death again.

Lucien understood that immediately.

Then let the thought go.

It was not worth it.

Not when the answer ahead was only one more extension of suffering before the inevitable returned with a different spelling.

Convergence noticed the lack of resistance.

"You’ve finally given up," he said.

He stopped punching for a moment and studied the ruined face beneath him.

"You would have made a magnificent shell."

Then he added quietly, "But I need to kill you here."

A pause followed.

Then, perhaps because some broken remnant of human habit still clung to the shell, perhaps because the battle had been too strange not to mark him, Convergence asked:

"You can say your final words."

At that, Lucien’s mangled face still held the shape of a smile.

Slowly, with hands that barely worked anymore, he reached into his inventory.

Convergence watched, curious despite himself.

Lucien pulled out one last drop.

Ashleaf Cigarette Pack — A bundle of pale, dried leaves rolled in thin black paper. When burned, it steadies the mind and reduces fear-response for a short period.

Lucien took one cigarette out.

Slowly.

Carefully.

Like a man making time obey him one final time through sheer disrespect.

Then he lit it with the last thin spark of divine energy he could still command.

He put it to his mouth.

And took a drag.

Lucien smoked while dying.

Convergence stared.

Then something in him snapped.

He punched again. And again. And again.

Until Lucien’s face stopped resembling a face.

And Lucien’s response?

He blew smoke into Convergence’s ruined face.

Still smiling.

At last, Convergence stopped.

He stood slowly.

The battle had cost him too much.

He looked down one final time.

Lucien was dying.

His breathing had slowed. His heart was weakening. The body beneath all that damage was nearing its end.

Convergence understood.

Only a few more seconds.

That was all.

And in his present state, wasting any more strength was unnecessary.

So he waited.

Once Lucien died fully, he would take the items.

Those impossible items...

Convergence’s eyes lingered on them.

Then his vision shifted.

He saw something approaching.

Fast.

Many presences.

Convergence’s ruined face hardened at once.

In his current condition, he could not fight another battle.

Not that many.

He clicked his tongue.

"Human," he said softly, "even in death, you are still resisting."

Then he left.

Not proudly.

But he left.

Lucien lay there alone.

No longer recognizable.

His body was almost gone as a body.

Still, one hand moved.

Slowly.

He reached into his inventory one final time and pulled out a seed.

He raised it weakly toward the sky.

And smiled.

Then he took one last breath.

And before his heart fully stopped—

Lucien Lootwell died.

They arrived too late.

Seran came first.

Then the ancient beasts.

Then the ladies.

Then Luke and Cienna.

...

They crossed the battlefield only to find a man already gone.

No one spoke at first.

There was nothing to say.

The body on the ground was almost unrecognizable.

Face ruined. Blood everywhere. The remains of the battle still burning through the air around him.

And yet—

there was still a strange smile on what remained of him.

As if even at death, he had refused to give the world the satisfaction of seeing fear.

•••

Far away inside a small world—

The great tree in Lootwell Territory began to die.

Leaves fell in sheets.

Its life-thrum weakened visibly.

The trunk that had once glowed with quiet, rooted vitality now dimmed as if some deep agreement sustaining it had suddenly been withdrawn.

Vivian stood nearby and felt unease rise at once.

That tree had been planted by Lucien.

So when it began dying—

She ran forward.

Cielius appeared beside her almost at the same instant.

He laid a hand against the trunk.

Then froze.

"This..." he whispered. "This cannot be."

Vivian turned to him, already afraid of the answer.

"Grandpa Ciel... what happened?"

Cielius’s whole body trembled.

"This tree..." he said. "This was planted from a Soulgrain Seed bound to its owner. Like my Worldroot Staff. It does not fail unless—"

He stopped.

He did not need to continue.

Vivian’s body shook.

Because she already understood.

The dying tree meant only one thing.

Lucien Lootwell—

was dead.