100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full?-Chapter 458 - Preparations

When Lucien and the others returned, no one wasted time pretending things were normal.

No one knew where the inevitable meeting would occur. No one could name the exact day.

Divination could circle around it, sense its gravity, feel the convergence of pressure... but not pin it down cleanly enough to make certainty useful.

That meant there was only one correct response.

Prepare now.

Shadow left almost immediately after their return.

Before he went, he said only, "We’ll accelerate what we can. If we can’t stop the meeting, then we’ll at least make sure the board is better when it happens."

Lucien understood what that meant.

More cure. More allies. More stability. More pressure on the Exchange before the world tilted again.

He gave Shadow a single nod.

That was enough.

The women who had gone with him were much quieter than before. The usual rhythm between them had changed.

No one was panicking.

But all of them were thinking.

Thinking hard.

Thinking around something too large to grab cleanly.

Lilith was the first to speak.

She stood in front of Lucien with her arms folded, looked at him for a moment, and said, "I’ll do what I can do best."

Lucien already knew what that meant.

She continued, "If I can’t fight a Primordial Incarnation head-on, then I’ll make sure you enter that fight carrying the strongest things I can possibly give you."

Then she turned and left before he could respond with anything that sounded like gratitude.

That was just like her.

The elemental women followed in their own way.

Kaia clicked her tongue and looked annoyed at the world itself.

"Then we’ll train," she said. "If fate wants to throw something impossible, then we’ll become the kind of impossible that bites back."

Sylra exhaled through her nose, still pale from everything she had heard, but steadier now.

"We’re not staying weak just because the enemy is absurd."

Marina looked as though she had cried earlier and refused to admit it, but her voice did not shake when she said, "When the time comes, I want to be able to stand there too."

Marie grinned, though there was no real mischief behind it this time.

"Well," she said, "guess I’ll just have to become terrifyingly reliable. What a cruel fate."

Even that made Lucien’s chest ease, if only a little.

Eirene came last.

She looked toward the Stillness Palace, then back at him.

"There are still untouched devices, half-understood mechanisms among the treasures of Stillness, and deactivated relics. I’ll sort through them."

Lucien sighed.

"You think there might be something useful?"

"There might be many things useful," Eirene said. "I simply haven’t had a reason to force them awake until now."

Then, after a pause, she added more quietly, "You are not facing this alone."

That was what struck him the deepest.

He had grown used to carrying things alone in the back of his mind, even when others helped him in practice.

But now—

They were all moving on their own.

Not because he ordered them.

Because they had decided he mattered enough to do so.

He stood there for a while after they all scattered to their chosen work.

And though he had been left physically alone—

He did not feel abandoned at all.

He felt... accompanied.

That was different.

That was dangerous in its own way.

And precious.

•••

Soon after, Lucien went to Anvil-Horn.

The construction had to change.

Growth could wait. Aesthetic improvements could wait. Expansion could wait.

Lootwell itself had to become harder to kill.

He found Anvil-Horn already surrounded by half-completed structural diagrams, spectral overlays of district layouts, and material samples stacked in careful disorder.

Lucien did not waste time.

"Uncle, let’s halt the construction," he said. "Let’s reinforce the whole territory first."

Anvil-Horn’s expression did not change immediately.

He observed Lucien but asked no questions.

He understood that the suggestion came with reason. Something was coming... something dangerous.

But he chose not to say it aloud.

"Good," he said. "I was waiting for you to say that."

Lucien reached into his storage and began placing things on the table.

Goblin and Gargoyle scriptures. Monster schematics. Design logs. Stolen architecture from the enemies.

At the sight of them, Anvil-Horn’s eyes lit up so brightly that Lucien almost took a half-step back on instinct.

"Do you know what this means?" the old smith said.

"Yes," Lucien replied. "That I may have ruined your rest for the next few months."

"No," Anvil-Horn said, almost offended. "This means those beasts had ideas worth stealing."

Then he smiled.

That was never a safe sign.

He began flipping through the scriptures at speed that would have made a scholar faint.

Lucien let him work for an hour, then asked, "What can we build?"

Anvil-Horn’s answer came not as one structure, but as a whole system.

Lootwell would not be protected by a single great wall.

That was too simple, too visible, and too brittle.

Instead, it would become layered.

First came the Outer Veil Bastions.

These would be distributed around the territory’s broader perimeter, disguised in terrain and architecture. Each one will be capable of projecting overlapping distortion fields inspired by goblin concealment methods and gargoyle territorial warding.

It’s not true invisibility but something more irritating. A shifting ambiguity that would make enemy approaches misjudge distance, weight, alignment, and targeting.

Second came the Buried Relay Spines.

It would be a network of deep-set void-metal channels running beneath Lootwell, carrying energy, warnings, and activation authority through the entire territory.

If one part of Lootwell was struck, the others would not go blind or slow. It was inspired by monster command routing, but rebuilt in Thousand Races logic.

Third: Skyhook Intercept Towers.

Tall, elegant structures whose upper rings would use modified gargoyle interception arrays and goblin tracking principles to catch incoming long-range strikes, descending entities, or destabilizing spatial entries.

They would not just defend. They would pin trajectories and force hostile approaches into predictable lanes.

Fourth: Reversal Wells.

If miasmic pressure or any form of contamination entered the territory, the wells would absorb, slow, and redirect the spread into controllable sink-zones rather than let corruption move freely through the districts.

Fifth: Civic Refuge Nodes.

Anvil-Horn insisted on these personally.

"If catastrophe comes," he said, "then not everyone should have to run toward the palace."

So each district would have hidden fallback chambers built into its own structural bones. Defensible, ventilated, supplied, and linked to the relay spines.

Refuge for everyone.

Lucien approved that at once.

The materials were not a problem.

Lucien had taken too much from goblin and gargoyle storages for scarcity to be the bottleneck now.

Void metals, reactive stone, warped alloys, half-living construction matter... there was enough.

And Starforge was exactly the right sort of monster to turn these kind of materials into homeland strength.

By the time Lucien left the planning chamber, Lootwell was no longer merely being built.

It was becoming survivable.

•••

After that, Lucien returned to his own room.

Now came preparation of a different kind.

He activated Cram Session and copied a skill from Seren, one of the Children of Destiny under Elunara’s care.

Essence Shift.

He had too many wearable drops, especially crowns. Far more than he could possibly use at once.

With Essence Shift, however, there’s no need to wear them all at once.

He summoned his Crown of Creation.

Then, one by one, he drew out the other crowns from his Inventory and laid them before him.

He kept their descriptions in mind with care, because each one represented not just power, but a precise kind of answer.

Crown of Transcendence – Temporarily lets the user wield both divine and miasmic power without penalty.

Crown of the Colossal King — Channels earth’s raw might. When worn, it enhances strength, vitality and regeneration while providing resistance against knockback or pressure-based attacks.

Samsara Crown - When worn, it grants the ability to exchange one life for another. To sacrifice one to revive another, or to give up one’s own years to defy death itself.

Crown of Embers – Grants command over lesser dragons and complete immunity to fire.

Crown of Hollow Night – Channels the darkness of the void; grants immunity to illusion and fear effects.

Crown Sigil of Resonance — Grants authority over metal-integrated structures and artifacts.

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

Lucien exhaled once.

Then began.

He used Essence Shift carefully.

The process was not violent, but it was not gentle either. Each transfer required the donor crown to give up its defining pattern while the Crown of Creation opened itself enough to absorb, interpret, and stabilize the incoming authority.

One by one, the powers flowed.

The Crown of Creation glowed brighter each time, as if it recognized not just the strength being offered, but the logic behind it.

It did not reject. It accepted.

Transcendence. Colossal force. Samsara. Embers. Hollow Night. Resonance. Manacle binding.

Each one sank into its growing matrix.

By the time Lucien finished, the Crown of Creation no longer felt like a singular artifact.

It felt like a throne of accumulated permissions.

...

Next came Morphis.

Lucien took out the legendary drop from the CHRONOSLUMBER THISTLE.

Moment Anchor Seed — A core material capable of fixing a single moment into reality-based constructs.

He held it for a while.

Then he brought Morphis forward and let the seed touch its core.

The reaction was immediate.

Light spread through the weapon’s center in concentric stillness, as though time itself had become aware of its new residence. The seed was absorbed into Morphis and vanished from sight.

Its principle was terrifyingly simple.

Lock an object to a single moment.

If that moment contained wholeness, then the object stayed whole. If that moment contained burning, it would burn forever without being consumed. If that moment contained motion, the motion could be perpetually renewed as long as the logic held.

In battle, that meant Morphis could now resist destruction in a way ordinary durability could never explain.

It would not simply be hard to break.

It would keep insisting that it had not yet entered the moment in which it was broken.

Of course, Lucien knew the weakness immediately.

A Law like Severance, aimed not at form but at logic, could still cut through the anchored principle and end the effect.

But he was not facing Severance this time.

And that mattered.

So he repeated the process across the rest of his five-equipment set.

It’s not enough to make him invincible.

But enough to make him much harder to ruin.

...

Then Lucien crafted the next thing he would need.

Lives.

If he was really preparing to face a Primordial Incarnation then he had to assume that dying once might be part of survival.

So he made Life Link Talismans.

Fortunately, the materials for them were found in the Eternal of Stillness’s resource sites... the same ones he had explored with Eirene.

Lucien fed the recipe through his Craft Feature and made ten of them in sequence.

When they were done, he bound each one to a different slime plushie.

The result would have looked ridiculous to anyone lacking context.

Ten soft, harmless, absurd little things.

Ten backup lives.

Lucien exhaled when he finished.

That alone eased some of the pressure in his chest.

...

After that, he sorted his drops more carefully.

He prioritized everything he and Seran had discussed.

Survival first. Disruption second. Countermeasure third. Escape only if all else failed.

Then he sat down.

And meditated.

He visualized the battle.

Again. And again. And again.

He ran through it with Perfect Calculation and Perfect Loop active, using the Convergence Incarnation he had once seen in the Mural World as the nearest available model.

It was incomplete, yes. Unreliable in places, yes.

Still enough to train against.

He saw possible openings. Then watched them close. He built traps. Then watched them fail.

He attacked early. He died. He delayed. He died. He tried deception. He died slower. He changed terrain. He died differently.

Every time, he died.

Sometimes quickly. Sometimes after brilliant resistance. Sometimes after clever sequences that would have annihilated almost any ordinary enemy in the world.

It did not matter.

He died.

Lucien opened his eyes once, breathing harder.

Then closed them again.

No despair entered him.

Only refinement.

Again.

This time he altered the timing of first contact. Again.

This time he gave up the middle ground and forced asymmetry. Again.

This time he built the fight around bait, not victory. Again.

His deaths became narrower. Cleaner. More informative.

His expression grew colder. His will sharpened.

By the time the night deepened, the room was filled not with panic—

but with repetition.

With failure turned into instruction.

With a man staring at inevitability and answering it with refusal.

He would die in simulation as many times as necessary.

He would strip meaning from every death until the real one had fewer places left to hide.

And in the silence of Lootwell, while the territory around him prepared in a hundred different ways—

Lucien kept fighting the coming future.

One death at a time.