fynovel Chapter 655 - System
Chapter 655 - System
Lucien now had a direction.Deadman had not given him the full answer, but he had given him a door.
That was enough.
So Lucien locked himself inside the Origin Core Shrine again.
The shrine became silent around him.
This time, Lucien did not stand before the map as a ruler reading movements across five continents.
He stood before the merged Origin Core fragment as a student. The almost half-sphere floated in the center of the shrine.
Lucien stared at it for a long time.
He owned it. Technically.
It recognized him and allowed him to use authority that most beings in the universe could not even approach.
But Lucien had never fooled himself.
The Origin Core was not truly his.
Not in the way a sword could belong to a swordsman.
The Origin Core was older than possession.
It was proof. A witness to the universe being born.
Lucien could borrow its authority.
But to say it belonged to him completely felt wrong.
The Origin Core belonged to the universe first.
Lucien was merely the current person arrogant enough, lucky enough, and responsible enough to hold part of it without immediately being erased by the implication.
He exhaled slowly.
Then he extended his senses.
•••
At first, the Origin Core responded gently.
Its authority unfolded around Lucien like a door opening without sound.
The shrine faded.
The map faded.
The walls, floor, light, and air became unimportant.
Lucien’s senses touched the merged fragment, then sank deeper.
Into origin.
The Tree of Creation above his Divine Energy Core rustled at once. Its leaves stirred as if a wind older than wind had passed through them.
Comprehension flowed through Lucien quietly.
The Tree did not explain everything.
But it helped him endure what he was seeing.
Without it, Lucien suspected his thoughts would have scattered like dust thrown into a storm of creation.
He continued downward.
Or inward.
Or backward.
Direction lost meaning.
For a moment, Lucien felt as if he was watching the universe from a place before the universe had fully decided how to be watched.
Stars were not stars yet.
Worlds were not worlds yet.
Laws were not names.
They were tendencies.
Possibilities.
Pressures.
The first difference between something and nothing.
Lucien’s awareness trembled.
He stabilized himself with Living Creation.
The Origin Core was not attacking him.
That was not the danger.
The danger was scale.
A mortal could drown in a river.
An Eternal could drown in meaning.
Lucien finally understood that in a very personal way.
Actually, this was the first time Lucien had tried to sense the Origin Core this deeply.
Before, he had only touched its surface.
Back then, there had been fewer merged fragments, and Lucien had known that delving too deeply into the Origin Core’s authority might be dangerous.
Now, he finally understood the difference between touching the surface of the Origin Core and reaching toward the deep meaning behind its existence.
He kept his sense of self anchored to his Divine Energy Core.
His spirit embraced the core.
The Tree of Creation held steady.
Only then did he continue.
•••
Time stretched.
Lucien did not know how long passed.
Inside the shrine, it might have been minutes.
Inside his awareness, it felt like seasons had turned into breaths and breaths had become eras.
He had fallen deeper into the merged Origin Core fragment’s authority than ever before.
Too deep, perhaps.
If he lost focus, he might dissolve into perspective.
He might begin thinking as the authority thought, seeing as the fragment saw, and forget that Lucien was a person rather than a convenient arrangement of memory and will.
That was unacceptable.
Lucien had too many responsibilities to become philosophical soup.
So he held himself together.
Slowly, beneath the vastness, he began to sense roots.
Authority roots.
Connections.
Things born from the Origin Core.
Things shaped by it.
Things that had inherited its permission to exist in a special way.
The first root was too vast to name casually.
The Big World.
Lucien became silent.
He had known the Big World was special. Everyone knew that, in the way children knew the sky was high before they learned distance.
But knowing was different from seeing.
The Big World was not merely an old world.
It was the first world that had truly carried life under the Origin Core’s influence.
The first world where life had become a proper answer.
The Origin Core was proof that the universe had been born.
The Big World was proof that the universe had chosen to continue through life.
Lucien felt something in him become quiet.
For once, even his thoughts did not joke.
He was touching something sacred.
A fact so large that reverence became the only reasonable response.
The Big World was not important because people said it was.
People existed because it had been important first.
Lucien continued carefully.
Beneath that root, more structures appeared.
Newer.
Smaller.
Familiar.
Lootwell.
•••
Lootwell’s connection to the Origin Core was impossible to miss once Lucien knew where to look.
It was everywhere.
The communication devices.
The Grace System.
The public arrays.
The special facilities.
The structures Lucien had made again and again by borrowing what he understood of the Origin Core’s behavior.
They were not the Origin Core itself.
They were imitations.
Children’s drawings of a cosmic machine.
That thought hit Lucien harder than expected.
The Grace System, which had changed the world, stabilized public trust, distributed quests, carried faith, coordinated responses, and supported Lootwell’s rise, was only an imitation.
A crude imitation.
A successful one.
A useful one.
But crude.
Lucien stared at the structure and felt embarrassment rise slowly.
Then it became worse.
He found the older layer.
The true systems.
The systems of the True Liberators.
The ones the Primordial Slime had imparted to the reincarnators.
Lucien’s awareness touched the layer, and immediately he understood that he had been comparing a child’s wooden cart to an intercontinental airship and calling both transportation.
His Grace System had worked because he was clever, lucky, and backed by absurd authority.
The true systems were different.
They were elegant, layered, personal, and adaptive.
Each one fitted its bearer while still connecting back to a shared origin authority.
They were tailored frameworks built from Origin Core authority, Primordial Slime’s will, personal destiny, reincarnation adjustments, and survival necessity.
Lucien found his own system first.
Drop Rate Max.
Skillpedia.
Magic Book.
Monsterdex.
Craft Feature.
And the other strange functions that had shaped his impossible road from the beginning.
They were not random gifts piled together.
They were a structure.
A web of permissions.
Drop Rate Max was not merely "luck."
It was an authority-level declaration that outcome could be extracted from victory.
Auto-Collect was not merely convenience.
It was a retrieval law wrapped in system logic, allowing earned things to reach him without being stolen by distance, chaos, or battlefield clutter.
Skillpedia, Magic Book, and Monsterdex were not simple archives.
They were conceptual libraries connected to records of skill, magic, and monsterhood, each one interacting with the wider authority of the Origin Core.
The Craft Feature was not merely a shop.
It was pattern acquisition, structure translation, and resource-conversion logic disguised as something Lucien could use without losing his mind at age twelve.
Lucien’s expression changed slowly.
Then he almost laughed.
The Primordial Slime had hidden cosmic engineering beneath beginner-friendly labels.
That was either kindness, madness, or both.
Probably both.
Lucien studied deeper.
The true system beneath his familiar interface was terrifyingly complex.
Layer upon layer moved under every function.
Authority filters.
Fate permissions.
Drop classification logic.
Ownership recognition.
Soul-safe reward transfer.
Concept stabilization.
User protection.
Growth restrictions.
Progressive unlocking.
Compatibility limits.
Emergency correction.
Even the functions that sounded ridiculous had serious structures beneath them.
Procrastinate, which delayed functions, was built on local causality interference.
Scam the System, which had become an invulnerability ability, carried loophole-authority that briefly convinced consequence to step aside.
Lucien stared at that part for a long moment.
He suddenly felt much less proud of naming things.
Then he remembered the Grace System.
His imitation.
The one he had built with confidence.
Compared to the true systems, it looked embarrassingly simple.
A child’s training wheel attached to a divine chariot.
Lucien closed his eyes.
For a brief moment, he wanted to pretend he had not noticed.
Then his embarrassment vanished.
Because this was not humiliation.
It was opportunity.
If his crude imitation could already change the world, what could he build after truly understanding the original?
•••
Lucien’s awareness moved along the structure carefully.
The true systems were too personal, too deep, and too connected to the Primordial Slime’s work.
But he could learn principles.
The Origin Core’s authority was vast.
Most people could not touch it directly.
They needed frames.
Everything Lucien had built was, in one way or another, an attempt to turn impossible authority into something people could safely use.
Now he was finally seeing how a true master had done it.
The Primordial Slime.
Lucien’s thoughts quieted when he reached that name.
Deeper inside the system structure, he felt something.
A Will.
The Will of the World.
The Primordial Slime’s Will.
Lucien’s heart throbbed.
The Will had merged into the systems so completely that separating it from their function would be like asking sunlight to leave dawn behind.
It was there in the assistance, the corrections, the safety.
The absurd generosity hidden under ridiculous labels.
The way the systems guided without overwhelming.
The way they helped reincarnators survive without stripping them of choice.
Lucien watched it.
For a moment, the Will seemed to notice him.
There was no face.
But something smiled.
Lucien froze.
It felt like an old teacher seeing a late student finally open the difficult book.
Lucien’s throat tightened.
He stood silently in the vastness of authority.
Then an impossible thought arrived.
If this Will remained here...
If other wills remained scattered in other systems...
If he gathered them...
Could the Primordial Slime be revived?
The thought was so large that Lucien immediately stepped back from it.
His awareness tightened around itself.
No.
Not now.
Maybe not ever.
Revival was not reconstruction.
A Will was not a whole soul.
A system imprint was not a person.
Even with Living Creation, the Reincarnation Disc, and Origin Core authority, assuming he could simply gather scattered wills and restore a Primordial existence was arrogance wearing hope.
And hope, Lucien had learned repeatedly, was very talented at becoming dangerous when unsupervised.
•••
For now, he studied.
There was so much to learn.
So much he had misunderstood.
So much he had used without knowing the depth beneath it.
Lucien felt smaller again.
Strangely, he did not hate that feeling.
Feeling small meant there was still a sky above him.
And Lucien had always been unreasonable about climbing.