Card Apprentice Daily Log

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Azorheim, Temporal Cave Valley, Temporal Cave No. ES3030

The simulation I was conducting was to see the growth of the World Calamity Seed in the right settings to learn if there was more to it than what Hive Spirit and I had deduced after reading its Soul Pathways and arrangements.

Because it had become clear to me that I didn’t know enough about the World Calamity Seed, despite thinking I did. It wasn’t that I hadn’t read all its Soul Pathways and arrangements or that I hadn’t understood Soul Pathways and arrangements enough, but the variables couldn’t predict or have control over. Still, I had already narrowed it down to two possibilities:

i) Mutation: Since the growth of the World Calamity Seed was heavily dependent on its environment, I believed it had devoured something in the Realm of True Evil, causing a mutation that influenced its evolution cycle, resulting in its strange ability.ii) Skill or Arts: I believed that, at a certain stage of its evolution cycle, it had awakened a unique skill or art belonging to the World Calamity Seeds, like humanity’s martial arts, for example. I say awakened because the World Calamity Seed was like a machine. All it did was enslave, devour, evolve, and repeat until it was powerful enough to devour the realm and its Celestial Will itself. It didn’t have the ability to create a martial or energy art for itself unless it awakened one from its own bloodline.

Both these variables were beyond my control and were dead ends. However, I was hoping the simulations would show other possibilities that I could explore.

Hive Spirit and I conducted multiple simulations of the World Calamity Seed growing in the Card World and devouring it because there was nothing out of order. The countless simulations only showed me what I already knew. Until the World Calamity Seed began to grow by devouring only reborn Supreme Beings.

We observed that when the World Calamity Seed devoured a reborn Supreme Being at the initial stage, the pure Rule Power of the Supreme Being helped it grow to the next evolutionary stage but also induced a mutation in it, and it continued to develop into a being similar to a World Calamity Seed but also a Supreme Being.

The mutation happened once in every hundred thousand simulations. It was extremely rare. The World Calamity Seed devoured Supreme Beings in the latter stages of its evolution, but it never underwent mutation. Only during the initial period did it undergo mutation after devouring a young Supreme Being. Even then, it wasn’t guaranteed to mutate. It could also fail and fall back a step in its evolution, having to start over like in Snakes and Ladders.

While World Calamity Seed mutation was extremely rare, the World Calamity Seed awakening an ability or art from its bloodline was practically nonexistent.

Among our millions of simulations, the World Calamity Tree never awakened a skill or art from its bloodline. Not even once. In fact, in some simulations, I even made the environment of the Card World favor the growth of the World Calamity Seed. Yet, there was no sign of it awakening a skill or art from its bloodline.

So, I decided to make the environment of the Card World just as harsh as that of the Realm of True Evil. On my third simulation, we ran into an error: insufficient data. The World Calamity Seed had undergone a bloodline awakening; however, there wasn’t enough data to determine if it had successfully awakened or what it had awakened. This happened in almost every third simulation.

Impossible!

It could undergo a bloodline awakening, so the data had to have been in the Soul Pathways and arrangements. If there was no data on awakening, it should never undergo awakening, no matter how harsh its environment was. Because if something was not there, how could it happen?

Unless it was a ghost.

But even a ghost cannot escape my Soul Pupils.

I have used Soul Pupils enough to understand that Soul Pathways contained all the information a being and its predecessors had stored in them. That includes one’s bloodline too. As long as you can read them, you can awaken the skills or arts from them. I did it when helping Marcy Davis, the orphan girl that the Field Marshal took in as her disciple, awaken her traits.

The Soul Pathways and arrangements were like a library dedicated to the said entities’ family history, dating back to their origin. This wasn’t just true for living beings but for anything in the Myriad Realms. Stones, sand, air, clouds, everything was made of Soul Pathways and arrangements that all mapped to their origin.

That was why I couldn’t believe that the Soul Pathways and arrangements that could induce bloodline awakening didn’t have the information on said bloodline awakening. That was simply absurd. Unless those Soul Pathways were only the trigger for something bigger outside the Soul Pathways and arrangements, like the Origin Source and the Rule Sources. But the World Calamity Seed wasn’t welcome in the Origin Source and the Rule Sources. I learned that the hard way while trying to rescue Cortney.

That possibility intrigued me, because from everything I gathered about the World Calamity Seeds, they were basically machines, very, very advanced machines designed to enslave and end all life and realms. What I am wondering was that every machine should have a factory, right?

Like how everything in the Myriad Realms stemmed from the Origin Source, the World Calamity Seed too should have stemmed from somewhere, if not the Origin Source. There was already enough evidence that the World Calamity Seeds seemed to be different from everything else in the Myriad Realms.

Unlike everything in the Myriad Realms that pursued transcendence, they didn’t, even though they could attain it with ease. But then again, there were Primordial Pixies, the gardeners of the Myriad Realms. They too didn’t seem to care about transcendence despite possessing the power that can turn them into a transcendent as long as they willed it.

The more I thought about it, the more the once-familiar Myriad Realms began to feel like a stranger.

Novel Raider: The First Fiction Summoner