Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 2551: Lucine Past, Present, Future, & End

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Card World, Central Region, Central Academic City, Morningstar University District, Morningstar University Campus, Garden of Beginning, Time Vestige, Morningstar University 2nd Campus

No longer dwelling on the steep price of my Time-Rule resistance, I stepped into the time-expansion chamber—just in time to witness the three new bodies of Lucine rising from their pots. They weren’t alone. A withered corpse emerged from the fourth pot as well. To my surprise, Lucine’s incarnation that had been trapped in her original body had survived the treatment and her Time-Rule dementia... as an undead. It seemed she had gained far more from this procedure than I expected her to.

I watched as the three new bodies of Lucine turned to face the withered, undead Lucine—now their Incarnation—and for some reason, the entire chamber fell into an eerie, suffocating silence. They stood frozen in place, staring at their original body, now their incarnation.

Soon, they broke their standoff, and just as I was about to let out a breath of relief, they moved—swiftly landing around me and circling me in perfect unison. The three Lucine spoke at once, their voices overlapping perfectly, ”Wyatt, you were right. You really did cure my Time-Rule dementia.”

Ignoring their spooky speech, I activated my Soul Pupils to verify that everything had gone as planned—only to discover that all four of Lucine’s bodies brimmed with immense temporal energy. The three new bodies of Lucine had no sign of time-rule dementia, while the withered-old body did.

I noticed immediately that this undead incarnation was unlike any other I had ever seen. All of its soul pathways and energies were completely still—frozen, as if time in it or in contact with it would become still. There wasn’t a flicker of change anywhere in its entire body. I also realized it wasn’t moving on its own; every step it took was guided by the intent of Lucine’s other bodies.

Still, the results were as I expected and more.

I couldn’t help but feel genuinely impressed by what she had accomplished. It made me feel that swearing an oath to steady her nerves—to take such an active role in the entire treatment—had been completely worth it.

”Don’t tell me the obvious. Tell me how you’re feeling—how well did the procedure go,” I eagerly said, urging all four of Lucine to share every detail of their treatment, especially anything they had obtained through it. They, too, appeared more than eager to share their experience with me.

But before they could begin, all four of Lucine’s bodies suddenly converged, merging into a single form. I almost shouted in shock. After everything we had done to free her from Time-Rule dementia, she had just reabsorbed the incarnation that was now suffering from the punishment of breaking time taboo in her stead.

Sensing my rising panic, Lucine offered a gentle smile. ”Relax, I know what I’m doing,” she said softly. ”As I told you earlier, your treatment truly cured my Time-Rule dementia. My undead incarnation can suppress the remnants of it using the fourth Time-Rule meaning I pushed to ultimate comprehension—Eternal Stillness. As the name implies, it represents the point where time is still, losing all its meaning.”

Hearing the words Eternal Stillness, my mind instantly jumped to the Big Freeze theory from Earth—where the universe ends not in an explosion, but in a slow collapse of thermal dynamism. In that scenario, entropy reaches its maximum, energy becomes evenly distributed, and all physical processes gradually cease as the universe approaches absolute zero. It’s the ultimate stillness, the point where time itself loses meaning.

Imagining the implications and possibilities of Lucine’s Fourth Time Rule meaning my mind when blank. No wonder she dared to take her undead incarnation carrying the time-rule dementia back into her. In the big freeze, time technically still exists, but its passage becomes effectively meaningless. If time itself was meaningless, what use was the punishment for breaking time taboo, it too was meaningless.

Wait a minute—if her undead incarnation was the embodiment of the Eternal Stillness Time-Rule meaning, then everything I had noticed suddenly made sense. Of course its body showed no change; of course every pathway and stream of energy was frozen solid. No wonder it needed help just to move.

In its current state, it was essentially a temporal meat shield, a vessel built to absorb the punishment for breaking time taboos. But even that had limits. If Lucine pushed it too far, her undead incarnation would be erased into nothingness like any other undead being.

Still, the fact remained: with this incarnation, Lucine could break certain time taboos without having to fear the consequences—at least to a considerable extent.

”You did well,” I said, genuinely impressed. Lucine hadn’t just completed her assignment—she had gone above and beyond, tackling the extra credit on her own. The emergence of Lucine Past, Present, and Future fell neatly within my calculations. But the birth of Lucine End—that, I had never anticipated.

Inside the time-expansion chamber, Lucine had followed my treatment plan thoroughly, but she had also gone far beyond it. Using the excess time surrounding her—something she had in overwhelming abundance in there—she not only fused her three Time-Rule meanings and condensed her Time-Rule River, but, together with her incarnation, she comprehended a fourth Time-Rule meaning... and pushed it all the way to ultimate comprehension.

While Lucine focused on channeling her first three Time-Rule meanings into refining the three Viltronian vine root bodies, her incarnation used their newly comprehended fourth meaning to refine Lucine’s original body—preparing it to take over once Lucine shifted into her new vessels.

When Lucine transferred her divinity into the three refined bodies and transformed them into Lucine Past, Present, and Future, her incarnation simultaneously completed the refinement of the original body, reforging its divinity through their fourth Time-Rule meaning, Eternal Stillness.

From that process, Lucine End was born—Lucine’s undead incarnation, the embodiment of the Eternal Stillness meaning of time rule. Since she had already forged her Time-Rule stream, she could now fuse her three bodies—and even her incarnation—back into herself with effortless ease.