Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 2584: ’Wheels Of Time’ Battle Array Formation

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Card World, Central Region, Central Academic City, Morningstar University District, Brothwork Manor

Using my celestial force and the Limitless Strain Rune, I can stretch space without limit, free from the risk of tearing or distorting it. If a card apprentice were caught inside a space I had stretched in this way, it would look to the naked eye as though they were simply stuck walking at that point of the pace. When in reality, they would be running across an endlessly elongated space, unable to make any actual progress.

Now, what happens when I stop channeling my celestial force to maintain that limitless stretch? The moment I release it, the space snaps back to its original state. And the card apprentice trapped within would be crushed instantly by the recoil of that violently contracting space. The temperature released from this process would instantly evaporate whatever was caught in it, like their mangled remains.

That was how I killed the bearded card demigod—making it seem as though his body folded inward and collapsed before evaporating. Afterward, I used my celestial force to gather his divinity and grimoire.

The bearded demigod died in a gruesome instant, without even the chance to resist. With his death, the companion hiding within his shadow was forced out. He attempted to slip into another shadow the moment he emerged, but he too was dragged into the endlessly stretched space similar to the one that had trapped his partner. Unlike before, there was no shadow within that boundless expanse for him to take refuge in. With nowhere to escape, he suffered the same fate—crushed by the recoil of space snapping back to its original form and evaporating into nothingness by the resulting heat—without managing even a token struggle.

Once again, I used my celestial force to gather his divinity and diamond grimoire.

Watching two of their comrades die gruesomely—without resistance and before any of them could even process what had happened—the remaining forty-three demigods in their battle formation reacted at once. Abandoning any hope of a peaceful resolution, no longer praying that the situation might remain within their control, they immediately activated their time-related cards and runes, triggering the ’Wheels of Time’ battle formation. At this point, their only focus was to subdue me and drag me before their masters, trusting them to judge both sides accordingly.

As the demigods vanished from her sight and her own time-related cards flared in warning, Jill realized the temporal flow around her was being distorted. She quickly called out to her love, ”Wyatt, look out—they’ve entered their respective accelerated time—”

Her warning cut off midway. She froze, stunned, as several dozen divinities and diamond grimoires flew toward me in rapid succession. I stored them neatly within my dimensional storage card, one after another.

Jill’s eyes widened, disbelief washing over her. Before she could stop herself, she blurted out, ”What the fuck happened?”

Given the tension of the moment, Jill hadn’t even blinked—yet somehow the card demigods had vanished, replaced in an instant by the cluster of divinities and diamond grimoires now orbiting around me. She had no idea what had happened.

She immediately dismissed the notion that I had killed them within their accelerated time. She knew full well that a single time-related card wasn’t nearly enough for me to enter the fastest time flow generated by the demigods’ battle formation. I had not even comprehended the Time Rule, let alone reached a level where I could step into the highest accelerated time flow of the Wheels of Time battle array.

With that possibility ruled out, she was left with no reasonable explanation for how I could have eliminated every demigod inside the Wheels of Time battle formation. After several seconds of mentally retracing every angle, she gave up and simply asked, bewildered, ”How? How did you do it?”

”I have an unusually high resistance to the Time Rule,” I replied, offering the truth—though with no intention of elaborating further.

The moment the remaining demigods activated the Wheels of Time battle array, thanks to my time resistance I instantly slipped into the fastest accelerated time flow among the multiple accelerated time flow they had generated. There, I found only a single elder demigod still capable of movement—everyone else’s time flow was so slow they appeared completely frozen.

The old demigod was stunned to see me standing beside him within the highest time acceleration of their formation. Before he could react, I summoned aloud, ”Limitless Celestial Domain.”

At my command, I shifted the entire ’Wheels of Time’ array formation into a single point within my Limitless Celestial Domain that was stretched infinitely. Then, with deliberate intent, I released the stretched space. It snapped back to its original form in an instant, crushing every demigod inside into pulp. The heat generated from the collapse evaporated what little remained of their bodies, leaving nothing behind.

With the domain retracted, I calmly gathered the divinities and diamond grimoires that surfaced following their deaths.

The Time and Space Rules were severely wronged by most card demigods, unable to bring out their true destructive power. Not all of them possessed the talent or affinity required to comprehend these rules, and even those who did often found themselves lost when they reached the bifurcation points. Without luck along with proper insight, they could never hope to showcase the true potential of either rule.

Take Henricks, for example. His mastery of the Space Rule was largely confined to spatial travel. It wasn’t that he lacked ambition—he simply lacked compatible foundations. The three foundational Space-Rule meanings he comprehended to the ultimate tier were all random. Using sheer insight and creativity, he repurposed those mismatched rule meanings to incorporate them in his spatial travel and aid his origin card, but that was the limit of what he could construct from such scattered foundations.

Not everyone was fortunate enough to discover a method for selecting rule meanings at a bifurcation point inside the World’s Womb like I managed to do so before I became a hybrid celestial—before I gained the privilege of comprehending rules directly from the rule source, just as the celestials themselves do.