Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 2789: Fail Safe

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Card World, Southern Region, Blossom District, Gideon Grim’s Camp

After Corey left, I turned to Gideon Grim, who was still trying to contact the devil merchant code through his devil codex like a mad man.

I could have killed him on the spot. But for the sake of the millions of card apprentices he had brainwashed across the five regions, I needed to break the hold of his origin card on them before ending his life.

Gideon would never release them willingly. If anything, he would use them as leverage to bargain for his freedom. I had developed a method to remove the roots he had implanted in his victims through his origin card, but applying that procedure to millions would demand immense time and resources.

The simplest solution was clear: turn him into my calamity daughter gem and make him release them himself.

So I didn’t waste time. I used my blood fate plunder meaning of blood rule to strip him of all his prowess. I prepared to feed him the calamity daughter gem and make him undo every root he had planted. But the moment I clamped down on his prowess, something went wrong.

Gideon suddenly began to cry in agony as his body—it started coming apart. His flesh peeled away from him like a shedding cocoon, layer by layer, bloody and disgusting. It didn’t fall clean either; it stretched, clung, then tore, as if it had never truly belonged to him in the first place.

And then something inside moved. A huge worm resembling a radish with roots pushed out from within that peeling shell, forcing its way through like a mouth splitting open from the inside. The Gideon I had been dealing with was nothing more than a husk, and the real thing had been hiding underneath all along.

I was shocked—not by what I saw, but by the fact that my soul pupil had failed to detect it. Refusing to believe it could miss something so significant, I focused it on the creature that had crawled out of Gideon’s body—a massive, radish-like worm—and traced its soul pathway.

Only then did I understand. When I severed Gideon from soul energy and rule power, his origin card interpreted it as death.

That mistake triggered a failsafe. Using whatever it could salvage from his body, the card birthed that grotesque worm. Its purpose was simple: burrow into the ground, escape the threat, and survive. Once safe, it would seek out a compatible human host—most likely one of the victims already marked by his origin card—merge with the roots embedded in them, and recreate Gideon Grim.

Just like that, he would live again. Which meant the thing I saw wasn’t something hidden and revealed—it was something newly born within his body. No wonder my soul pupils missed that worm the first time, it was there.

Remembering Gideon’s scream before his flesh split apart to force the worm out, I couldn’t begin to imagine the kind of pain he must have endured. Then I looked at the worm that lay on the ground with pity. Since I had restricted its prowess too, it wouldn’t just escape by borrowing into the ground and could only lie there powerlessly and helplessly. But thinking of the heinous crimes he did throughout his life I wasn’t anymore.

”Was that all an act?” I asked the worm. Through my soul pupil, I could still sense Gideon’s will—alive and awake within it.

”No,” it replied after a good while. Its mouth moved with an unsettling, almost human-like. ”It wasn’t an act. My previous body’s mind broke the moment it realized you had cornered me and learned that there was no escape, no other options. You triggered one of its oldest traumas and burned its mind out.”

It paused, then continued, its tone steady despite the grotesque form. ”That’s the flaw in my version of immortality. I don’t just take a body—I inherit everything. Memories, experiences, skills... that means the emotional baggage and damage that comes with them.

”That’s why I try to stay in one body for as long as possible,” Gideon continued. ”But even the finest vessels—those with exceptional bloodlines or physiques—start to fail within a few decades. I’ve tried everything to overcome it. Nothing works.”

As he spoke, the pieces fell into place. The vanishing villages, the frozen town, they weren’t meaningless genocide but they were large scale human experimentation.

Gideon had used those villages and towns’ entire card apprentices populations as test subjects, chasing a way to perfect the flawed immortality granted by his origin card. Millions of innocent lives, reduced to trials and errors in a pursuit that never once succeeded.

He had only stopped after becoming a devil merchant, shifting his search elsewhere—into the devil merchant code and the depths of the dark realms, hoping to find an answer where the card world had failed him.

When I realized the earlier Gideon Grim hadn’t been scared out of his wits but that his flesh suit had simply malfunctioned, I almost felt I owed him an apology for calling him a coward.

Then I learned that he had slaughtered millions of innocent souls in his pursuit of immortality. I nearly slapped my thigh and laughed. Of course he was a coward. Only someone terrified of facing death would go to such lengths to escape it.

”All right. Release every card apprentice you’ve tainted with that disgusting ability, and I’ll grant you a painless death,” I told Gideon Grim. I wanted to avoid turning him into my calamity daughter gem if I could.

”Hahaha... and why would I do that?” the worm sneered, its voice dripping with contempt. ”Those people are the only reason I’m still alive.”

Exactly the answer I expected from someone like him.

Shaking my head, I summoned a primordial calamity daughter gem and flicked it at the worm. Instead of sinking in and merging with its body, the gem bounced off. For a brief moment, a shimmering, multicolored veil flared across its skin at the point of impact—then vanished as the worm burrowed into the ground and disappeared.