Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 2929: Petra’s Dilemma

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Card World, Southern Region, Blossom District, Sky Blossom City

Standing in the middle of what could only be described as a miniature Sky Calamity, I finally understood why every instinct I possessed had been urging me to either shut Petra up or run for my life.

Fortunately, nothing truly disastrous happened.

At the last moment, Aero appeared to realize what he was doing and tried to suppress his emotional outburst. Unfortunately, the attempt was about as effective as a person trying to stop a sneeze halfway through.

Some reactions were simply involuntary. Once triggered, they couldn’t be stopped. At best, they could be lessened. That seemed to be exactly what Aero had managed to do.

The endless chain of explosions gradually weakened instead of escalating further. The expanding spatial tear slowed its growth, and the terrifying suction from the void stopped intensifying. The catastrophe was still horrifying by any reasonable standard, but it remained contained within a scale everyone present could survive. Because it all played out high above the blood storm clouds, the city escaped completely untouched—except for a few occasional thunderous roars.

Even so, the realization left me uneasy. Because I could clearly see what would have happened if Aero hadn’t attempted to restrain himself. The explosion would have continued feeding upon itself, converting ever-greater volumes of atmospheric gases into heat and thunder energy. The resulting Sky Calamity would have rapidly grown beyond the limits of my One Thousand Curse Fields.

Not because my field was weak. But because there would eventually be no battlefield left to contain. The curse fields would have been shattered by the escalating disaster, space itself would have collapsed under the strain, and the rest of us would have been swept into the void before we could properly react.

Meanwhile, Aero would have simply reformed afterward as if nothing had happened. That was the truly absurd part. To everyone else, such a disaster was a life-or-death crisis. To Aero, it was little more than an emotional outburst.

A particularly violent tantrum. One that could accidentally tear open reality and throw Supreme Beings into the void. As the explosions gradually subsided and the shattered space began stabilizing, I found myself silently revising my evaluation of the Gas Supreme.

Aero wasn’t merely powerful; he was the kind of entity that made power itself seem unfair. Then again, every supreme being within the confines of the Card World left you with that exact same feeling.

However, what I had witnessed so far was only the tip of the iceberg.

The fumes, smoke, and residual gases produced by the explosions began to gather together. They swirled through the air like living creatures, twisting and condensing into a humanoid figure. Flames flickered beneath dark clouds of vapor as the shape rapidly stabilized.

Moments later, Aero stood before us once again.

This new form was darker than the previous one, composed of storm clouds, smoke, and glowing embers. Yet despite its ominous appearance, he remained just as majestic and absurdly beautiful as before. It was as though destruction itself had decided to take human form.

”Aqualas, I’m sorry,” Aero immediately apologized upon reforming and tried to defend himself. ”I didn’t do it on purpose. It was Petra. She provoked me...”

He sounded genuinely aggrieved. Anyone arriving late would have thought he was the victim rather than the person who had just detonated half the battlefield.

More impressively, neither the ongoing explosion nor the violent suction from the void seemed to affect him in the slightest. Aero spoke as casually as if he were just returning from a short walk.

The more I learned about his abilities, the more a troubling conclusion formed in my mind. Aero wasn’t merely the atmospheric gases. He was the embodiment of the Card World’s atmosphere itself.

After all, a planet’s atmosphere was nothing more than an endless collection of gases. The clouds, winds, storms, thunder, pressure systems, and countless weather phenomena we all experience, all originated from those gases. And Aero was those gases.

It would explain why my Soul Pupils and One Thousand Curse Fields had struggled to identify him. Trying to locate Aero within the atmosphere was like trying to locate a single drop of water within an ocean. That was to say if we were in the ocean, I wouldn’t be able to locate Aqualas either. However, Petra was different.

Unlike water and atmospheric gases, the ground was relatively stationary from our perspective. It wasn’t constantly flowing, dispersing, reforming, and mixing with the rest of the world every second.

Because of that, my Soul Pupils would immediately detect Petra’s presence. No matter how deeply she hid within mountains, continents, or the planet’s crust, there would always be a distinguishable target for me to focus on. She couldn’t blend into the world as naturally as Aqualas could with the oceans or Aero could with the atmosphere.

At least, that was the theory. Of course, Petra would probably argue that burying an entire continent on top of someone was a perfectly valid substitute for stealth. Still, from a purely practical standpoint, she had lost to the other two.

Back to the matter at hand, Aero wasn’t inside the atmosphere. He was the atmosphere. The realization made him seem even more troublesome than Petra and Aqualas combined.

Fortunately, Aero didn’t appear to possess complete control over his element. The weather patterns, storms, and seasonal changes associated with him seemed far more connected to his emotions than his conscious will. His powers behaved less like tools and more like natural extensions of his feelings.

When he was calm, the world remained calm. When he was angry, storms formed. And when he lost control... Entire civilizations could disappear beneath a Sky Calamity. Suddenly, countless historical disasters made a lot more sense.

I was willing to bet that, much like in Aqualas’s case, very few people had ever seriously considered killing Aero. Or perhaps they had considered it and quickly realized what a terrible idea it was. The consequences of removing the embodiment of the world’s atmosphere were difficult to imagine and probably better left unexplored.

In this case, compared to those two, Petra seemed to have drawn the short end of the stick.

After all, Aqualas was an ocean, Aero was the atmosphere, and Petra was the planet that carried them both. Yet neither of them was killed even once. Meanwhile, Petra had been hunted down a few times over. Not because she was weak, but because her death brought landslides, earthquakes, or at worst a continental drift — nothing apocalyptic, the world’s celestial force would never allow anything worse.