Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 3001: Heathen Stone Lab

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Dark Realm, Gelid Alps, Snow Elven Region, Frosell District, Frosnow City

“How did I find out about your lab? That’s the least of your worries, my dear Crown Prince—oh, sorry, force of habit, I should address you as the Snow Elven Empyrean now,” I mocked him mercilessly, letting the weight of his patricide hang heavily in the frozen air. My tone snapped instantly from dark amusement to cold, unyielding authority, ordering him, “Leave here now. Do not interfere with the Frosling mass migration, and release those half-bloods in my care.”

Despite the harsh, biting words, the Crown Prince’s expression remained entirely indifferent and incredibly calm.

The brief, chaotic panic that had gripped his previous vessel was entirely gone. The reason was simple: a split second ago, the real Thalorien had just received a secure transmission back from the Crown Princess in the royal palace. Learning that she was completely safe, sound, and uncompromised, his hyper-logical mind had snapped right back together. He was far more collected than he had been even a minute earlier.

He continued to stare directly into my eyes, a faint, chilling smirk touching the edges of his frozen lips.

“Now, why would I do that?” Thalorien’s proxy asked smoothly with his voice steady and devoid of anger. “From where I stand, I seem to be holding all the cards. What good is a thief if he can’t even break into the house? You get what I am getting at, right? Even if you are at my doorstep, all you can do is merely bark outside my walls.”

“Hahaha!”

I threw my head back and laughed out loud, the sound echoing wildly across the Frosnow skies. I didn’t laugh just to undermine the Crown Prince’s newfound confidence, or to mock his belief in his absolute safety.

I laughed because the exact moment he finished speaking, the telepathic feed from my clone pinged my consciousness.

He thought his house was secure. He thought his fortress was impenetrable. But my clone hadn’t just reached the doorstep—it had already successfully infiltrated his sanctuary.

The Crown Prince’s ultimate, multi-millennial secret lab wasn’t hidden in some natural mountain or a random pocket dimension. The paranoid bastard had hidden it directly underneath the Snow Capital’s most heavily guarded, iron-clad facility: the Heathen Stone Prison.

This mad snow elven scientist hadn’t just built his lab underneath a prison; he had literally carved the entire facility out of a single, ginormous block of Heathen Stone.

The ambient mental strain and soul-crushing pressure radiated by Heathen Stone scales exponentially with its mass. The sheer volume accumulated in this subterranean vault was more than enough to drive a veteran Ruler-class powerhouse completely insane under prolonged exposure. It was a natural zone of absolute cognitive death.

Yet, Thalorien didn’t just survive there; he comfortably manipulated his clones remotely to conduct all of his complex genetic and alchemical operations.

He had achieved this impossible immunity through sheer, industrialized cruelty. He had systematically sacrificed millions of his own perfect clones to the stone’s maddening radiation, letting their minds shatter in agony over and over again, until thousands of them finally began to mutate and develop a mental resistance to the psychological pressure. By continuously reabsorbing those broken, resistant proxies into his primary soul, he systematically inherited their combined biological immunity.

Now, every single new clone gestated through Snowomb was born with a thousand-fold resistance to the Heathen Stone. Because of this horrific, self-inflicted evolutionary ladder, he and his proxies could function inside a mountain of conceptual mental poison as if they were working in a regular, everyday laboratory.

This was the true, unshakable source of the arrogance that led him to boast about holding all the cards. He trusted with absolute certainty that no sane intruder—not even a peak Ruler-class entity—would ever dare hunt him down inside a literal block of Heathen Stone. Anyone foolish enough to try would have their mind violently fractured within seconds, leaving them completely paralyzed and ripe to be effortlessly captured by the capital’s Ruler-class array formation.

Unlike regular entities tied down by the singular laws of flesh, my clone possessed a dual presence, allowing it to exist simultaneously in both the spiritual and physical planes. It borrowed the high-level concept of Agent Lois’s ability to instantly teleport using an opponent’s spiritual channel to infiltrate the Heathen Stone Lab.

My clone had simply entered the parallel spiritual plane and piggybacked directly onto the spiritual channel of one of the clones working deep inside the laboratory, and slipped right past the physical obstructions and security. The moment it materialized inside the spiritual channel, it utilized the Myriad Devil Transformation to perfectly mimic the Crown Prince’s signature, flawlessly blending into his automated workforce.

As for the mind-shattering mental pollution of the massive Heathen Stone? To a hybrid celestial like me, that psychological pressure felt like nothing more than a tiny, slightly annoying migraine.

“I am already inside, dumbass!” I grinned, my voice cutting through the sky like a whip.

The moment the words left my mouth, the Crown Prince’s calm, indifferent expression instantly solidified into pure, unadulterated horror.

He didn’t panic because he suddenly decided to trust my word. He panicked because the complex, multi-threaded soul ledger inside his primary brain just experienced a sudden, violent drop—he had completely lost connection to one of his clones working inside the absolute isolation of the Heathen Stone lab. The proxy’s feed hadn’t just gone dark due to some random spatial interference—which was impossible inside the absolute isolation of the Heathen Stone vault. It could only mean one thing: it had been instantaneously and silently executed.

The Crown Prince didn’t hurriedly fling himself into a reckless counterattack out in the open sky. Instead, his primary brain went into absolute overdrive, commanding his remaining proxies below to systematically sweep every square inch of the Heathen Stone lab for the intruder. Time was of the essence, and he knew it. To accelerate the dragnet, he aggressively tapped into his Snowomb ability, rapidly producing dozens of fresh, hyper-alert clones to flood his labs corridors and finish the search quicker.

However, no matter how many times they swept the laboratories, and no matter what advanced tracking abilities and arrays they deployed, they found absolutely no sign of the intruder. My clone was a ghost in the machine, shifting seamlessly through their spiritual channels and using the Myriad Devil Transformation to hide.