Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 3006: Hostages

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

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

“Silence,” I uttered softly.

With that single word, the Reality Isolation Seal clamped down like a vice. In a fraction of a second, the elderly Ruler-class general and his two elite squads were cleanly severed from their respective semi-Ruler and Ruler-class prowess. Their grand frost rules withered to nothing, their weapons grew heavy, and they were left entirely powerless, suspended in the dead vacuum of my sub-reality bottle.

Leaving them trapped in their silent cage, I stepped out of the seal and materialized back into the crisp, open air space of Frosnow City.

Below me, the massive exodus of the Froslings was proceeding flawlessly, approaching its absolute final phase. The major hurdle was cleared. Now, all that remained on the ledger was freeing the thousand half-bloods. Hopefully, the Crown Prince was still capable of processing baseline logic and wouldn’t force my hand to completely massacre the Snow Elven Capital just to secure their release.

Then, there was the darker question of the experimental subjects used to breed those half-bloods in the first place.

According to Sansa’s continuous deep-dives into the memories of the Crown Prince, there were still thousands of Froslings and Snow Elves locked away in the massive subterranean caverns deep underneath the city where the half-bloods were housed before they broke out of it and moved to the Heathen Stone Prison.

Learning the sheer scale of the horrific, industrialized cruelty happening down there made my blood boil. A volatile part of me genuinely wanted to level the palace, tear down the Crown Prince, and systematically slaughter every single Snow Elf who had ever supported his plans.

But I reined the anger back in. I didn’t want my grand debut in the Dark Realm to be highlighted for the wrong reasons.

I wanted my entry into this theater to be remembered as a legendary rescue of the Frosling race, not a mindless, genocidal slaughter of the Snow Elves. Building a reputation as a highly calculative, ruthless merchant would ensure I was respected, feared, and welcomed with open arms by factions across the entire myriad realm. Becoming a genocidal maniac, on the other hand, would just unite the semi-ruler and ruler-class empires to hunt me down as a rogue threat.

You know what they say: it is infinitely easier to rob a single rich thief than to rob hundreds of houses across the neighborhood.

Reputation matters—even in a cut-throat place like the Dark Realm where they constantly preach that might makes right. True power isn’t just about how many bodies you can drop; it’s about controlling the board so perfectly that your enemies never truly know your bottom line or upper limit, because once they did, it was game over.

So, while the paranoid Snow Elven Crown Prince was frantically fortifying his position inside the Heathen Stone Prison, bracing for an imminent assault on the half-bloods’ holding cells, my clone was nowhere near it.

Instead, moving like a ghost beneath a seamless illusion, my clone had slipped directly into the heart of the capital disguised as a Snow Elf Nobility. It was following a hyper-precise set of coordinates provided by Sansa, searching for the absolute primary core of the Snow Capital’s grand defensive array formation. If my upcoming negotiations with Thalorien failed, I didn’t plan on fighting my way out through his armies; I planned on hijacking the keys to his entire capital.

With the sudden, mysterious death of their old Empyrean, the ongoing chaos of the Frosling rebellion, and the terrifying threat of the half-bloods attacking the city from within, the security surrounding the array core was tighter than it had been in millennia. The central chamber was completely locked down, swarming with elite guards, high-tier sensory matrices, and layers of physical barriers designed to repel an invading army.

However, bypassing those hyper-advanced layers of security wasn’t even a challenge for my clone.

It didn’t need to pick locks or break shields. Operating from the liminal space of the spiritual plane, my clone simply hopped seamlessly from one guard’s spiritual channel to the next, past every physical checkpoint. Within minutes, it smoothly slipped inside the restricted vault, materialized in the shadows of the massive, pulsing array core, and quietly began laying the groundwork for me to take over the capital.

Meanwhile, exactly as I expected, the sudden and complete vanishing of his elite reinforcements threw the Crown Prince into another tactical recalculation. Realizing his vanguard had simply ceased to exist out in the open sky, he sent yet another proxy out to meet me—desperately trying to figure out my bottom line, or more likely, trying to stall for time until the remaining Ruler-class powerhouses of the empire could arrive to reinforce his position.

I stared coldly at the approaching clone. Just like the last one I had stored away, this vessel was born from the pristine, snow of the Winter Valley, its flesh radiating that same frost plague aura.

He stopped a safe distance away, his eyes locking onto my mask with a calculating, dead focus.

“I know you didn’t kill them,” the Crown Prince said, his voice carrying the smooth, chilling resonance of the valley’s frost. “Their soul candles back in the royal ancestral hall are still lit, vibrant and completely unbroken. So… a master of primordial curses is resorting to taking hostages now?”

“Hostages?” I let out a low, mocking chuckle that resonated softly through the crisp air, my dark-red hybrid aura shifting slightly. “Your Highness, your ability to twist reality to suit your narrative is truly commendable.”

“First, let’s talk about the poor souls that are still trapped in the cave under the capital serving as a breeding machine for your inhumane experiments,” I said, my voice dropping its playful edge, cutting through his frost aura like steel. “Release them along with the Half-Bloods while I’m still asking nicely.”

The Winter Valley clone’s icy eyes narrowed, his rigid composure fracturing for a fraction of a second at the mention of the subterranean breeding caves. He hadn’t expected me to know the exact layout of his darkest operation. This resolve to capture me only grew the more he interacted with me.