Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 3008: Ancient Ruler Class Force

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

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

Sensing the heavy spatial energy and massive vibrations in the lower atmosphere suddenly drop dead silent—as if the frantic, realm-wide exodus had never even been there to begin with—the embarrassed clone of the Crown Prince stared at me in sheer, unadulterated shock.

It was statistically impossible. He had calculated the logistics based on the highest standards of the Dark Realm; he expected the migration to be midway through its cycle at best. Never in his wildest, most paranoid calculations did he expect an entire enslaved population in the Gelid Alps to be completely teleported out of his grasp in such a terrifyingly small window of time.

With the spatial disturbances gone and the air clearing, the ambient Snow Spirits of the realm rushed back into the Frosell District’s cities. The real-time sensory data flooded straight into Thalorien’s network, confirming the bleak, empty truth: the streets, the mines, and the quarters were completely devoid of Froslings.

I wasn’t lying. They were gone.

In that single, quiet moment, the Crown Prince’s evaluation of me, my power, and the hidden identity behind my mask grew astronomically.

Undertaking a massive, multi-layered migration of an entire race in such a tight timeframe wouldn’t have been possible with mere luck; it required a staggering, bottomless reservoir of wealth and esoteric knowledge. He was now more certain than ever that the entity standing in front of him wasn’t just a rogue anomaly—I was being backed by an ancient Ruler-class force.

Any regular, high-tier Ruler-class faction could technically fork out the sheer amount of wealth and resources required to open those teleportation hubs. But the knowledge? To cleanly migrate a whole race out of the heavily restricted, elementally locked Gelid Alps straight to a secure, completely untraceable secret location, all while entirely bypassing their tracking networks, that too without making use of the proprietary functions of the Devil Merchant Code?

To Thalorien’s hyper-educated mind, that meant only one thing. The spatial mathematics and dimensional arrays my faction wielded were fundamentally equal to the very cosmic knowledge used in the creation of the Devil Merchant Code itself.

Though he was absolutely certain about this terrifying assumption, the Crown Prince still wasn’t willing to back off.

His hyper-fixated mind simply couldn’t comprehend what an ancient Ruler-class force could possibly want with the Froslings. Because even if you completely took the lethal Glacier Fever and the horrific monsters born from it out of the equation, the forbidden Winter Valley was simply not a territory meant for the living. It was not for the taking.

Thalorien had paid a devastating, unspeakable price and was now permanently reduced to living inside protective Heathen Stone environments just to learn that brutal truth first-hand. Surely, an ancient Ruler-class force should already know that truth.

Be that as it may, the Crown Prince’s strategic target shifted on a dime. He completely abandoned his original plan of capturing me to force a return of the Frosling slaves or pry into my true identity. Instead, his greedy, political mind envisioned a new plan: he wanted to secure my body as a high-value bargaining chip to open a direct negotiation with the ancient ruler class force backing me.

He intended to use my life to demand staggering astronomical compensation and a portion of the Frosling slaves returned to his labs—even if it meant he had to swallow his royal pride and sign a binding soul oath promising that the Snow Elves would never attempt to explore or conquer the Winter Valley again.

Thanks to Sansa continuously reading the Crown Prince’s raw memories and feeding them straight into the Hive Spirit, I was getting a live, real-time update of his frantic thought process and the terrifying reasons driving it.

And I had to admit… the raw, unfiltered truth Thalorien carried in his head regarding the deep horrors of the Winter Valley made me completely pause. It forced me to seriously reconsider my original blueprint to establish my very first operational base in the Dark Realm inside that frozen void. If a Ruler-class entity of the Snow Elven Crown Prince had been broken so badly he had to hide in a bunker of Heathen Stones just to breathe, then the Winter Valley held secrets that Froslings couldn’t overcome.

I should have known that the thirteen deadliest zones of the Dark Realm were not without their terrifying reputation. Very little was known about these places even in the Infinity Library, and even less was known to the common populace. Only those with true strength and ancient heritage understood just how apocalyptic those thirteen forbidden territories actually were.

The legendary ancestors who had managed to create an almost transcendent-level living spell like the Devil Merchant Code had themselves failed to conquer those thirteen zones.That fact alone should have told me everything I needed to know before I even began planning a campaign there.

However, I didn’t have any plans to completely put a hold on my plans without exploring the Winter Valley myself. I needed to see it with my own eyes.

But before I could chart a course for the Winter Valley, I had to wrap things up here in Frosnow City.

“I didn’t pay you guys to ask questions! Just capture him already!” the Crown Prince’s clone suddenly thundered, his patience entirely snapping as he screamed at the Ruler-class mercenary team his original had hired.

“You’re the boss,” the jackfruit-skinned devil grunted.

In the next microsecond, the devil didn’t just attack me—he violently slammed his fists together, shattering the foundational laws of local physics. The very space around us was instantly torn to shreds, and the entire battlefield was violently thrown out of Frosnow City’s airspace and dragged straight into the turbulent, pitch-black void of the chaotic spatial sea.

The spatial whiplash was immense. But before I could even steady my stance amidst the floating debris and crushing void pressure, a dark shadow flickered.

The red-skinned, four-eyed devil materialized directly behind my blind spot. His two pairs of unblinking eyes flared with a deep, hypnotic crimson light as a staggering wave of localized spiritual power slammed into my consciousness.

A commanding, authoritative voice violently detonated inside my mind:

‘Sleep!’

…

AN: An Ancient Ruler-class force refers to a Ruler-class organization whose lineage predates the establishment of the Devil Merchant Code.