Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 3009: Hundred Frost Domains – I

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

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

The two devils worked in perfect, terrifying tandem.

The jackfruit-skinned devil had actually caught me completely off guard. I had been in the middle of stealthily deploying my Reality Isolation Seal, planning to wrap this entire mess up nicely before the Snow Elven Crown Prince’s clone army could arrive and lock down the area. But the brute had freaking punched a hole straight through reality, shattering the local space like cheap glass and throwing us all into the void. The sheer, raw physical force of the disruption had completely torn apart the isolation seal I was setting up.

Capitalizing on that split-second destabilization, the four-eyed devil had sneaked right into my blind spot. He mobilized his absolute strongest spiritual move, aiming to use his overwhelming spiritual strength to force my consciousness to briefly shut down, giving his team the perfect window to capture me.

Normally, no matter how monstrous his spiritual strength was, it wouldn’t have stood a snowball’s chance in hell of overpowering my consciousness. My soul was completely armored by the protective seed cover of the World Calamity Tree, tightly enclosing my mutated ego gem against any external intrusion, be it spiritual or physical.

But as his hypnotic command slammed into my mental barriers, a cruel thought struck me.

Instead of blocking the attack, I purposely lowered the defenses of my mutated ego gem. I opened the gates and actively pulled the devil’s invasive consciousness deep into my mind, practically roll-out the red carpet to lead him straight toward my inner sanctum.

He thought he was breaking into an open vault. Instead, his spiritual avatar stumbled right into the absolute center of a hidden slaughterhouse.

Waiting for him in the deep recesses of my consciousness was the massive, terrifying battle array formation formed by my primordial ethereal spirits as Ruler-class curse incarnations, allowing them to efficiently integrated together to grant me my current peak prowess—and right now, they were all staring down at his invading soul signature with hungry, malicious eyes.

Before the four-eyed devil could even process the horror of the trap he had walked into, my thousand-plus curse incarnations moved as one. A synchronized tidal wave of raw, primordial curse energy converged on his invading consciousness, instantly shattering his spirit into absolute nothingness.

Outside, in the physical void, the lethal backlash hit his physical form immediately. His four eyes went blank and blood sprayed from his nose as his nervous system collapsed.

I didn’t give his team a single second to react. In a flash of dark-red light, my physical body split into five identical selves. Four of them surged forward like shadows, wrapping around the trembling, brain-dead mercenary, physically locking his limbs in an unbreakable, crushing hold. Operating with a collective, singular mind, the four clones simultaneously initiated a total, irreversible sacrifice of their physical structures.

A grey, calcifying curse erupted from their skin. Within a heartbeat, the four clones petrified entirely, transforming into solid, indestructible stone statues that completely interlocked with the mercenary’s physical body, petrifying him right along with them.

The resulting massive, macabre sculpture of stone and dead flesh drifted away into the boundless void like an untethered kite.

But before the remaining mercenaries could even scream, the horizon of the void illuminated. The Crown Prince’s specialized, Ruler-class clone army had finally arrived.

Moving with terrifying, instantaneous precision, the hundreds of clones arranged themselves in a complex, shifting geometric pattern. The temperature plummeted nearing absolute zero as their individual domains interlocked, creating a massive domain that was once considered theoretical.

The clones transformed themselves entirely, their bodies expanding and shifting into towering, translucent living ice walls and stairs that shot up across the chaotic space.

Within a fraction of a second, a colossal, mind-bending Ice Maze Domain materialized, violently dragging us all deep into its endless, freezing corridors.

I tried to use my celestial force to break the spatial pull, but the sheer, crushing weight of the domain was irresistible. This was the true horror of Thalorien’s cultivation method.

Because every single one of these ruler-class clones originated from the exact same primary soul, their synchronization was completely effortless and flawless. There was zero lag, zero hesitation, and zero ideological divergence. They could combine multiple same domains into one big domain, that was otherwise only theoretically possible on paper, achieving a perfect, amplified output that no regular squad of independent Ruler-class devils could ever hope to replicate.

The maze walls pulsed with volatile elemental properties—some walls radiating the virulent Glacier Fever of the Winter Valley, others burning with black frost or flaking with cursed snow.

I landed lightly on the freezing floor of one of the massive maze corridors, my single remaining primary body steadying its stance. The remaining three mercenaries and the jackfruit-skinned leader had been separated from me by the shifting walls, scattered across the colossal labyrinth.

Standing in the frozen maze domain, I looked around at a shifting, architectural nightmare. Towering ice walls and massive staircases rearranged themselves continuously with a complete disregard for physics, offering no sense of direction, north, south, up, or down. It was a fluid labyrinth suspended entirely within the chaotic logic of the void.

The most disturbing part about this specialized domain wasn’t the shifting terrain, though—it was the absolute information asymmetry. Its allies, my remaining enemies, knew exactly where I was at every given millisecond, while I had no idea where they were hiding, let alone where or when they planned to orchestrate their next ambush.

Usually, a blind spot like this wouldn’t even pose a minor problem for me thanks to my passive conceptual rule: If you can see me, I can see you.

But Thalorien had built a clever loophole into this formation. The mercenaries and his remaining clones weren’t technically looking at me directly; instead, the living maze itself acted as a massive, singular sensory organ, feeding my real-time coordinates straight into their minds.