Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 3012: Tarnished Glacier Of The Black Sea

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Void, Hundred Frost Domain, Frost Maze

Now that I had faced actual, combat-hardened Ruler-class entities in real-time, the stark reality of my situation set in: I had drastically been underestimating them.

They weren’t just repositories of high-tier raw power; they possessed an absurd array of esoteric means, hidden trump cards, and combat experience accumulated over millennia of surviving the Dark Realm’s brutal social order. Every single individual who managed to climb to this realm was, by definition, the most ruthless, adaptive survivor of their generation.

One-on-one, I could confidentially take them on. I could probably even systematically slaughter the mercenaries and the Snow Elven Elder given the right setup. But the Snow Elven Crown Prince? Thalorien was an entirely different story.

Back when he was nothing more than a novice, newly ascended Ruler-class entity, the bastard had the absolute audacity to try and conquer the Winter Valley—one of the thirteen deadliest zones in the entire Dark Realm—all by himself.

The real kicker was that his suicidal campaign had actually been more successful than almost anyone else who had ever dared to step foot into that frozen abyss by themselves. Yet, he still failed, unearthing a terrifying, lesser-known truth at an unimaginably steep price.

He had barely managed to drag his soul back alive, forced to hole himself up inside the Heathen Stone environment just to survive. Then let go of his Snow Elven pride, dilute his own people’s bloodline with the ‘filthy’ bloodline of the Froslings to sustain his experiments in hopes of making the Snow Elven race a true ruler-class force.

What I was ultimately getting at was a cold, pragmatic truth: right now, in a straightforward, head-on war against their combined might, I couldn’t win. It wasn’t that my realm was just too lacking, but means and experience were too.

So, I had no problem adapting. If I couldn’t crush them with brute force, I would simply have to outsmart, outmaneuver, and play them like violins—even if my methods came off as completely cowardly and shameless to some.

But my charade was completely seen through by the maze.

Just as I was beginning to think my act was a success, the spatial geometry around us violently spasmed. The mercenaries, who had been casually standing around my limp flame covered form, suddenly jerked backward. Moving with explosive, professional instincts, they leaped a few steps back and instantly surrounded my body, weapons drawn and auras flaring, as I lay there engulfed in the fiercely burning phantom flame.

Though there had been a slight delay, the living maze had ultimately seen right through my trick and mentally screamed a warning to his forces.

The icy corridor fractured immediately. Sensing that a chaotic, high-tier clash was about to detonate, the Snow Elven Elder and his elite squads slowly backed away, their figures melting straight into the rearranging icy walls, leaving the mercenaries with me.

The mercenaries stared down at my form with intense, calculating caution. The Phantom haze devil’s eyes narrowed as a massive surge of purple haze suddenly flared out from its body, violently feeding the phantom flame that was still haunting me to test my reactions.

Yet, looking at my perfectly still, unbothered form beneath the phantom flames, a flicker of doubt crossed its face. It turned its head slightly, staring directly at the shifting ice of the maze’s walls, and muttered aloud, “Are you sure?”

Clearly, neither the mercenaries nor the old elven elder seemed to see through my trick. But for some reason, the maze itself could.

Standing there under the heavy scrutiny of the surrounding devils, the question of how this labyrinth had so easily tracked my original body earlier popped back into my head. The pieces weren’t adding up based on what I knew.

But then, a realization clicked.

I recalled an exotic rare item, the Tarnished Glacier of the Black Sea. It was famous across the myriad realms for one absolute, terrifying property: it highlighted the fundamental flaws in all objects, arrays, and living beings.

If someone were to look through a polished shard of that tarnished ice, the inherent weaknesses, structural gaps, and spiritual discrepancies of whatever they targeted would be laid completely bare. Crafters often used tiny pieces of it like microscopic lenses to identify hidden imperfections in their work before forging.

However, they were astronomically rare and expensive. Only the absolute top-tier soul crafters in the Dark Realm could even dream of affording them, and even then, their scarce availability made them nearly impossible to acquire on the open market.

If the Snow Elven Crown Prince had used his proprietary Snowomb ability directly on the unique snow of the Tarnished Glacier, he wouldn’t just have a rare artifact—he would have gestated an entire, specialized clone carrying the ability of the tarnished snow itself. Integrated directly into this maze domain, that specific clone would act as a magnifying glass, effortlessly spotting the subtle flaw in my clone-swapping technique and immediately identifying that I was faking my incapacitation under the phantom haze poison.

Realizing that any further trickery wasn’t going to work against the surveillance of the Tarnished Snow clone, I stopped playing dead.

I stood up straight, snapping my eyes open as I unleashed my innate calamity: the World-Devouring Plague.

The illusionary purple flames covering my body didn’t just extinguish—they were instantly swallowed whole, violently consumed and replaced by an expanding, deep-red mist. The moment the mist touched the air, it surged outward like a tidal wave of microscopic predators. It slammed into the living ice walls, the floors, the ceilings, and the rearranging staircases. The moment it made contact with the Crown Prince’s specialized clone-matter, it began its terrifying, exponential loop: devour, replicate, devour, replicate…

The icy walls vibrated as if the living maze were screaming. The ice walls groaned as the crimson plague systematically dismantled the domain’s structural rules, turning Thalorien’s proud maze into raw fuel for my own power.

Instantly sensing the apocalyptic threat radiating from the World-Devouring Plague, the mercenaries retreated fiercely. They bounded backward, desperately trying to phase through the corridor walls to escape the crimson fog. But the walls refused to take them in like it did with the Snow Elven Elder and his hidden squads.

I stood at the epicenter of the expanding red mist, my celestial aura fully unfurled, crackling with the centralized power of my entire thousand curse incarnation battle array formation. I looked across the corridor at the panicked faces of the devils and the distant, pale complexions of the elves melting out of the dying ice.

I let out a soft, echoing laugh.

“Thank you for shifting the fight into the void,” I said, my voice carrying the absolute, crushing authority of a true Ruler-class force. “Without the surveillance of the celestial will, I can finally unleash and use my full, unbridled prowess.”