Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 3112: Outsider

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Lil’ Red Storm Realm

As one of the greatest researchers of his generation, Thalorien had spent countless years studying races, bloodlines, Rule Streams, realms, and unusual lifeforms. He had built his reputation by taking seemingly impossible phenomena and reducing them to understandable principles.

Yet those very principles had become a cage. His knowledge told him what a Celestial was supposed to be. His knowledge told him what a World-Devouring Tree was supposed to be. His knowledge told him what an array formation was supposed to be. And because he understood those things so well, he couldn’t imagine them existing outside the boundaries he had already established.

Dalia shattered those boundaries simply by existing. She wasn’t one thing borrowing characteristics from another. She appeared to genuinely possess all of them. The Celestial wasn’t concealing the World-Devouring Tree. The World-Devouring Tree wasn’t merely being used as a vessel. The Celestial array formation wasn’t simply a tool being used, it was alive and a part of them. They were intertwined, interdependent, one existence expressing itself through several fundamentally different forms.

Thalorien suddenly realized something almost humiliating. He had spent his entire life believing that his greatest advantage was his ability to comprehend the unknown. But standing before Dalia, he discovered that his imagination itself had limits.

He could observe her, he could analyze her, he could identify individual components of her existence, but he couldn’t comprehend how those components could coexist without destroying one another.

For perhaps the first time in his long life, Thalorien wasn’t facing a phenomenon he couldn’t explain because he lacked information. He couldn’t explain it because his imagination refused to accept that such a thing could exist. Somehow that realization for him was far more frightening than Dalia slowly devouring him to death.

Therefore, Thalorien didn’t give up. His entire race was counting on him with the last Empyrean being murdered. Thalorien’s expression grew increasingly solemn, realizing the weight of having created patricide.

Pushing away the distracting thoughts he began to focus on the matter at hand. He tried to understand Dalia to defeat her, as that was all he was capable of right now.

However, the more possibilities he eliminated, the more impossible the remaining answer became. There shouldn’t have been any path for Dalia to achieve this. She didn’t have the native races. She didn’t have a developed civilization. She didn’t even have the mature realm foundation expected of a Celestial of her age. Yet she had somehow accomplished something that even ancient Celestials would struggle to achieve.

Thalorien suddenly felt a strange chill. For all his knowledge of World-Devouring Trees, perhaps he had been asking the wrong question. The question wasn’t how had Dalia defeated a World-Devouring Tree? It was far more terrifying than that. What kind of existence could defeat a World-Devouring Tree and then integrate it into itself?

Thalorien stared at Dalia solemnly. For a moment, he genuinely considered the possibility that she had accomplished all of this herself. Then he rejected it. That was even more absurd. Someone had helped her. There was no other reasonable explanation.

It had to be the ancient ruler class force that had abducted his Froslings and Half Breeds. Perhaps they weren’t even native to the Dark Realm considering how they were experimenting with a World Devouring Tree. Thalorien’s thoughts immediately turned toward the ancient Ruler-class forces that existed beyond the territories controlled by the major Dark Races.

The Myriad Realms were simply too vast for the Dark Races to be the first or only civilizations to explore them. Compared to some of the ancient races Thalorien had encountered during his travels, the Dark Races were practically children.

Those ancient races possessed histories stretching back to eras the modern Dark Races could barely imagine. Unlike the Dark Races, many of them had little interest in expanding their territories or roaming the Myriad Realms in search of resources. They remained within their own domains, rarely interacting with outsiders.

During their expeditions, however, the Dark Races had encountered quite a few such civilizations. A few were friendly, some were merely indifferent, but most were so reclusive that they simply refused to communicate.

The Demon Merchant Code had extended invitations to many of those ancient civilizations, inviting them to participate in its search for a path toward transcendence. A few had accepted but most had refused.

Thalorien had always considered those ancient races mysterious, but now his suspicion was becoming increasingly convincing. Could she belong to one of them?

The region around the Lil’ Red Storm Realm had been registered through the Demon Merchant Code. That meant this wasn’t some completely isolated corner of the Myriad Realms. Someone had acquired the rights to this territory. Someone powerful enough to conduct experiments here with a World-Devouring Tree and a Celestial without worrying about offending the Librarian.

Thalorien’s expression became increasingly grim. If his guess was correct, then the existence standing before him wasn’t merely a strange Celestial. She was probably the product of an experiment conducted by an ancient Ruler-class civilization that had knowledge far beyond his own.

That would explain everything he couldn’t understand. The impossible fusion. The living Celestial array formation, the World-Devouring Tree, the very strange nature of Dalia’s existence. But another question bothered him even more. Why the Froslings? Why his Half-Bloods?

Thalorien gritted his teeth while his mind explored other possibilities. What did that ancient force want with them? Had they noticed something about the Half-Bloods that he had overlooked despite spending millennia studying them? Had they discovered a potential he hadn’t even realized existed?

The thought made his heart sink. He had spent thousands of years trying to make the Snow Elves a true Ruler-class race. The half-bloods were the culmination of that research, the greatest hope he had ever created for his people. If some ancient civilization had looked at his creations and immediately recognized a potential that he had failed to see, then what did that say about him?