Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 3146: The Perfect Baby Dilemma

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Azorheim, Temporal Cave Valley, Temporal Cave No. ES3030

After the universal love batch, I had to deal with another batch of lunatics: Card Apprentice couples who wanted to make absolutely certain their children would be born healthy and talented.

This batch was tricky for an entirely different reason because there were three kinds of couples mixed together.

The first were couples who couldn’t have children naturally because they had reached a sufficiently high realm that made it harder for them to sire a child. The second could have children perfectly fine, but they weren’t satisfied with simply having a healthy baby. They wanted to maximize their child’s talent from the very beginning. The third group consisted of pregnant women who were terrified that their unborn children might not be healthy enough or talented enough.

At first glance, the last two groups sounded incredibly superficial.

Who spends their hard-earned merits worrying about whether their unborn child is talented enough?

But after thinking about it, I could understand their reasoning.

This was an incredibly competitive world. Everyone wanted to give their children every advantage they could afford. If they had the resources to ensure their child was born healthier, possessed better talent, or had a stronger foundation, why wouldn’t they use them?

Their reasoning reminded me of something from Earth.

It was easy to criticize wealthy parents for spending enormous amounts of money on their children’s health and development, but if you gave any parent the same resources, most would probably make similar choices.

A mother from a wealthy family could receive regular medical examinations throughout her pregnancy, eat nutritious, protein-rich food, take whatever vitamins and supplements her body needed, and have access to the best doctors available.

A poor mother might have to make do with whatever food she could afford and simply pray that her child was born healthy.

Was it fair? That was a much bigger question, but didn’t matter here

From purely a parent’s point of view, I could understand the instinct behind it.

If you had the ability to give your child an advantage and chose not to use it, knowing someone else would, could you really expect yourself not to feel guilty later?

That was probably why these Card Apprentice couples were willing to spend their merits.

They weren’t necessarily trying to create some perfect little monster. Most simply wanted to make sure their child didn’t start life several steps behind everyone else.

Still, the lengths some of them were willing to go to reminded me of one particular lunatic.

Jill’s father and my father-in-law.

The Demigod Norley.

Once I started reading through these requests, I couldn’t help but think of him. Apparently, the desire to give one’s child every possible advantage wasn’t limited to parents. Some people could turn it into an obsession.

I believed this obsession wasn’t limited to Earth or the Card World. The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that parents across the Myriad Realms had been worrying about the same things for as long as intelligent life had existed. Every race had its own methods, traditions, medicines, rituals, and absurd superstitions surrounding pregnancy and childbirth.

So I had Dredre scour the Infinity Library for everything related to the subject.

But before I did anything, I established a few principles for myself.

First, I wasn’t going to play god.

I had no intention of creating some artificially perfect mother whose sole purpose was to give birth to a perfect baby. That was a rabbit hole I had absolutely no intention of entering. Demigod Norley and Crown Prince Thalorien were already more than enough of a cautionary tale for me.

The moment someone starts thinking they can engineer perfection, there is always another flaw to eliminate, another weakness to correct, and another improvement to make.

What I was actually looking for was much simpler.

I wanted to ensure that an unborn child was healthy, properly nourished, and receiving everything necessary for its development. That meant providing the mother with sufficient nutrients, energy, vitality, and spiritual nourishment throughout the pregnancy.

And I couldn’t just focus on the baby.

The mother’s condition mattered just as much.

Her physical condition directly affected the child growing inside her, but her mental and emotional state could also influence the development of the unborn child. A mother enduring constant exhaustion, pain, anxiety, or spiritual instability wasn’t merely suffering herself. Depending on the race and cultivation system involved, those conditions could potentially affect the child as well.

So if I was going to help, I wanted to protect both of them.

Second, my responsibility didn’t end the moment the baby was born healthy.

That was only the beginning.

A mother could survive pregnancy and childbirth while still being left exhausted, injured, malnourished, or mentally overwhelmed. Childbirth itself could be brutal. In some races, it was practically a battle between life and death. Even human women weren’t exactly walking away from it after pushing an entire baby out of their bodies feeling like they had just returned from a relaxing vacation.

There were physical injuries to consider, recovery of vitality, replenishment of nutrients and energy, hormonal changes, and the simple fact that caring for a newborn could drain an already exhausted mother even further.

So I wanted whatever solution I created to account for the mother after childbirth as well.

She needed care.

The baby needed care.

And neither should be treated as an afterthought simply because the delivery had gone successfully.

As for the matter of the babies’ talent that these Card Apprentices were obsessing over, I could guarantee that with the right upbringing and proper childhood development, their children would reach at least ten percent active Soul Control by the age of eight to twelve and become Card Apprentices.

Along with that, I would make one promise: I would never engineer a perfect baby for anyone else, including myself. And those disagreed, I needed to check into them to what else they disagreed with that was both morally and ethically questionable.