Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 3150: Physique: Infinitesimal Energy & Stamina Consumption

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

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

I was interested in these abominations, these nightmares, these… true evil, but not because I was fascinated by the kind of cruelty they could inflict on others or even on themselves. What interested me was their insane biology. The more I read, the more I understood why the Dark Races had spent so much time studying them despite everything they had done.

Their bodies were almost the exact opposite of their mentality.

Their minds seemed obsessed with living in the moment, while their bodies had evolved to survive for decades without food or water. Their metabolism was so absurdly efficient that they consumed only an infinitesimal amount of energy and stamina.

Once they had eaten their fill, the energy reserves could sustain them for years while they continued fighting, traveling, playing, or doing whatever else caught their attention without experiencing anything resembling normal exhaustion.

At first, that sounded like an incredible advantage. But, what happens when you give an organism that barely spends energy an unlimited supply of energy? It doesn’t become healthy. It becomes a walking problem.

Their bodies would constantly be carrying more energy than they could meaningfully expend. Their stamina would replenish faster than they could deplete it, and physical exhaustion, the natural mechanism that forced ordinary creatures to slow down, would barely exist for them. Even sleep could become optional, or in extreme cases, nearly impossible unless they deliberately suppressed their own biological functions.

Now imagine living like that for a thousand years.

Not for a week.

Not for a decade.

For centuries.

Most intelligent beings needed sleep because their bodies and minds demanded recovery. Fatigue forced them to stop, gave their nervous systems time to reset, and naturally separated periods of activity from periods of rest. These creatures could potentially spend days, years, or even decades continuously active without experiencing the same biological pressure to stop.

That would change a mind.

A person who never had to sleep would have far more waking hours than an ordinary person. A person who rarely became physically exhausted would have far fewer opportunities to withdraw from their impulses. And a person whose body constantly carried excess energy would have a powerful incentive to keep doing something, anything, simply because remaining still would become increasingly uncomfortable.

Over centuries, that could produce an extraordinary dependence on stimulation.

Novelty would become valuable.

Risk would become entertainment.

Extreme experiences would become increasingly necessary to produce the same emotional response that ordinary experiences once provided.

Imagine living for several hundred years while almost never being tired. Eventually, climbing a mountain wouldn’t be exciting. Fighting a powerful opponent wouldn’t be exciting. Exploring another realm might not be exciting. Even things that once terrified you could eventually become mundane simply because you had experienced them too many times.

So you search for something more intense.

Then something more dangerous.

Then something that would have been unthinkable a few centuries earlier.

That could create a vicious cycle. The more extreme their behavior became, the more stimulation they would require to feel engaged, and the more ordinary experiences would begin to feel meaningless by comparison. Their tolerance for danger could increase until things that would horrify a normal person barely registered as noteworthy.

And there was another problem.

Without sufficient sleep, their minds would lose one of the most important natural periods for emotional regulation and memory processing. If their biology genuinely prevented them from sleeping normally, then they would be denied a mechanism that ordinary brains had evolved to rely upon. Their memories could accumulate for centuries without the psychological reset that sleep provided. Grudges, obsessions, traumatic experiences, bizarre fixations, and every strange impulse they had ever entertained could remain part of an uninterrupted stream of consciousness.

After enough centuries, I couldn’t even imagine what that would do to their perception of normality.

A thousand-year-old member of their race might have spent tens of thousands of times longer consciously awake than a human had ever lived.

At some point, the passage of time itself would probably lose meaning.

A decade might feel like an afternoon.

A hundred years might feel like a long weekend.

And when everything became that cheap, perhaps even consequences would start feeling cheap.

Of course, none of this excused what they did.

Biology could explain pressure without absolving behavior.

There were plenty of other beings in the Myriad Realms who possessed unusual bodies, suffered terrible circumstances, or lived extraordinarily long lives without turning into monsters. Their biology might have created an environment in which certain psychological problems were more likely to develop, but what they chose to do with those impulses was still their responsibility.

That distinction was important.

The Dark Races weren’t claiming that these creatures were innocent victims of their biology either. They had simply uncovered enough of their physiology to understand that their minds and bodies had developed together in a particularly disastrous direction.

Their bodies gave them almost limitless energy.

Their lifespans gave them almost limitless time.

Their lack of physical exhaustion removed one of the most basic restraints imposed on ordinary creatures.

And their culture apparently taught them to use all three advantages immediately.

Put those things together for a few thousand years, and perhaps it wasn’t surprising that some of them had become twisted beyond recognition.

Not because their bodies forced them to become evil, but because they had been given an almost limitless supply of time, energy, and opportunity to indulge every increasingly distorted impulse they possessed.

That was what truly fascinated me.

They weren’t merely physically abnormal.

Their biology had created the perfect environment for psychological extremes to compound over an absurdly long lifespan.

And once that process continued for generation after generation, I could only imagine what kind of creature would eventually emerge.

But their bane was my boon. I could use their unique biology to design a card that would allow a Card Apprentice to transfer their Origin Card, Runes, and even Divinity to whomever they pleased, all without damaging or degrading them in the process.