Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 3151: Collectable Corpse

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

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

I scoured the Inter-Realm Network, trying to procure a complete corpse of one of those creatures that had no proper name and was simply known as True Evil.

It was proving to be an expensive headache.

These creatures were powerful, and worse, they were densely populated. The combination made their territory practically untouchable. No sane Devil Merchant would casually visit their realm because getting caught there meant being surrounded by an overwhelming number of them before you could even establish a route of escape.

But where there was fortune to be made, there were always reckless idiots willing to gamble their lives for it.

The Inter-Realm Network had a few sellers who had somehow managed to acquire the corpses of True Evil. Unfortunately, most of what appeared on the market were incomplete remains, damaged bodies, missing organs, or specimens that had been degraded by whatever process had killed and transported them.

The few relatively complete corpses were priced at absolutely ridiculous figures, enough to force me to think twice and even wonder if they were real. Unfortunately, they were not joking.

My finances were already stretched thin. Establishing the New Empire alone had consumed a ridiculous amount of resources. Then there was the integration of the Froslings and Frost Elves, followed by my plans to bring the Redfoot Dwarfs into Freedom City as well.

I could afford expensive things.

I just couldn’t afford to casually throw around fortunes on a single ingredient when there were entire populations depending on the resources I was pouring into the Empire.

So I contacted every seller offering a suitable corpse and tried negotiating.

I even offered something far more valuable than ordinary currency.

Dalia had been collecting enormous quantities of resources using Celestial Array Formations, many of which were difficult to obtain through conventional means. I offered several of those resources as part of a trade, hoping the sellers would be more interested in rare materials than in simply letting the corpse eat dust in some storage item.

Apparently, I had underestimated their greed. None of them wanted a trade. Not a single one of them.

They weren’t interested in resources, regardless of how rare they were, and none of them was willing to lower the asking price. According to them, these were collector’s items. There were corpse collectors willing to pay twice, or even ten times, the listed price if a corpse contained parts they had already procured but were missing.

It turned out that the corpses of True Evils were famous among necromancer races and practitioners. They could use the corpses to temporarily gain their physique, allowing them to expend an infinitesimal amount of energy and stamina while maintaining it.

For a necromancer, what could be more attractive than such a physique? It would allow them to command a massive legion of undead without worrying about running out of energy for the duration.

Now, I finally understood their insane market value and why the sellers believed I was desperate enough to pay anything for them.

Maybe they weren’t entirely wrong. I did want the corpse badly. But wanting something and being willing to bankrupt myself for it were two very different things.

I closed the last negotiation window and leaned back. There had to be another way. I needed the corpse. I didn’t have enough liquid wealth to justify buying one. And the sellers had no interest in trading. That left me with an unpleasant conclusion.

If I couldn’t buy the ingredient, I would have to acquire it myself.

The thought was dangerous enough that I sat there for a while, considering whether I had finally become one of those reckless fools who ventured into forbidden realms because the profit looked tempting.

Then another thought occurred to me. Why stop at acquiring the corpse? If I was going there anyway, I might as well turn the trip into a business opportunity.

I could acquire the ingredients I needed and potentially make a ridiculous amount of money in the process.

The plan was dangerous, certainly very dangerous. But I wasn’t going there blindly.

I had my own abilities, my knowledge of the region, and several methods of escaping if things went wrong. More importantly, I had no intention of announcing my presence and challenging an entire civilization to a fight.

I would go there to hunt, collect what I needed, and leave. At least, that was the plan.

I opened the information on the part of Myriad realms where the True Evil were believed to reside and began studying it carefully. And if I was going to risk visiting their territory myself, I wanted to know exactly what I was getting myself into. After all, I wasn’t suicidal. I was simply financially motivated.

There was a difference.

Having decided on my next course of action, I began preparing to hunt and capture what was known as True Evil among demons and devils themselves. Meanwhile, my clones completed all the requests I had already accepted.

I went through records of various encounters between Dark Races and so-called True Evil, studying them carefully to understand their behavior. Each encounter was more bizarre than the last. However, they all had one thing in common.

These things hardly ever fought among themselves, but whenever they did, a bloodbath followed. That was one of the reasons the realm hadn’t been completely overrun by them and reduced to a wasteland devoid of other life forms.

According to what Devil Merchant explorers had witnessed, the Realm of True Evil was an incredibly tenacious place, and so were the life forms that inhabited it. Yet its most prized creations were the creatures known as True Evil.

It almost seemed as though the nature of the realm had evolved around them. The more I studied the records, the more I felt that the realm hadn’t shaped them, they had shaped the realm. When actually not the case for other races and realms across the myriad realms.