Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 3156: Realm Of True Evil

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Realm Of True Evil

I opened my eyes to towering green skyscrapers. They had no windows, no doors, and no signs of civilization. They simply leaned against one another, forming a canopy as their enormous green surfaces stretched toward the sky. At first glance, they looked like gigantic blades of grass. Then I realized they weren’t just similar to grass. I was actually standing inside a gigantic grass field.

Everywhere I looked, there was nothing but enormous blades of grass rising around me, so tall that I couldn’t see where they ended, their thick stalks disappearing into a dense canopy far above my head. For a moment, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was what the world looked like to ants. And considering the difference between my height and these blades of grass, that comparison wasn’t even an exaggeration. If I placed myself in an ordinary field back on Earth, I would have been several times taller than the grass surrounding me. Here, the situation was reversed. I was the tiny creature struggling through a forest of grass.

The leaning blades overlapped above me, forming such a dense canopy that they blocked most of the sky. Their thick stalks were packed together so tightly that even looking toward the horizon was difficult. I couldn’t tell where the grassland ended, and the sheer density of it made the entire place feel less like a field and more like an endless green forest.

I had studied every record and depiction I could find of the True Evil’s native realm and its ecosystem. Not a single one had mentioned gigantic creatures or vegetation on this scale, and there had been no evidence suggesting the True Evil themselves were enormous, either. So what exactly was I looking at? I initially considered the possibility that the creatures were simply much larger than the records suggested, but the longer I looked, the less convincing that explanation became. Aside from the ridiculous scale, nothing about the vegetation itself seemed fundamentally alien — the grass was still grass, the trees were still trees, the plants were still plants. The difference was that everything had been magnified to an absurd degree.

With no better explanation available, I decided to get a better view. I flew upward, broke through the first layer of grass, and was immediately greeted by another canopy, this one even higher, way higher. The higher I climbed, the denser and more vibrant the vegetation became. The leaves were broader, greener, and seemed to possess an almost overwhelming vitality. From below, the overlapping canopies looked like enormous green clouds hanging in the sky, except these clouds were made of living leaves. I kept ascending, going past more vegetation, more layers, more green.

Eventually, enormous trees began appearing between the canopies. Their trunks were so massive that my entire field of vision wasn’t enough to take in one of them at once; I could look toward one side of a trunk, fly for a considerable distance, and still not see where the other side ended.

At that point, I had to wonder if this was what the world looked like to a bee. Except even that comparison felt inadequate. In front of these gigantic trees, enormous grass blades, and countless other forms of vegetation, I didn’t merely feel like a small bug wandering through a huge forest. I was a small bug wandering through a huge forest.

I flew higher, past the grass, past the first canopy, past the enormous leaves. Some were so massive they were larger than the biggest airports I had ever visited on Earth, forcing me to weave between them rather than simply fly over them. Then something enormous fell toward me. My instincts made me dodge as a gigantic droplet of water passed beside me and plummeted toward the forest below. For a moment I thought it was some strange falling object, until I realized it was dew. A single droplet of dew, larger than a jumbo aircraft. I stared at it for a moment before continuing upward.

The higher I flew, the stranger the silence became. At first I hadn’t noticed it. The forest had simply seemed quiet. But after climbing for so long, I realized it wasn’t merely quiet. It was silent. There were no insects buzzing between the leaves, no birds calling from the trees, no distant cries of animals, not even the sound of wind moving through the vegetation. Nothing. It was as though the entire forest had been muted.

That immediately put me on guard. Something was wrong. A forest this enormous, this lush, and this overflowing with vitality should have been filled with life. Even if I couldn’t see the creatures themselves, I should have been able to sense something: movement somewhere, sounds, vibrations, the faint presence of countless living beings. Instead, there was nothing.

My urgency to escape the canopy increased, and at the same time I erased every trace of myself. I activated Soul Pathway Resonance and used it to suppress not only the sound of my movements but my very presence. I didn’t want whatever lived here to know I had arrived until I understood what I was dealing with.

I continued climbing. Eventually I broke through the final layer of vegetation and emerged into the open sky. For the first time since arriving, I could properly see the world around me, and it was enormous. The green canopy stretched farther than I could see; I searched for its edge, but even scanning as far as the horizon, I couldn’t find one. It wasn’t a forest anymore. It looked like a boundless green sea. A sea made entirely of trees, grass, leaves, and countless layers of vegetation.

Yet something still bothered me. There was no wind. Not even a breeze. The leaves weren’t rustling, the branches weren’t swaying, nothing moved. I decided to climb even higher. If I could get far enough above the canopy, perhaps I could finally understand the structure of this forest. So I continued ascending, higher and higher, until I reached the clouds. And as I looked down, that same thought returned. I hadn’t sensed a single living creature. Not one. That realization made me even more wary.

Then I looked at the forest again, and noticed something I hadn’t noticed before. The forest was moving. Not the individual trees, not the leaves, but the entire forest. For a moment I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but I watched carefully, and the movement was incredibly slow, almost imperceptible. Once I noticed it, I couldn’t unsee it. The entire green expanse below me was shifting. The canopy rose and fell in enormous waves, vast sections of vegetation moving together, not like countless independent plants responding to the wind, but as though the entire forest itself were slowly breathing. There was no wind causing it. Nothing external was pushing the vegetation. The forest was moving on its own.

My entire skin crawled. The hairs on my body stood straight up. A chill ran through me as I stared down at that endless sea of green. Until that moment, I had been wondering where all the creatures were. Now I was beginning to wonder if I had been looking at one the entire time.