Card Apprentice Daily Log

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Card World, Five Regions, Southern Region, Blossom District, Sky Blossom City

After the Central Government and the Five Royal Families declared the New Empire an enemy state and branded its ruler the False Ruler, a coordinated campaign of misinformation spread across the Five Regions.

They didn’t merely criticize him. They dissected him.

Every piece of publicly available information about the False Ruler was dragged into the light, examined, twisted, and presented in whatever way best served the narrative they were building.

His age was repeatedly highlighted. So was the absurdly short period he had spent as a Card Apprentice.

To them, none of it made sense. And when something didn’t fit their explanation, they supplied one. They believed that he was using borrowed power.

According to the narrative pushed across the Five Regions, a low-level Card Apprentice couldn’t possibly accomplish such feats through his own strength. The only known entities capable of granting power far beyond one’s realm were the demons and devils of the Dark Realm.

Thus, the accusations began. The False Ruler was a devil worshipper. A puppet of the Dark Realm. A pawn deliberately cultivated and empowered to destabilize the Card World from within.

But they didn’t stop at attacking his character. Once the accusation had been established, they began using it to undermine everything he had accomplished.

His discoveries were no longer presented as genuine breakthroughs. His inventions became schemes. His achievements became evidence of a larger conspiracy.

The VR-Universe became particularly important to their narrative. The same VR-Universe that had fascinated millions across the Five Regions was suddenly described as a tool created by the Dark Realm to influence and corrupt the younger generation. The fact that the False Ruler had distributed the VR-Slime Card freely only made the accusation easier to sell.

Why would anyone give such an extraordinary card away for free? That question was repeated again and again. The answer provided by his enemies was simple. Because there was a price they hadn’t discovered yet.

They claimed the VR-Slime Card was a Trojan horse disguised as a gift, while the VR-Universe was supposedly a massive influence network designed to infiltrate the minds and souls of Card Apprentices across the Five Regions.

The Central Government and the Royal Families called for caution. Then came the calls for a collective boycott. Citizens were urged to stop using VR-Slime Cards, abandon the VR-Universe, and refuse anything associated with the False Ruler.

For a moment, it looked like the campaign might actually work. After all, fear was an ancient weapon, and the Five Regions had centuries of experience wielding it.

But there was one problem. Millions of people had already used the VR-Slime Card. They had already entered the VR-Universe.

They had already experienced its countless worlds, interacted with its indigenous illusionary lifeforms, explored its civilizations, and discovered things they had never encountered in reality.

They weren’t being asked to reject an unfamiliar invention. They were being asked to give up something that had already become part of their daily lives. And that made the campaign considerably more complicated than its creators had anticipated.

Obviously, despite every attempt, the campaign failed to achieve what its architects had intended.

People didn’t boycott the VR-Slime Card. They didn’t abandon the VR-Universe either. If anything, the campaign inadvertently highlighted exactly why people valued them so much.

For countless Card Apprentices, the VR-Slime Card had become a way to narrow the gap between those born with resources and those without them.

Its soul-energy digestion ability allowed even ordinary Card Apprentices to consume monster meat and properly digest the immense soul energy contained within it, giving them another avenue to strengthen themselves without relying entirely on expensive resources or powerful families.

The VR-Universe was even harder to condemn. To those genuinely seeking knowledge, it was practically a minefield of information waiting to be explored and learned. Its indigenous civilizations possessed their own power systems, cultures, histories, technologies, crafts, and countless other forms of knowledge that couldn’t simply be found in the Five Regions.

For many people, abandoning it because the Royal Families told them to would have meant willingly giving up an opportunity they had never possessed before.

Demigod Dyke understood exactly what the Five Regions were trying to accomplish. He had watched the campaign unfold from the sidelines and could recognize the political strategy behind it.

Yet, despite everything he had seen, he still believed that the strength displayed by the False Ruler was borrowed power. The difference was that Dyke wasn’t convinced the source had anything to do with the Dark Realm.

Now that he had not only met the man labeled the False Ruler but also accepted him as his one and only Ruler, Dyke was more certain than ever that the Five Regions’ narrative was incomplete.

He had personally experienced His Highness’s strength. The pressure he had felt earlier hadn’t resembled the borrowed power of some external entity. It had been too complete, too natural, as though that terrifying strength belonged to him and him alone.

For the first time, Dyke began to question his own assumption. What if I was wrong? What if the power wasn’t borrowed at all? What if it truly belonged to His Highness?

Rather than questioning him further, Dyke turned his attention to the words he had spoken: The Card World’s power system was limited, but not restrictive.

His Highness had claimed that he had created other power systems to compensate for the deficiencies of the Card World’s system, allowing him to achieve things that should have been impossible within the existing framework.

Dyke’s eyes gradually narrowed. That statement immediately brought another possibility to mind: the Hidden Clans. The ancient families and secluded factions that had existed outside the public Card World’s conventional understanding of cultivation had always been surrounded by mystery. They possessed techniques, bloodlines, inheritances, and methods that outsiders could barely comprehend.

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