Card Apprentice Daily Log

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Lil’ Red Storm Realm, Freedom Megalopolise

As soon as Dalia uttered those words, Thalorien and his clones gathered around the core of the Lil’ Red Storm Realm suddenly felt themselves, along with everything surrounding them, begin to stretch outward.

It wasn’t merely their bodies. The space around them was stretching. The ground around them, the layers of the realm’s crust, and even the distance between objects began expanding at an alarming rate, as though reality itself were being pulled apart and stretched infinitely outward.

Thalorien’s brows shot up. His divination clones simultaneously began issuing warnings, informing him of danger, overwhelming danger. Without wasting another moment, Thalorien abandoned his plan to destroy the realm’s core.

‘Protect me!’ His command rang through the shared connection between him and his clones.

Immediately, every clone capable of moving rushed toward the original body. They abandoned their positions and poured all their power into reaching him. As the fabric of reality continued to stretch, Thalorien himself did everything he could to close the distance between him and his clones.

The clones gathered around him one after another. Then they began sacrificing themselves. Layer upon layer of defensive barriers formed around the Crown Prince. Special snow condensed into defensive shells. Powerful clones positioned themselves at the outermost layers. Weaker clones poured their strength into reinforcing the barriers, giving up their own lives if it meant adding another layer of protection around the original body.

Yet before they could complete their defenses, the expansion of reality began to slow. The Crown Prince’s heart sank. Then everything came to a momentary halt. For the briefest instant, absolute silence filled the stretched reality.

Then, before Thalorien or his clones could understand what was happening, the entire reality was violently pulled back together. Like a stretched rubber band snapping back into place, everything contracted toward a single point.

Thalorien, his clones, the surrounding space, the realm’s crust, everything caught within the affected area was dragged toward the same point. The entire region collapsed inward with them at its center. In an instant, everything condensed into a superheated, unimaginably dense singularity.

The defensive barriers shattered one after another under the overwhelming compression. The clones closest to the outside disappeared first, crushed and condensed before they could even react. Then the next layer followed and the next. Everything within the affected space was consumed by the collapse, compressed into the superheated, high-density singularity that Dalia had created at the heart of the Lil’ Red Storm Realm.

“Idiot,” Dalia muttered as she looked at what remained of the Snow Elven Crown Prince and his clone army.

Then her expression shifted. She was genuinely surprised to find Thalorien still alive and conscious. Granted, Dalia had held back a little to keep him alive. Turning him into a Calamity Daughter Gem wasn’t going to be much use if there was nothing left of him afterward.

Still, she hadn’t expected him to survive Big Crunch without so much as a scratch. Dalia studied him with newfound interest. The bad blood between them suddenly didn’t seem all that important anymore. Thalorien had clearly proven that his arrogance wasn’t baseless. He had the strength to back it up.

At the very last moment, when the collapsing reality threatened to swallow him whole, Thalorien had used the variety of special snow making up his defensive barriers to create an ever-growing wall of Ruler-class clones.

The clones continuously appeared around him, throwing themselves into the destruction before it could reach his original body. But that alone wasn’t enough. The destruction caused by Big Crunch was constantly consuming them. For every layer of clones that disappeared, Thalorien had to create another and then another. To survive, he had to produce clones faster than the destruction surrounding him could destroy them.

It was an absurd feat. Yet he had done it. By continuously sacrificing clone after clone, Thalorien had managed to maintain his great wall of living shields until the collapse finally ended.

The fact that he was still standing was proof enough of how terrifying the Snow Elven bloodline ability truly was.

Dalia’s lips curled upward. Perhaps the arrogant bastard really was worth keeping around. Big Crunch was a defensive mechanism her creator had incorporated into the Celestial array formation. The formation’s primary function involved attracting meteorites, asteroids, and other space rocks and burying them within the crust of the Lil’ Red Storm Realm.

However, objects drifting through the void didn’t always arrive alone. Sometimes, alien entities, parasites, plagues, or other unknown lifeforms lay dormant within those rocks.

Once buried within the realm’s crust, such entities could become a threat to the realm itself and, more importantly, the Celestial array formation. That was precisely why Big Crunch existed. Whenever an unknown entity buried within the realm’s crust was identified as a potential threat, the defensive mechanism could isolate the affected area and collapse it inward, eliminating everything caught within its range without damaging the realm’s core. The heat generated from it was supposed to purify the realm’s crust in such scenarios.

For countless millennia, it has dealt with countless unwanted pests. And it had never failed Dalia before. That was why she had been so confident when Thalorien and his clone army decided to burrow deeper into the realm’s crust. As far as Dalia was concerned, the Snow Elven Crown Prince had practically walked into the mouth of a trap and complained about the teeth.

Dalia gazed at Thalorien. He still appeared to have plenty of fight left in him. Even though the destruction caused by Big Crunch had already stopped, he continued recreating his clone army without pause. Clone after clone emerged from the special snow surrounding him, quickly rebuilding the forces he had sacrificed to survive the collapse.

Dalia didn’t interrupt him. Instead, she waited to see what he would do next. Would he finally learn his lesson and try to return to the surface? Or would he continue with his stupid strategy and keep digging toward the realm’s core?

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