Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 2480: Artifical Field Dungeon: Garden Of Beginning

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Card World, Central Region, Central Academic City, Morningstar University District, Morningstar University Campus

"Do you know where the time vestige is?" I asked Henricks when my probing with celestial force failed to detect it.

Why the time vestige?

Morningstar University had everything on its campus insuranced. They didn’t care what happened to the beautiful campus. They could just use the insurance payout to build a new and better campus. However, there were few things that the insurance can’t just cover, like, for example, off the top of my head, Morningstar University’s coveted time vestige. That thing was priceless. If destroyed, no amount of money could help Morningstar University get another time vestige.

Since Morningstar University was counting on me to rampage on their campus, I planned to do just that, but with one tiny adjustment, I changed the location of my rampage to where the time vestige was being hidden and protected. Let’s see if Dean Faust and the other faculty can continue to ignore me then.

"I have been there once. But it is protected by an SSS-rank kaleidoscopic maze array formation, which is impossible to crack as the user can keep changing the maze pattern at will—" Henricks began to explain to the best of his knowledge only to be interrupted by his impatient young boss, "Just take me there and let me worry about the rest."

"Sure, right away," Henricks nodded in agreement, as he opened a portal next to him and signaled eloquently, "Right this way, boss."

Stepping into the portal, I found myself hovering above a gigantic garden. When I said gigantic, I couldn’t have been more literal. Everything in here was magnified by 100x. Things in here were a hundred times of their original size. The grass here was 9-10 ft tall. Not just the grass, everything, the flowers, trees, bushes, etc. It was like I had stepped into a giant’s garden. I couldn’t help but feel like a tiny fly in here.

"Where is this?" I asked Henricks, because the last time I checked, I didn’t find this gigantic garden on Morningstar Campus.

"The garden of the beginning, Morningstar University’s heritage land and humankind’s last haven in case we had lost to the demon invasion. While some were fighting the good fight, some were preparing for the worst. The founders of the Morningstar University were one of them.

Don’t get them wrong, they fought the demon invasion alongside their comrades, but they didn’t go all in. They used their spare strength and resources to build this place. Once the invasion was averted, they left it for the future generation to decide what to do with it. Morningstar University wasn’t alone in this; many other forces did the same.

I used to think they were cowards for doing so, but now, after seeing the state Freedom Fighters were reduced to until you rescued us, I realize maybe not putting all your eggs in one basket isn’t a bad strategy either," Henricks answered, but lost track realizing that he had no right to judge what their predecessors did to defeat the first demon invasion. They did what they thought was best at that moment, to the best of their abilities, just like he did with the Freedom Fighters.

"What does all this have to do with the time vestige?" I asked in annoyance. If it were some other time, I wouldn’t have minded Henricks’ history lesson that ended with his self-reflection, but now I was not in the mood. I was pissed off being ignored by Dean Faust.

How could I not be? I had imagined this grand scene of hero rescuing the damsel in distress before the hero announced his plan to make the world a better place, but Morningstar University threw that script into the bin and were forcing a new script, where I’m the stupid demon king with anger issues attempting to kidnap the damsel. I couldn’t rest until I fixed the damn script.

"Ah, that... last I checked, the time vestige was hidden here. It has been decades since I have been to the Time Vestige. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had moved it," Henricks replied in doubt.

"Shouldn’t you have informed me that before you brought me here? Anyway, it’s like the garden is a small world by itself. Let’s fan out and search for it," I ordered after learning the garden was bigger than the university campus.

How could something inside a thing be bigger than the said thing? Unless they were in a different space or dimension, like for example a dungeon — artificial field dungeon, to be more accurate.

The card apprentices have long been able to make artificial field dungeons for millennia now, just like they could create pseudo-natural array formations. However, they were mostly used to build tombs and crypts by demigods at the end of their life span to avoid the theft of their card collection, remnants of their runes & divinity, and their diamond grimoire.

This practice was very common and long standing since the ancient period. After all, not all demigods were from the royal or noble families who had their own ancestral burial sites being guarded by and passed down to their descendants.

The methods of making manmade field dungeons were just as old as the practice of demigods creating big and hidden tombs and crypts for their final resting place.

It wasn’t hard to believe that the card apprentice had figured out how to create a stable artificial field dungeon. After all, unlike the gate dungeon, field dungeons had lower infrastructural requirements to be mimicked by the card apprentice especially with the core of the pseudo-natural array acting as the core of the manmade field dungeon.

However, the scale of manmade field dungeons usually wasn’t this big. After all, these manmade field dungeons were built secretively by one demigod. Meanwhile, the garden of the beginning was grandly built using the resources pooled by Morningstar University. At the end of the day, the resources of an individual couldn’t compare to that of an organization. The garden of the beginning could easily be considered one of the biggest artificial field dungeons in the Card World.