Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 2760: The Truth

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Zhongguo (China), Liaodong Province, Shuntian Prefecture, Shenyang City

Going through their mother’s memories, the twins felt a cold dread settle deep within them. What they uncovered was far more disturbing than anything they had imagined. The truth of their mother’s life—and the circumstances surrounding their own birth—was steeped in choices that were all deliberate and calculated.

The memories unfolded revealing how carefully their mother had walked a path that no one else even knew existed. It was nothing like the story they had imagined on their way over to the Empire’s capital. It was several times more horrifying than they could have imagined.

Within that horror lay the answers they had long sought. The deeper they went into their mother’s memories, the more overwhelming the truth became. Her decisions, the marriage, the sacrifices, even the circumstances of their birth—none of it had been born from desperation or duty alone. It had all been part of a single ambition. She had been trying to defeat death.

Not because she feared dying. The memories made that painfully clear. Their mother had never trembled at the thought of death. What she refused—what she rejected with almost arrogant certainty—was the idea that death had the right to decide when her story ended. She had been cursed by a witch who told her exactly how she would die. And instead of accepting it, she chose to challenge it.

The audacity of it left the twins reeling. Coryn felt a strange admiration bloom inside her. Their mother had been so powerful, so confident in herself, that she had grown bored enough to pick a fight with Death itself. That kind of reckless courage was almost beautiful.

Reven, however, found herself drawn to the method rather than the defiance. Their mother had not simply raged against the curse—she had tried to outmaneuver it. Yet despite everything she tried, the prophecy had come true. She had died exactly the way the witch had foretold. And that was the part that unsettled Reven the most.

However, by the time they reached the end of the memories, the twins realized something far more unsettling. Nothing was as it had seemed.

The deeper they had gone into those memories, the better they began to understand her calculation and gameplan. What they had believed to be their mother’s life no longer felt entirely... their mother’s. They were having this nagging feeling building in their minds, but they didn’t want to face it

The weight of it was so overwhelming that, for a brief moment, the twins felt as though they were sinking into their own shadow, swallowed by a creeping dread that had slowly been building as they relived the life of the woman they had always believed to be their mother.

Because the more they looked at those memories... The less certain they became about who she truly was.

What truly broke them was learning that, contrary to what the rest of the world had always assumed, the Emperor was not their father. The revelation left them shocked and devastated. How could he not be? The man they had once believed to be their beloved father had actually been their uncle. And the second man they had later come to believe was their birth father turned out to have no blood relation to them whatsoever.

The true horror came with the next revelation. They had no father, i.e. no male was involved in their birth. Their mother had used witchcraft to conceive them herself. The memories made it unmistakably clear. Despite marrying the Emperor, she had remained a virgin her entire life. The Emperor had never actually touched her.

Every time he came seeking her, she used her witchcraft. With a few whispered words and a touch of her power, she would place him into a dreamlike trance where he believed he was living out his wildest desires with her. Inside those illusions, he experienced everything he wanted, pleasure, affection, intimacy, while in reality he slept peacefully on the floor without ever disturbing her.

The Emperor never realized the truth. In fact, the opposite happened. He became addicted to those dreams. He kept returning to her chambers again and again, chasing the intoxicating fantasies she planted in his mind. From the outside, it looked as if the Emperor could not stay away from the Thirteenth Concubine.

Soon the entire imperial palace began whispering the same thing. Even the Empress came to believe it. Everyone thought the Thirteenth Concubine was the Emperor’s favorite.

Just when the twins thought things could not possibly get any worse, the memories proved them wrong. The deeper they went through the memories, the clearer it became that the truth had never been what it seemed.

Their mother, or rather the woman who had created them, had lived an incredibly complicated and calculated life. Every decision she made, every relationship she formed, every risk she took had been carefully chosen for a single purpose. To achieve her greatest ambition to defeat death.

The worst thing was that the witchcraft she used to conceive them was proof of that. The ritual had allowed her to create a perfect child, flawless in body and spirit, exactly as she intended.

But she had deliberately changed the outcome. Instead of giving birth to one perfect child, she tried to give birth to twins so that she could give birth to two children at once for the sake of her game plan to beat the cursed prophecy, but since the spell was meant to get pregnant with one child, she ended up getting pregnant with conjoined twins. Because, in her mind, she had found a prefect loophole that helped her satisfy both the pregnancy spell and the cursed prophecy.

A chilling clarity settled in the twins mind that their birth had never been a complication of childbirth. Their creator had designed their misery. Their birth had never been about love, survival, family, or even fate. They had been part of her grand plan from the very beginning. And it didn’t end there.