Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 3069: Susan’s Insecurities

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Card World, Five Regions, Southern Region, Blossom District, Sky Blossom City, TSR Tower, Penthouse Office

As much as I wanted every citizen of the New Empire to take responsibility for their nation, they still needed a leader capable of filtering out the noise and turning countless individual voices into a collective symphony, something they could all move toward as a nation.

I wanted my three women to be that leadership. It wasn’t about keeping power within the family. It was about legitimacy. Their positions as my fiancées made them legitimate representatives of me and the vision I had used as the foundation to build the New Empire on. By placing them at the center of its leadership, I could remove one more variable that might otherwise fracture the Empire from within.

After everything was said and done, everyone had joined the New Empire because they trusted me and believed in my vision. Without that shared foundation, there wasn’t much holding them together. That was where my women came in. They weren’t meant to rule simply because they were close to me. They were meant to represent the ruler they had chosen to follow and, more importantly, the vision they had chosen to uphold.

The department heads and organizational leaders in the assembly understood this as well. That was why they had been throwing their support behind one of my three fiancées, each quietly aligning themselves with the woman they believed best represented their interests and, by extension, my vision.

They understood a simple truth. If the New Empire was going to survive, it could only exist under my banner. And if I wasn’t there to lead it, who better to represent me than my fiancées?

The loose factions that had been slowly forming around each of the three women would inevitably take shape under the pressure of my sudden absence. What had previously been little more than informal alliances and personal loyalties could now develop into genuine political blocs, each centered around one of my three fiancées. And very much likely to become the source of its next internal struggle that brought the New Empire to its knees even before their enemies could.

I say it with such certainty because when the three of them are influenced by their respective factions, despite their better judgment, the three would inevitably find themselves pitted against one another by the very factions supporting them. Those factions wouldn’t necessarily want the women themselves to rule. They wanted the New Empire for themselves and believed they could secure it by placing their chosen woman at its center.

What began as loyalty to my fiancées could gradually become a struggle for influence, with each faction pushing its chosen representative further than she intended to go. And once that happened, even the strongest bonds between the three could be tested by people who saw the Empire not as a shared vision, but as a prize waiting to be claimed.

The fall wouldn’t happen overnight. They would wait, watching and gauging whether I would return early… or never return at all.

With the numerous safeguards I had established to protect the New Empire from the Masters and Royal Families, an external attack was unlikely to be what brought it down.

If the Empire fell, it would far more likely be from within. A civil war born from competing factions, ambition, and the gradual erosion of the unity that had brought them together.

Yet none of that was inevitable. It could all be avoided if everyone stepped up and carried their share of the responsibility. Especially Susan, Jill, and Anna.

They were the ones I trusted to stand at the center of the Empire while I was gone, keep the factions from tearing each other apart, and ensure that my absence didn’t become the beginning of the New Empire’s end.

Yeah, they were my safeguard against the internal struggles and conflicts that could bring the New Empire to its knees.

If the three of them remained united and learned to play their factions instead of allowing their factions to play them, they could have the entire Card World in the palm of their hands by the time I returned.

All they had to do was stay strong and, most importantly, not turn against one another. Unfortunately, judging by their debate earlier, I wasn’t convinced they could keep that up for very long.

From the debate, I could tell Susan felt like she wasn’t being heard. I could understand why. Managing the New Empire was probably far more difficult for her than it was for the other two. Jill and Anna were both far ahead of her in terms of realm and education, and both came from royal bloodlines. Susan, meanwhile, was still a mortal with a relatively ordinary education and a common bloodline.

Many people in the New Empire liked to pretend those differences didn’t matter, but they did. Despite everything, most of them naturally respected Jill and Anna more than Susan. Even the so-called commoners’ faction that had rallied around Susan couldn’t completely escape that bias.

Most of them came from the Southern Region. They might have rebelled against the Southern Royal Family, but they still admired Anna, the former Southern Heir who had rebelled alongside them.

Their admiration for Anna was almost unsettling. Especially considering they had ultimately chosen to follow Susan. It was one thing for Susan to lead people who supported her. It was another thing entirely to lead people who secretly looked up to one of her rivals.

As awful as it was, that was simply the reality of the situation. The real problem was that neither Anna nor Jill seemed to notice it, or perhaps they simply chose not to acknowledge it, caught up in their quiet race to become my principal wife, the Queen of the New Empire.

So focused were they on securing their own position that they were forgetting a fundamental truth that they were stronger together than they could ever be alone at the top.

The factions gathering around them understood that perfectly. And they wouldn’t hesitate to exploit the rivalry between the three of them to get what they wanted.