Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 3167: Pseudo-Natural Array Formation

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Realm Of True Evil, Shell Island

I watched the hundreds of thousands of undead Truevils fill the Shell Island space while the long serpentine lava rock’s body kept running, swaying in the space like the waves of an ocean avoiding the Shell island and the fossilised massive ribcage.

At first glance, the undead Truevils seemed to be moving haphazardly, nearing me, but then there was a pattern in their movement that I kept losing until I noticed that whenever I lost track of the pattern in their movement, the body of the long serpentine lava had rearranged itself.

As I realized that I had a very small window to deduce the pattern and move as far as possible before the serpentine lava rock body had rearranged itself, I noticed that the undead Truevils weren’t trying to reach me but rearrange themselves to face me without blocking each other’s field of sight to me.

With their numbers, even the huge space within the shell felt congested, but with perfect calculations and angling, they all were facing me without their sight being obstructed.

Seeing this I immediately recalled the Scarred Truevil’s compressed supersonic lava beam, and I felt a chill on my spine, wondering if all their lava beams collided at me, would I even have a cell left to reconstruct my body from?

A coarse rhythmic voice dragged me out of my thoughts to find hundreds of thousands of undead Truevils singing tribal hymns. It echoed in the shell, the echoes smoothly merging with their singing, giving their voices a primal ethereal momentum. As I was wondering if they were using some kind of sonic or vibration attack…

The space around me seemed to be pulled into the one point, the core on the belly of the serpentine lava rock, the Scarred Truevil, as if imploding, but along with my thoughts, it suddenly exploded, and the inside of the shell suddenly morphed.

The serpentine lava rock formed an Ouroboros where the inner walls of the shell should have been, while the undead Truevils stood on its back, facing me, who stood in the center of the Ouroboros.

The Shell Island, the huge fossilized ribcage, everything vanished along with the shell. Even the ceiling was no longer layered with oddly shaped luminous pearls, but it was a starry black sky, like the space itself. The only things that remained constant were the choruses of the undead Truevils and the lava underneath.

I stopped exploring the changes and tried to locate the array core on the serpentine lava rock, but the Scarred Truevil was nowhere to be found on its long body. Just then, I sensed the disturbance beneath. Slow ripples formed on the surface of the still lava before they became fast until a massive disc resembling the shell on the back of the Truevil surfaced from the lava.

I stared at the shell as the limbs and head of the Scarred Truevil came out of it and stood on the surface of the lava as it once again became still. To my dismay, she was no longer the core of the pseudo array formation she had set up… I was no longer in a pseudo array formation, but a natural array formation.

My eyes widened by the knowledge of the Scarred Truevil. I know why the Dark Races were even scared to give them names, even without a civilization they were far too advanced.

What bothered me was the fact that now the entire Shell was acting as the core of the array formation I was trapped in with hundreds and thousands of Undead Truevils.

A natural array formation’s core was their location, their surroundings. As the environment gave birth to natural array formation.

That was to say that if I wanted to destroy this array formation, then I would have to destroy the shell itself, and thanks to the natural array formation being in a separate space within the shell where the Ouroboros was the boundary of said space, I would have to destroy to make it out of the array. However, it was protected by hundreds and thousands of undead Truevils.

Having deduced my situation, I looked at the Scarred Truevil. She was looking at me. As our eyes met, I realized she never really got serious with me, fearing that if she let loose, the little nest she had found for her hatchlings would be destroyed before they reached adulthood.

The Truevil race had a class system, not an organized one like in all civilizations, but one naturally formed using nature’s foremost law, survival of the fittest. The three Truevils I had turned into my Calamity Daughter gems were like mortals on the Card Realm, and the Scarred Truevil I was facing right now was like a Card Apprentice among several mortals.

Yes, even the lowest class in their race were of Ruler-class strenght and practically immortal.

I gained a lot of information on the Realm of True Evil from those three Truevils, but they didn’t have any on the upper classes of their race. They were just as clueless about them as the mortals on the Card World were clueless about Card Apprentices, unless they had a Card Apprentice in their family or an extended one.

The Scarred Truevil slammed on the lava with her long and huge upper arms, jumping at me. It was clear she wanted to fight me one-on-one, but I wasn’t interested anymore.

Initially, I planned to overpower the Scarred Truevil and use her hatchlings to try and get her to become my Bloodkin, but trapped in the natural array with only two ways out, killing her or destroying her army of tens of thousands of undead Truevils, I realized I would only be wasting my time by further entertaining the thought of trying to turn her into a Bloodkin.

The hatchlings were outside of the array, so I could no longer use them as leverage, and even if I defeated her, she would not submit to me. I would most likely be fighting her army of undead next, and most likely only leave the array by breaking the shell that was enabling this natural array formation.

Not to mention, even if everything went my way, the chances of her becoming a Bloodkin were low. So, it was best to efficiently collect the loot and return to my Temporal Cave in the Azorheim Realm.

I conjured a Calamity Daughter gem and slammed it into the fist of the Scarred Truevil. As I felt the gem melt into her body, my body was sent skipping across the lava with a sonic boom.

Using my celestial force to force my body to a halt, I looked at the Scarred Truevil’s figure flash before me, her fist before her face stopped by boundlessly stretched space.

I dumbfoundedly locked eyes with her smug eyes, finding that my Calamity Daughter gem had failed to turn her into a Daughter Gem.

While my mind was descending into chaos trying to understand why my Calamity Daughter gem failed on the Scarred Truevil, she fired a concentrated supersonic beam of lava, burning through my boundlessly stretched barrier and burning a hole in my chest, which was further widened by her massive fist.