Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 2462: War? I’ll Give One

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Card World, Southern Way Beyond, SSS-rank Titan Forest Field Dungeon.

”Master, who do I kill?” Lois asked in concern, knowing that her master wouldn’t easily lose his calm.

The misfits stared at Lois, bewildered and speechless at her reaction to their boss’s outburst. Recovering from her shock, Kiren asked, ”Boss, is she also in the criminal rehabilitation and reintegration program? If not, I suggest we add her.”

”Nah, my schedule is full for the foreseeable future. Besides, my time is worth too much to waste it on helping dregs of the society get their lives together,” Lois answered, misunderstanding that Kiren wanted her to join the program as a staff.

”...” the Misfits just nodded and smiled, not bothering to correct Lois’s misunderstanding, knowing her bad temper.

Meanwhile, my mind was preoccupied with Jill and her Yin Nymph cards. Instead of helping remove the legal hurdles to selling adult cards in the five regions to sell her subpar cards like I had hoped for, it now appears that she was actually going to monopolize the entire adult card market using her advantage of being first in the adult card market.

For a moment, Jill’s action had me consider whether I should release my Fairy Slime cards on the market way ahead of the time than I previously planned on. Especially with her buying the personality rights of every courtesan in the Central Region.

I’m sure Jill wasn’t done here and planned to do the same in the other regions. However, they were not her home turf and should be facing similar challenges I was. However, if she promised to share enough profits with them, the four royal families will not only green-light her adult card sales but also actively help her.

Considering the steep price at which she was selling the Yin Nymph cards, she would have enough left to cover her investment and leave a good profit for herself after sharing most of the profits with the royal families and the courtesans.

If a money grubber like Jill had no problem sharing most of the profits with royal families and the courtesan to get the right to the courtesan’s personality right, why could I not do the same? That was because Jill and I might be trying to monopolize the same market, but we were taking totally opposite routes.

I was trying to monopolize the adult card market by mass-producing quality adult cards and selling them at a reasonable price. However, Jill was trying to monopolize the adult card market by gaining sole control of one of the most important ingredients in creating quality adult cards, the personality rights of beautiful women and men who didn’t mind giving up their intimate privacy for a lot of money.

Why were the personality rights of courtesans important?

It was because the human heart and mind were fickle. No matter how tasty a certain dish was, they couldn’t eat it for every meal; they would grow bored with it in a few days, forget months or years.

Card apprentices were human, and similar to humans, they preferred having choices in the cards they equipped. For example, take the fireball skill card. It alone had about 709 iterations of it, and 57 of them were still actively being sold in the market.

The same was true for the adult cards. At first, people would be excited about it as it was the new thing on the market. But once their hype was over, they would see it for what it was, and return to their old routine.

Even the courtesan knew this. That was why they not only did not protested the adult cards, worrying it would affect their business. Instead, they were selling the adult cards to their loyal guests. Because they knew that a card could never be the same as the real deal, no matter how lifelike they got with time.

Their confidence didn’t stem from ignorance but from millennia of history and experience. Many of the courtesans’ guests were capable people who were surely aware that the city’s brothels served as intelligence hubs for the royal families and the central government.

Yet, despite the risks, they continued to visit them. Whether out of confidence in their own abilities or a lack of self-control, they rolled the dice on their lives, ultimately influenced by the unforgettable skills of these courtesans. It played a detrimental role in swaying their will and decisions.

It was a common belief among the card apprentices that a skilled courtesan could awaken impure thoughts in a rock and force it to speak. It wasn’t literally possible, but it perfectly summed up just how proficient the courtesans were in the art of seduction and temptation.

To borrow the wise words of our predecessors, ’No matter how beautiful one is on the outside, if they’re ugly on the inside, that inner ugliness will eventually corrupt their outward beauty.’

This was true for the adult cards too. No matter how beautiful and lifelike a card creator made one, it would still be incomplete without a proper soul.

This was where the courtesans and their personality rights came in. Through their perfected skills—from their looks and voice to their shyness and teasing—they could create a beautiful soul for the adult card. These techniques had been passed down and refined among the courtesans for millennia.

Their skills were so good they could effortlessly get their on guard guests to spill their darkest secrets, like master lock pickers unlocking any vault. Jill’s goal was to index and control these courtesans’ identity and skills. In the future, she would be able to charge a hefty fee to any card apprentice who wanted to use them to create an adult card.

Her plan was a perfect example of what Microsoft, Android, and Apple had achieved back on Earth—a complete OS monopoly over pc and smartphone market.

How could Jill gain total control over the skills of the courtesans if they were passed down for millennia and practiced by millions of courtesans across the five regions? Even if she manages to get the personality rights from all courtesans in the world, with time won’t new courtesans replace the old ones? Won’t these new courtesans break Jill’s monopoly?

Jill would buy or destroy anyone who threatens her monopoly using the money she amassed through her decades-long monopoly. Just like the trillion-dollar companies back on Earth. In the sort of market she had chosen, there wasn’t actually much morality and ethics to speak of, so money would easily solve her problems and help maintain her monopoly for a long time. Unfortunately for her, her competition was me. If she wants a war, I will give her one.

Sorting out my thoughts, I ignored the arguing Misfits and uttered aloud, ”Guys, prepare yourselves, we are going to war.”