Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 2499: Devil’s Holy Scripture

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

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

”Ten Commandments?” I repeated, pretending to be clueless. Trying to figure out how much Morningstar University understands the Dark Realm.

Honestly, I was shocked to learn that Morningstar University was aware of the Ten Commandments. They seem to have better knowledge of the Dark Realm when the rest of the five regions seem to have no clue or forgot about it. Instead, they just think demons tried to invade them.

”Yes, ’Ten Commandments.’ They are a small faction in the dark realm. These guys are responsible for the first demon invasion of our world. The big guy imprisoned here is one of the leaders of ’Ten Commandments.’ We only managed to learn this from him much later, after we had won the war,” Lucine revealed, going into details without holding back. She thought someone as capable as the boy before should know their true past so that they didn’t repeat the same mistake.

”Really? What else did you guys find out?” I asked curiously, feigning ignorance. No, I was not taking advantage of Lucine’s good nature and trust in me. I was trying to gauge how to engage in an honest and rewarding conversation with her without revealing any of my own secrets.

Also, didn’t the devil merchant code declare everyone in the ’Ten Commandments’ faction dead? It not only reclaimed the rights to the Card World it sold to the ’Ten Commandments’ faction but also re-sold it to the ’Seven Prince of Hell’ faction. What’s up with that?

As this thought crossed my mind, I immediately summoned my grimoire and checked out the demon codex page. Only to find that I could connect to the devil merchant code, but when I tried to use its functions, nothing happened. That was the first I had seen it do that, which meant one can access devil merchant code here.

Is this way the devil merchant code declared their faction annihilated and reclaimed their assets?

On the Card World, it has been centuries since the first demon invasion, but in the Dark Realm it hasn’t been that long. After all, ten days in the card world was equal to one day in the dark realm. Judging by the time zone difference of the two realms, it has only been several decades on the Dark Realm since the Card World’s first demon invasion.

No matter how I look at it, the devil merchant code was too quick to declare the ’Ten Commandments’ dead and reclaim their assets registered with it. I used to think that though the devil merchant code was ruthless capitalist, it played by the rules, but from what I was learning right now, it seemed that wasn’t the case. I need to get to the bottom of this matter. After all, the fate of the Card World depended on it. If my assumptions were true, then maybe I can do something to ensure that no dark race or faction can ever use the devil merchant code to invade the Card World.

I calmed down, realizing I was getting ahead of myself. Clearly, the Devil Merchant Code wouldn’t break its own rules. There was a point I wasn’t seeing.

Perhaps the ’Ten Commandments’ owed too much debt to the Devil Merchant Code in preparation for invading the Card World. This debt kept growing with time as neither of the leaders of the ’Ten Commandments’ were available to make the loan payments on time for several years and decades altogether until the Devil Merchant Code was forced to reclaim their assets registered with it.

But that didn’t explain why it declared them dead when one of the ’Ten Commandments’ was alive in this past. I could see someone else making this mistake, but the Devil Merchant Code? No way. It was above such silly mistakes. Otherwise, the inter-realm network, inter-realm city, and the whole thing would have fallen apart a long time ago. There had to be something I was missing here.

”Not much. It’s just too strong for us to capture and interrogate. We can only spy on it through the Time Vestige. The Devil imprisoned here calls himself Slay. Every time we think he has succumbed to timeline dementia under the influence of this past, he somehow manages to recall everything and recover, summoning a grimoire of sorts and screaming the words ’Devil Merchant Code.’

We have yet to find out what this ’Devil Merchant Code’ is, but many believe it might be some kind of holy scripture that this faction of the dark race followed or worshipped. Those words are the only thing that has kept him from fully succumbing to the timeline dementia for centuries. I can’t imagine how strong the being is that this Devil follows or worships.

This is the reason our predecessors were so adamant about building a sanctuary to escape in case we lost the Demon Invasion. You don’t understand the horror we felt every time we failed to kill this Devil using every means we could think of. Since we are unable to kill it, I don’t see how we are even going to face the entity it follows or worships,” Lucine, for the very first time, confided her fears in someone other than her mentor.

”Then how does the time vestige factor into all this, actually? Don’t tell me the bullshit about the array of the ’garden of beginning’ needing it or that it’s just a glorified elevator allowing travel between past, present, and future. There should be more than that to it, right?” I asked, listening to Lucine bring it up again and again, claiming that without the Time Vestige we weren’t safe here. So far, from what she said, I gathered that it was a safe zone for those who entered this past from our present. However, I felt there was more to it. I could get it out of Lucine, or will have to enter the time vestige to figure it out using my primordial soul pupils.