Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 2805: Apocalypse (Part-I)

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Card World, Southern Region, Blossom District, Three Mischief Encampment, Mystic Dimension

Faith was a miraculous power; mastery over it allowed one to create miracles. Many believe that the stronger the faith, the greater the miracle. At least, that was how it worked in fairy tales and mythologies. In reality, it was far from the truth. Faith had its own set of laws and conditions. Without following them, no amount of faith or mastery of faith would allow one to create miracles.

This was true for the Emissary of Light’s origin card too. It cannot create a miracle that one cannot imagine or believe in. The clearer the vision of the miracle and the stronger the belief in it, the easier it is for faith to bring the miracle into being, and the less faith is consumed.

Think of using faith to create miracles like booking a ride on a mobile app.

First, you need a clear destination. If you don’t know where you’re going, no ride can take you there. In the same way, if you can’t clearly imagine and believe in a miracle or outcome, faith has nothing to work with.

Then comes the distance. The farther the destination, the higher the cost. With faith, that distance is the gap between your current reality and what you’re trying to achieve. If the miracle feels distant, unclear, or unlikely, it demands more faith to bridge that gap.

Clarity shortens the distance. The more vividly you can picture the outcome, and the more naturally you believe in it, the closer it feels. And just like a shorter trip costs less, a clearer and more believable miracle requires less faith to bring into reality.

So faith doesn’t create blindly; one needs to visualize it and believe it into existence. Faith works like a driver following a map. Your imagination sets the destination, your belief measures the distance, and your faith is the fare to get you there.

Therefore, in a battle, the Emissary of Light uses faith to enhance his cards, runes, martial arts, and battle formations, and not just pull miracles out of thin air. He uses the pre-existing system along with faith to make up for his lack of proficiency and mastery. As a result, when enhanced by faith, his attacks’ efficiency increases to the maximum possible within the realm of reality. So all of his attacks were near perfect within this realm’s possibilities.

As for using faith to create miracles, he relies on the imagination and belief of the masses, as he had learned that his own imagination and belief weren’t enough to guide the faith he gathered to pull off miracles. Whereas the imagination and belief of tens of millions of people make using faith to create miracles a lot easier and simpler. Also, the faith consumed was a lot less than they would have spent.

And there was another reason: if he were to use his own imagination and belief to guide the faith into creating the miracle, that miracle would fail as long as he had a shiver of doubt. But in the case of a miracle created using the imagination and belief of the masses, the doubt couldn’t destroy the miracle that easily, giving him time to salvage or rectify things.

These were the reasons why the Emissary of Light keeps spreading rumors to create miracles, instead of just using faith to create them.

However, there was one thing about his origin card that the Emissary of Light himself hadn’t uncovered, but Field Marshal Lorn’s niece and young lord had already guessed. That was why they advised her not to take the Emissary of Light lightly, to remain cautious and play it safe. And that thing was the primal instinct of all beings that were ever born: fear. Fear of death, to be accurate. Especially in this instance.

Fear stems from imagining and believing in failure.

Faith stems from imagining and believing in possibility.

Interestingly, fear can trigger faith.

Fear and faith draw from the same source. Both give form to what the mind imagines. Fear feeds on doubt and distance, while faith feeds on clarity and belief. One expands the gap. The other closes it. Yet, fear triggers faith.

Fear pushes the mind into a corner where it can’t stay neutral anymore. At that point, a person has two paths. One is to keep feeding the fear, imagining worse outcomes, letting doubt grow until it takes over. The other is to push back and choose something else to believe in, even if it’s uncertain.

That moment of choosing, when someone turns away from fear and decides to hold onto a different possibility, is where faith begins.

Put simply: Fear creates pressure. That pressure forces a choice. And faith is what forms when someone chooses belief instead of doubt.

Having the Emissary of Light’s past and possible future, it wasn’t hard for one to guess that, when push comes to shove, he would push back and choose to believe in himself, instead of whatever the circumstances were screaming at him.

Like a wounded beast fighting on its last breath, fear brings one to the edge of certainty. And in that final moment, when nothing remains but the will to continue, faith is born.

Just as no one can predict what a wounded beast would do or what it was capable of, it was impossible to predict what the Emissary of Light would do or what he was capable of. And thanks to the faith he had gathered over several decades, he definitely had the means to bring the worst possible scenario into being.

And he did.

Kicked around the mystic dimension by relentless starfall strikes and explosions that swallowed him without warning, bypassing his defenses without a trace, the Emissary of Light had no time to think. But he knew one thing, if this continued, he would die. So he abandoned all restraint, poured out his faith without reserve, and brought apocalypse down upon the mystic dimension.