Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 3000: Snow Elven Crown Prince Thalorien Aesryl II of House Winterbloom

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Dark Realm, Gelid Alps, Snow Elven Region, Frosell District, Frosnow City

Crown Prince Thalorien Aesryl II of House Winterbloom was born with the purest snow elven bloodline seen in several millennia. But his true terror lay in the unique, envied ability his bloodline awakened: Snowomb.

This innate bloodline ability allowed him to introduce his own blood into any mass of snow, effectively using the element as a womb to gestate and give birth to a perfect clone of himself in a matter of seconds.

The moment the royal family discovered the terrifying potential of Snowomb, the old Empyrean spared no expense. They hired the absolute finest tutors in the Snow Elven Empire to help Thalorien refine and build upon his bloodline ability. Possessing the absolute peak of elven pedigree, Thalorien proved to be a monstrous prodigy. He developed Snowomb to such a ridiculous degree that as long as he had access to snow, he could ensure he would never be truly outnumbered, and more importantly, he would never truly die.

Thrilled by his eldest son’s unprecedented progress, the Snow Elven Empyrean had wanted to throw the grandest, most decadent debut party the empire had ever witnessed to showcase his heir’s supremacy to the Dark Realm.

But Thalorien himself hadn’t been thrilled.

To a mind as deeply calculating as his, the achievement rang hollow. He understood that no matter how many countless Semi-Ruler-class clones he churned out from the blizzards, an army of ants remained just that, an army of ants. Before the absolute authority of a true Ruler-class being, their numbers meant nothing.

He flatly rejected his own debut, entirely unsatisfied with his current achievements. He didn’t want to be a big fish in a small pond. He craved to personally break through to the Ruler-class tier—shattering the brutal bottleneck of his race that only a handful of ancestors had ever crossed.

Yet, his ambition didn’t stop at personal ascension. He wanted to use the data from his own evolution to fundamentally help his people, ascending the entire Snow Elven race into a permanent, dominant Ruler-class species within the ranks of the Dark Realm.

As the Crown Prince’s cultivation realm climbed, his bloodline ability naturally grew alongside him. It was during this deep, meticulous refinement that he discovered a massive, unprecedented loophole within Snowomb.

He learned that if he provided his perfect clones with a full ego—letting them implicitly, completely believe that they were the one and only true Crown Prince—they wouldn’t just act as mindless proxies. Instead, they would diligently, passionately practice, meditate, and fight with the raw, desperate drive of an actual living soul. And when he eventually retrieved and reabsorbed them into his main body, every ounce of their hard-earned comprehension, battle experience, and cultivated energy would seamlessly add to his own prowess.

He ruthlessly exploited this loophole to become the youngest Semi-Ruler class, and subsequently the youngest true Ruler-class Snow Elf in history. He had thousands of these perfect proxies cultivating in hyper-isolated seclusions across the realm or learning from semi-ruler class tutors simultaneously. By feeding them just enough fragmented memories to perfectly execute his grand vision, they willingly pushed their bodies to the absolute limit, believing with every fiber of their being that it was their own choice and ambition.

The Crown Prince was already a once-in-a-millennia prodigy on his own. With this terrifying loophole, he had found a way to maximize his talent exponentially, effectively turning his own identity into a multi-threaded, self-improving cultivation engine.

Allowing him to shatter every single age record, not just within the borders of the Snow Elven Empire, but across dozens of neighboring territories and semi-ruler class races. He had become a mythic figure whose rise defied the very laws of natural cultivation.

Yet, even with that horrifyingly efficient loophole maximizing his genius, the sheer, unyielding bottleneck of the Ruler-Class for Snow Elf was too absolute. His multi-threaded soul engine had brought him to the absolute precipice, but it wasn’t enough to secure his place as the youngest true Ruler-class Snow Elf in history.

To cross that final, impossible chasm, he had to rely on an external miracle: a pristine Frosell Realm’s will fragment.

It was a priceless celestial treasure given to him as a wedding gift by Her Imperial Highness, the Crown Princess—his wife, a woman whose political backing and dowry finally provided the missing spark to ignite his grand engine. That fragment didn’t just give him raw power to break into the ruler class but also the secret to helping his people ascend to ruler class, officially lighting the path to fulfill his terrifying ambition.

Her Imperial Highness, the Crown Princess then went on to meticulously maintain his presence and influence—along with his various proxies that believed themselves to be the original—in the cut-throat politics of the capital and royal palace. She fought fiercely for his ideas in the royal cabinet, acting as his political shield and sword while he was completely absorbed in his grand plan to lift their race to a true Ruler-class force, away in a subterranean cave hundreds of miles below the Snow Capital.

As such, Her Imperial Highness became the absolute confidant of the Crown Prince, and one of the only two beings in the entire myriad realm to know exactly where the original Crown Prince was residing.

Until he ran into Sansa.

Thalorien had absolutely no idea that Sansa possessed a dreadfully sneaky origin card and a terrifying innate calamity that allowed her to effortlessly infiltrate and manipulate the memories of the original Crown Prince directly through the mental link of the clones trying to destroy the Frosell district.

Because he was entirely ignorant of Sansa’s existence, the Crown Prince naturally assumed the absolute worst: that it was his wife who had leaked the location of his sanctuary. He didn’t believe for a second that she would willingly betray him. Instead, his hyper-logical, paranoid mind immediately jumped to the darkest conclusion—that she was already dead, having been captured and tortured by this unknown anomaly, failing to keep his secret safe despite doing her absolute best.

“How did you find my lab?”