Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 3023: The Null Omission

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Void

With my comprehension of the Ice Rule’s Null meaning, my entire existence was gradually becoming null. It wasn’t merely my body that was disappearing. My existence itself was being stripped away. My position in time, my place in causality, my identity, and every trace that defined “me” were all being reduced to absolute zero.

When my comprehension of the Ice Rule’s Null meaning reached the Ultimate Tier, I had become Null.

That state wasn’t death.

Nor was it erased.

It was a complete detachment from existence itself.

The Myriad Realms would continue to exist within the ever-flowing river of time, while I would exist completely outside of it. They became two separate planes: one bound by time, causality, and change, and the other utterly devoid of them.

Everything within the Myriad Realms was constantly moving from past to present to future.

Null did not.

From the perspective of the Myriad Realms, Null neither advanced nor regressed. It simply wasn’t participating in the flow of time at all.

That was why, when my Primordial Curse Bloodline restored me from Null, I always re-entered reality at the exact moment I had left it. I wasn’t traveling back through time. There was simply no passage of time while I was Null. To the world, I vanished for an instant before returning. To me, there was no interval between leaving and coming back.

A simple analogy would be an RPG.

The game world continues to progress as long as the server remains online. Monsters respawn, players move about, and time advances.

When a player logs out, however, that character effectively stops participating in the world’s timeline. Upon logging back in, the world has simply continued from where it left off, while the player resumes interacting with it from that new present. Logging out represents stepping outside the game’s active timeline, while logging back in represents re-entering it.

Null worked on a similar principle, except it wasn’t merely logging out of a game.

It was stepping outside the framework of existence itself.

The Ice rule’s Null meaning granted me the authority to apply that state to anything. Matter, energy, space, time, causality, or even abstract concepts could all be reduced to Null, severing them from the framework of existence.

The Ice rule’s Null meaning’s ultimate rune Null Strider, on the other hand, solved the greatest flaw of the Null meaning. Becoming Null alone meant abandoning existence with no guaranteed path back. Null Strider served as the bridge between the two planes, allowing me to safely enter Null and, more importantly, safely return to the state I possessed before becoming Null.

And that privilege wasn’t limited to me alone.

Anything I transformed into Null could likewise be restored through the authority of the ultimate rune Null Strider.

The important point to understand was that once I truly became Null, I became nothing.

I thought nothing.

I did nothing.

I perceived nothing.

I comprehended nothing.

I wouldn’t even know that I was nothing.

Walking from existence into Null and back again changed nothing because there was no “me” left within Null to experience, remember, or accomplish anything. It was the perfect state of nonexistence.

So what made this incredible?

For almost everything… absolutely nothing, with the exception of the Ice Rule.

The closer I moved toward becoming Null through the Null meaning and the Null Strider rune, the closer my existence drew to the Ice Rule Source itself. It was as if every layer of existence separating me from the Rule Source was gradually peeled away.

That meant my affinity with the Ice Rule climbed toward the absolute limit any being could possibly achieve.

The nearer I was to Null, the clearer every Ice Rule meaning became. Concepts that previously appeared foreign to me suddenly unfolded before me with startling clarity, as though the Rule Source itself had begun explaining its truths directly to me.

The most fascinating thing about this was that as my existence approached Null, my time, my causality, and my existence slowed to an almost immeasurable crawl. Not because the world itself had slowed, but because I was gradually stepping outside the framework that governed them.

To an outside observer, less than a instant would pass.

Yet from my perspective, that fleeting instant stretched into what felt like countless millennia devoted solely to comprehending the Ice Rule.

It wasn’t that I had gained more time.

It was that in that instant I had become so closely aligned with the Ice Rule Source that comprehending it no longer depended on the normal flow of time.

Given enough proximity to Null, I could completely comprehend all three of my primary Ice Rule meanings and forge an Ice Rule Stream within that infinitesimal instant.

However, the loophole came with an equally terrifying restriction.

The instant I truly became Null, my comprehension of ice rule would stop with me. After all, a being that didn’t exist couldn’t possess knowledge much less process it. A being that was nothing couldn’t retain enlightenment.

Everything I had comprehended while approaching Null would also stop if I crossed that final threshold, becoming nothing with me.

So the trick wasn’t becoming Null, it was to stop one step before it. Close enough to borrow the limitless affinity of the Ice Rule Source. Far enough to remain a being capable of understanding, remembering, and forging an Ice Rule Stream.

That razor-thin boundary between existence and nonexistence was where the miracle lay. And it also explained why the Causality Certainty Curse had chosen that particular combination.

The Rule meanings that resonated with Dual Existence, If You See Me, I See You, and Primordial Resonance weren’t selected because they were the strongest. They were selected because they would allow me to approach Null as closely as possible without completely becoming it.

In other words, they let me exploit the loophole to its absolute limit, forging an Ice Rule Stream at a speed that should have been impossible for any living being.

The rule meaning that resonated with Dual Existence was the primary Rule meaning, while the rule meanings that resonated with the If You See Me, I See You and Primordial Resonance served as the secondary Rule meanings. Their exceptionally high compatibility allowed the three to resonate almost perfectly, enabling them to fuse into a Rule Stream while exploiting the loophole of being closer to null far more efficiently than any other combination I possessed.

In other words, it wasn’t that the rule meanings that resonated with If You See Me, I See You or Primordial Resonance were individually superior. Rather, they complemented the rule meaning that resonated with Dual Existence so well that the friction normally involved in merging multiple Rule meanings was reduced to a minimum, dramatically accelerating the Rule Stream forging process even within an infinitesimal instant.