Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 3148: Remains Of A Transcendent Being

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Azorheim, Temporal Cave Valley, Temporal Cave No. ES3030

The next batch of Card Apprentices came with an age old dilemma of all dying card apprentices as a request.

They wanted to leave behind everything they had accumulated throughout their life for their younger generations, families, or clans.

Their Origin Cards, Ego Gems, Runes, and even their Divinities.

They wanted their life’s work to become an inheritance rather than disappearing with them when their lifespan finally ran out.

There were already methods for doing some of this, but every one of them came with significant limitations.

The simplest solution for passing down an Ego Gem and Runes was an artificial Ego Gem. Unfortunately, artificial Ego Gems weren’t particularly effective at preserving the runes. The stronger the Rune, the more complicated the process of preserving its structure and the understanding embedded within it became.

Only organizations like Morningstar University with ridiculous amounts of wealth, resources, and accumulated knowledge could reliably accomplish something close to perfect preservation.

For everyone else, artificial Ego Gems were more of a compromise than a genuine inheritance system.

Then there was the method of passing down one’s Grimoire.

A card apprentice could leave their Grimoire behind for a younger family member or descendant to contract. If they shared the necessary bloodline, the younger generation could awaken and inherit the predecessor’s Origin Card.

It sounded convenient until one looked at the restrictions.

The inheritor needed to have a lower-rank Grimoire.

Someone who already possessed a Grimoire of the same rank or a higher rank couldn’t simply abandon their current Grimoire and contract the inherited one.

That created a rather nasty limitation.

What happened if the cultivator didn’t have a suitable younger generation?

What if their children had already surpassed the rank of their Grimoire?

What if they had no children at all?

In those situations, the inheritance method became practically useless.

The very people who had accumulated the most valuable Origin Cards, Runes, and cultivation knowledge could end up having no suitable successor capable of receiving them.

Divinity was different.

There was no comparable restriction on who could inherit it.

A Card Emperor could abandon the process of establishing their own Divinity and instead use the Divinity left behind by a fallen Card Demigod to establish theirs.

That made inherited Divinity an incredibly valuable shortcut.

But there was a catch, the durability of the Divinity.

A flawless Divinity could allow the inheritor to wield almost the same level of power as the original Demigod who had possessed it. As the grade of the inherited Divinity decreased, however, so did the amount of power the inheritor could actually retain.

At the lower end, things became downright tragic.

Some inheritors could fail to reach the Card Demigod realm altogether, becoming stuck at the Semi-Card Demigod realm.

And because the Divinity they used had not originally been formed by them, there was another problem. They couldn’t simply nourish it and make up for its deficiencies.

Once they reached the limit imposed by that inherited Divinity, that was it. Their power was permanently capped at the level that Divinity could support.

Naturally, the requests from this batch covered every combination of these problems.

I didn’t have to find a solution for their problems as there was already one. The founding card demigods like Micheal Angelo and the ancestors of the royal family had already found one, the relic Ruby Vault.

[Relic Name: Ruby Vault

Relic Effect: Ruby Vault allows the user to store everything from soul energy to rule power to mental strength to divinity to their ethereal spirit regardless of the time.

Additional Effect: Vault of Life, In Plain Sight, Indestructible

Note: the Ruby Vault is a relic formed from the remains of a being believed to have achieved transcendence.]

The Ruby Vault wasn’t limited to storing something as intangible as Soul Energy or Divinity. It could also preserve Origin Cards, Runes, and even the accumulated essence of a Card Apprentice’s Rules. More importantly, whatever was placed inside could remain in perfect condition for millennia.

In other words, it was almost the perfect inheritance vault.

Almost.

As the note had already made clear, the problem wasn’t whether the Ruby Vault could solve the requests of these Card Apprentices. It could.

The problem was obtaining one or the ingredients needed to create one.

As far as I knew, there was practically no information about beings who had genuinely achieved transcendence anywhere in the Myriad Realms. There were legends, fragments of records, contradictory stories, and enough rumors to fill several libraries, but nothing that could reliably tell someone where the remains of a transcendent being could be found.

Finding the remains of someone who had supposedly achieved transcendence was already absurd.

Finding those remains in a condition that could actually produce a relic like the Ruby Vault was even more ridiculous.

To be completely honest, I hadn’t even held a Ruby Vault myself.

I had seen Card Apprentices using them as Origin Cards, though. Pax Whiteburn was one example, and Anna’s cousin, JJ, was another. So I knew the relic existed and wasn’t merely some ancient legend sitting inside a forgotten record.

Unfortunately, knowing that something existed and knowing where to find another one were two completely different matters.

For these Card Apprentices, the Ruby Vault was therefore less of a solution and more of a beautifully decorated dead end.

Since I had no intention of going on a scavenger hunt for the corpse of a mythical transcendent being, I decided to look for another solution.

And when I wanted quick answers to questions that seemed impossible, there was only one place I trusted to have something useful.

The Infinity Library.

This problem wasn’t prevalent only among the Card Apprentice community. It existed across every race in the Myriad Realms. Surely, with countless races and civilizations having existed throughout history, some of them must have solved this problem without relying on the remains of a Transcendent being and some of those solutions might have ended up in the infinity library.