Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 3157: Exploring Realm Of True Evil

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Realm Of True Evil

Controlling my rapidly beating heart, I forced myself to calm down and activated my Soul Pupils. If this forest really was some enormous living organism, examining the soul pathways of its vegetation should give me a clue about what I was dealing with.

I examined the trees and plants below me one by one, but the result was almost disappointingly ordinary. They were regular plants and trees, the same kinds of vegetation found throughout the Myriad Realms, the Dark Realm, and even the Card World. Their soul pathways, life force, and biological structures showed nothing unusual beyond a single mutation: hyper-gigantism. Somehow, these ordinary plants had simply grown to an absurd scale. I tried to trace back the mutation and it led me to their roots.

Following their roots deeper with my Soul Pupils revealed something more interesting. Their individual root systems were connected to an enormous root network stretching deep beneath the ground. The farther I followed it, the more extensive it became, until the roots of individual trees seemed almost impossible to distinguish from the larger network. The entire forest was connected beneath the surface.

Perhaps I was looking at this the wrong way. Instead of examining individual plants, I needed to see the forest as a whole.

I summoned the heads of my clones and spread them outward and upward like drones, sending them several miles in every direction while concealing their presence through resonance. There was no reason for me to take unnecessary risks trying to investigate the forest.

For a while, they found nothing.

That was strange in itself. A forest this enormous and vibrant should have been overflowing with life, yet none of the heads detected insects, birds, beasts, or even distant movement.

Then one of them finally found something.

A massive white-feathered leviathan was struggling among the trees. Thick branches had wrapped around its enormous body, winding around its limbs and torso like serpents. The harder it struggled, the tighter they became, crushing its body inward while slowly dragging it toward the ground.

The forest was hunting it.

That immediately made me wonder why it had allowed me to leave.

Perhaps I was simply too small to be worth consuming. Whatever energy the forest needed to expend capturing me might exceed what it could gain from my body. Or perhaps it wasn’t interested in me yet and was waiting for me to settle down and breed a colony big enough for it to spare energy to devourer.

Either possibility was unsettling.

What bothered me more was the forest’s awareness. It had extraordinary senses that I hadn’t detected until now, and its branches were clearly acting with purpose. Yet when I examined the trees again, I found nothing that explained it.

They were still ordinary plants with a hyper-gigantism mutation.

So how were their branches moving like snakes hunting prey? How was the entire forest moving as one? Where was the intelligence behind it?

I had no answer.

Before I could investigate further, another scouting head reported, it had reached the edge of the forest. I shifted my attention to its vision, expecting to find open land beyond the trees.

Instead, I found an ocean of seething lava.

It wasn’t a volcanic lake or a river. An enormous expanse of molten rock stretched beyond the forest, its incandescent surface churning beneath waves of heat that distorted everything above it. The boundary between the lush green forest and the ocean of lava was almost absurd, as though two completely different environments had been placed beside each other.

I forced myself to stop making assumptions and ordered the scouting head to follow the forest’s edge without approaching the lava, who knew what it was hiding. I wanted to know whether there was a proper shoreline somewhere ahead or whether this entire region was surrounded by molten lava.

At this point, I had learned enough to know one thing. The Realm of True Evil was going to be far stranger than anything I had prepared for.

While my clone-head drones continued exploring the forest in complete stealth, I decided that observing it from the outside wasn’t going to be enough. I needed a more drastic method to figure out what was actually going on. Was the entire forest a single entity controlling countless individual plants, or was there something else connecting them? The trees themselves appeared completely ordinary when examined individually, yet the forest behaved as though it possessed senses, intelligence, and a will of its own. There had to be something I was missing.

To find it, I had one of the clone-head drones collect the necessary genetic material from one of the trees. I had no intention of guessing my way through this. If I wanted to understand the tree from the inside, what better method was there than becoming one?

I used Primordial Myriad Devil Transformation with the genetic material and transformed myself into the same kind of gigantic tree.

The transformation was strange.

One moment I was myself, and the next I had become an enormous tree floating among the clouds. My body was now a massive trunk, my limbs had become countless branches, and my roots hung beneath me like a gigantic network of tendrils searching for soil that wasn’t there.

The first thing I noticed was how sluggish I felt.

My soul energy seemed to move with considerably more resistance, while even maintaining my usual level of mental focus felt strangely taxing. It wasn’t that the tree form was weak. Quite the opposite. My physical body was enormous, and the sheer vitality contained within it was astonishing. But the way that vitality was distributed and utilized was completely different from my original body.

I immediately began examining the transformation with Hive Spirit, carefully comparing the structure of my new body with the genetic material I had obtained. We went through the tree’s biological structure, soul pathways and arrangements, energy circulation, sensory organs, and every other aspect I could examine.