Date: Unspecified
Ti: Unspecified
Location: Myriad Realms, Card World, Way Beyond, Unknown
*Fwoosh!!!*
Just as I was focused on circulating soul energy through the guard captain’s body, I caught, from the corner of my eye, a column of water shooting up from the vast lake beneath . By the ti the sound reached my ears, I sensed an entity forcing its way into my limitless barrier, attempting to cross its infinitely stretched space to reach . Monts later, my limitless barrier ruptured like a bubble, tearing the stretched space apart.
The unconscious guard captain and I were nearly pulled into the resulting spatial void. I hurriedly secured him and prepared to escape the range of the suction force, but a pair of hands suddenly seized us and dragged us out of there.
"Card Apprentice, is your friend okay?" an ethereal voice asked.
I turned toward the source of the voice and saw the one responsible for this upheaval. It appeared humanoid, with natural famine attributes. She had petrified gray skin, hair, and eyes and looked less like a living being and more like a living statue, or a gargoyle.Even so, she was undeniably striking. The craftsmanship was on an entirely different level.
"Stone Supre?" I blurted out in astonishnt as I watched the void closing as the space behind her rapidly knit itself back together.
I now understood why my limitless barrier had ruptured so suddenly. It was because her overall mass exceeded what the density of my limitlessly stretched space could withstand. Despite her size, she was unimaginably heavy like the world itself. Her re presence within my stretched space had pierced a tear through it. And since the space itself was stretching limitlessly, that tear continued to expand until, with a pop, the entire barrier shattered into fragnts.
"My human na is Petra Petros. I will allow you to call Petra," the Stone supre introduced herself as if this wasn’t the first ti eting humans.
"Hi, Petra. I’m Dalton Wyatt. My friend is fine," I replied, checking on the guard captain as I induced him into a deeper sleep and sealed him inside a miniature limitless prison bubble, storing it in my dinsional storage card beside Slay’s egg, next to Jill’s uncle. I wanted to avoid doing this, but I was forced to anyway to ensure I was prepared for any possible scenario. Hopefully, for the guard captain’s sake he doesn’t wake up earlier than my calculation.
Petra’s brows furrowed as she watched store the guard captain away. Then she said, "You are strong enough to have survived my demolition. I will give you that. But you heeded your greed instead of my warning. Now suffer the consequences of your insolence."
"Wait! Wait!" I uttered, not wanting to fight a supre being in the Way Beyond, which was crawling with them. However, without even listening to my explanation, Petra attacked with a strange stone rule. It bypassed all my defenses. Under its effect, all the minerals in my body began to attract one another and coagulate into stone.
It reminded of kidney stones, only this experience was a thousand tis worse. The pain was unbearable. It felt as if I were being petrified from the inside out. In the next instant, her stone rule flooded my body, and those small stones rapidly expanded into massive thorns that pierced outward all at once, causing my body to burst into a shower of blood, leaving a huge thorny stone.
My primordial calamity soul gem remained intact, embedded within the mass of thorny stone as it fell toward the lake. I intended to feign death and slip away once Petra left. However, the free-falling stone mass abruptly ca to a halt midair.
Petra intervened, manipulating it until the stone disintegrated and exposed my soul gem. With no other choice, I reconstructed a new body and attempted to reason with her once more. "Petra—"
"Is that a mutated ego gem?" Petra cut off and asked with an authoritative tone.
"You know about mutated ego gems?" I asked, feigning exaggerated shock to tickle Petra’s pride, hoping to buy a few more seconds before she destroys the second body.
From the fact that she had co to et us in her humanoid form, I gathered that she had experience dealing with card apprentices. And from what she had said earlier, I inferred that she had indeed warned the living creatures occupying the mountain range to leave, among whom card apprentices appeared to have been present as well. Now that she could identify my soul gem as a mutated ego gem, it was clear that she had a solid grasp of card apprentice knowledge.
Also, proving that my earlier assumption that this was an unexplored part of the Way Beyond was clearly wrong.
Between Petra’s words and the Emissary of Light teleporting us here, I was beginning to understand that it might have been the Empire’s card apprentices that Petra had encountered before. It seed the Empire was also active in the Way Beyond. At least in this part of the Way Beyond, they were more active than in the five regions. I couldn’t help but wonder how their expedition had managed to stretch so far into the Way Beyond.
"Yes, it was a mutated gem," I answered Petra. She frowned and imdiately asked, "How co I couldn’t crush it, no matter how hard I tried?"
I stared at Petra with a deadpan expression, screaming internally, Why don’t you just ask how to crush my ego gem? Of course, I didn’t voice those thoughts. Instead of answering her question, I redirected the conversation. "Where in the Way Beyond is this? My friend and I were teleported here by our enemy. Fortunately, I was strong enough to withstand your demolition. Otherwise, we would have had no way of getting back ho."
Petra stared at in silence, listening carefully, before saying, "Don’t you dare lie to . You will turn into stone. Even your mutated ego gem will not be able to save you this ti."
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