Card Apprentice Daily Log

Chapter 2681: Sansa’s Memory Bomb

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Card World, Southern Region, Blossom District, Sky Blossom City, TSR Guild Headquarters

"Die—!"

No longer paying attention to Sansa’s words, nor trying to understand them, I sentenced her to death within my Celestial Blood Fate Domain, intent on fulfilling the promise I had made to young Wyatt on that cold night when I awakened in this world, in his place.

However, something unexpected happened. Before I could even finish that single syllable, my head exploded.

"Memory Bomb!"

My headless body remained standing as blood sprayed endlessly from my severed neck. Sansa’s wild, unrestrained laughter filled my Celestial Blood Fate Domain as she bathed in my blood, utterly unaware of the corrosive nature of my cursed bloodline. The blood burned into her beautiful skin, searing it crimson. Only then did she panic, retreating frantically while activating a cleansing card on herself.

After putting distance between herself and my headless body, Sansa screamed—not in agony, but in despair. The skin her lover adored, the skin he liked to caress and kiss, had become hideous and grotesque. She now resembled a survivor of severe third-degree burns.

She desperately attempted to heal herself using various elixirs and healing cards, but none of them worked.

Only after she finally calmed down did she realize the truth that it was a curse. A high-tier curse at that, as none of her curse-purging cards worked.

The blood spurting from my neck suddenly spiraled inward, forming a violent whirlpool that rebuilt my head. I opened my eyes and looked toward Sansa.

She was cutting her own skin away, then regrowing it using elixirs and healing cards, only to watch the marks left by my cursed bloodline crawl back across her flesh. She repeated the process again and again. Each time, her cuts went deeper, eventually reaching bone.

She showed no mercy to herself, as though the pain meant nothing compared to the terror of facing her beloved with a hideous, ruined face.

When she finally accepted that she could not deal with the curse using the means available to her, she stopped. Her gaze snapped toward me, burning with a fury that words could not capture.

I didn’t care. I was too busy analyzing what had just transpired to spare even a thought for her death glare.

The Hive Spirit monitored my body around the clock, alerting me to any irregularities or attacks while my attention was elsewhere. According to its records, she had used my memory of her as the trigger, igniting and detonating my entire memory structure at once, causing my head to explode.

If not for the World Calamity Seed’s shell protecting my primordial calamity soul gem, the memories stored within it would have detonated as well, and my entire body would explode with my head, killing me instantly.

Understanding what had happened, I met Sansa’s stare head-on, fully aware that she had grown stronger than in Clown Mask’s future vision.

I realized then that sparing her in the Yellow Plains realm had been a grave mistake. An even greater mistake than sparing her was humiliating and antagonizing her—showing her just how helpless she was before me, how little I thought of her, to the point that I spared her life without even fearing the possibility of her revenge.

My provocations had pushed her to the edge of despair, so thoroughly that she had submitted to me.

Yet, in the few days since our encounter, the very despair and helplessness that forced her submission had, for reasons I still did not understand, transformed into motivation. It drove her to grow stronger, to devise a new application for her origin card, Memory Bomb—a technique that detonated the target’s memories by using their memory of her as the trigger. Simple yet lethal, the technique left me thoroughly impressed.

However, just as I was about to erase the memory of her from my mind and command the Celestial Blood Fate Domain to kill everyone trapped within it, she spoke again. Her warning came as if she had read my intent to kill her, just like last time, "Wyatt, don’t force my hand. I might not be able to kill you, but I can’t say the same about your beloved."

At her words, my breath froze. I didn’t believe her. I was fairly certain it was a bluff. Even so, I didn’t dare to call it. While I hesitated, Sansa continued, "Before you activated your celestial domain, I sent your little sweetheart a message. I introduced myself to her and implanted a ’Memory Bomb’ in her memories. It will detonate in twenty minutes. Now she has about eight minutes left."

Feeling my growing murderous intent for her, her smile sharpened, "If anything happens to me before then, the Memory Bomb will detonate immediately."

She tilted her head slightly, eyes locked onto mine, "So, what are you going to do, Wyatt? Tic Toc, Tic Toc."

I stared at her, not to judge whether she was telling the truth, nor to guess which of them she meant—Susan, Anna, or Jill, just to give her that impression while I used Hive Spirit to dispatch my calamity daughters to locate the three of them and ask who among them had received a message from Sansa. That was the only way to determine who the Memory Bomb had been implanted in, since unlike me, my calamity daughter gem did not possess primordial soul pupils.

So why didn’t I go to check on them myself?

Because I couldn’t leave the Celestial Blood Fate Domain if I intended to maintain it at full throttle. Anything less, and Sansa could escape my celestial rule domain piggybacking off the card world’s celestial force that permeated everything using someone who carried her memory as an anchor. Her ability was slippery like that.

Then how did I plan to save them if I couldn’t even leave the celestial domain?

Simple. I would have my calamity daughter gems gather the one at risk among the three into the Celestial Rule Domain—perhaps even all three of them, since I did not fully believe Sansa’s words.