Chapter 3078: My Ticket Home

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

Location: Myriad Realms, Card World, Five Regions, Southern Region, Blossom District, Sky Blossom City, TSR Tower

Before she could say anything else, Lorn flicked her wrist and sent her straight back into the Mystic Dimension. The room became quiet again. Lorn glanced at me, then shook her head.

"You actually want Corey to build the Disciplinary Department?" she asked. "Won’t it just end up filled with a bunch of kiss-asses? As far as I know, no decent Card Apprentice would willingly serve under someone with her temper."

She wasn’t wrong. Corey was difficult enough to deal with as an acquaintance. Working under her was another matter entirely. Unless someone was willing to nod along to everything she said, laugh at her jokes at their own expense, and treat every impulse she had like a brilliant strategy, they probably wouldn’t last a week.

I shook my head, asking, "When have you ever actually seen Corey working?"

Lorn’s expression immediately answered the question.

"Exactly." I smiled. "When I say Corey is responsible for building the Disciplinary Department, I’m not actually expecting Corey to do the work. I’m assigning the job to Park and Hive Spirit. Though I do hope she learns from them."

Lorn stared at me for a moment before slowly understanding.

"So Corey gets the title and perks while Park gets the headache." Lorn’s lips twitched. "And the Hive Spirit gets everything else."

"Now you’re getting it," I said before abruptly leaving the penthouse office noticing the sub-reality was beginning to crumble. Lorn followed close behind, still clearly dissatisfied with my answer.

"Wyatt, I don’t understand why you favor Corey." Her starry eyes narrowed slightly. "You treat your family and friends well, but when it comes to Corey, your decisions and actions don’t make sense to me."

"I don’t know. I just do." I shrugged, deliberately making my answer sound thoughtless. "Besides, she’s not all that bad. And I find her much like me."

I made it sound like I’d answered without thinking. It was a lie, a simple one. I couldn’t explain to Lorn why I really coddled Corey more than I did almost anyone else.

Corey was the one bad habit that I allowed myself. Because she was my ticket home. My connection to the place that had once been my real home: Earth. That was why I tolerated her tantrums.

Why I overlooked mistakes I would have punished in others. Why I kept giving her opportunities to grow even when she repeatedly made a mess of them. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely rational, but was necessary for me.

I consider the Card World my home now. After everything I had experienced here, it was impossible not to. But there was still one question I couldn’t bury, like what had happened to Earth after my death?

I wanted to know whether humanity had survived and somehow managed to thrive, or whether it had eventually gone extinct. I wanted to know whether people remembered me as a monster. A genocidal maniac who had unleashed a virus that killed millions of people who had taken the Superhuman Serum.

Or perhaps they had never learned the truth. Maybe history had twisted what happened until I became the villain responsible for humanity’s downfall. The thought haunted me more than I liked to admit. Had I been the end of humanity on Earth as I knew it? Or had humanity survived my death and continued without me?

That was why Corey mattered to me in a way Lorn could never understand.

Anyone familiar with her Origin Card, Relife, would know that whenever Corey broke through a major realm and underwent another baptism, she recovered memories from one of her past lives.

So far, she had confided in me about all three of them. And there was something strange about those memories. All three lives had been lived somewhere within the Myriad Realms, yet each world shared a familiar element. They resembled Earth. Not perfectly, but enough.

Each had technology, cultures, conflicts, and societies that carried echoes of the world I remembered. The details she described sounded eerily familiar. Some were so familiar that, at times, I wondered whether I was listening to the life experience of someone from my own Earth in a different time period or reality. Especially her first life, which seemed to belong to an Earth that existed before the Viltronian bastard descended.

That was the thread I couldn’t let go of. Corey’s memories might be my only clue.

If her reincarnations were connected to Earth in some way, then perhaps following the trail of her past lives could eventually lead me back to the answer I had been searching for since I first arrived in this world.

I didn’t know what I would find. Maybe Earth had survived. Maybe it had flourished. Maybe humanity had forgotten me entirely. Or maybe the world I left behind had died with me. I needed to know. And until I did, a part of me would always be looking backward, no matter how far forward I traveled.

There was another detail I couldn’t ignore. Corey had reincarnated in the Card World. And somewhere along the way, I had discovered the tiny remains of what appeared to be a Russian aircraft.

My mind immediately began connecting dots that I was almost afraid to follow to their logical conclusion. If Corey’s reincarnations were confined to worlds that resembled Earth in some ways, then why had one of them eventually led her to the Card World? Except for the humans, nothing about it represented Earth closely? Was this where the pattern ended or was there more to it then I was seeing?

The possibilities were unsettling. But possibilities were all they were. Until I saw the memories of all her past reincarnations, I had nothing but speculation, assumptions, and a collection of coincidences that happened to fit together far too neatly.

There was only one reliable way for me to learn the truth. Corey had to tell me herself. There were other ways I could uncover her memories. Methods that would be considerably faster and far less dependent on her cooperation.

But Corey had been one of my first friends on this planet. I had no intention of treating her like an experiment simply because I was curious about where her reincarnations might lead.

Besides, there was another problem. There was no guarantee that her future reincarnations would be weaker or less intelligent than I was at the time I encountered her. If I tried to force the truth out of her, I could easily find myself dealing with a version of Corey far more capable than I was prepared to handle.

So I would use patience. Honey before the stick. I’d let Corey reveal her memories naturally, one reincarnation at a time. If the truth really was hiding somewhere inside those lives, I would eventually find it. And when I did, I would finally know what became of the Earth I had left behind.

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