Chapter 3136: Artificial Cores

Date: Unspecified

Time: Unspecified

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

When it came to the Card Apprentices, completing their requests was considerably more complicated.

Unlike the mortals, their cultivation realms varied wildly. The weakest had been stuck at the peak of the Card Student realm, while the strongest was a peak Card Lord who had managed to force his way into the higher realm through questionable means, only to damage his own vitality in the process.

There were quite a few higher-realm Card Apprentices with similar problems, but Hive Spirit had already separated them from the main batch as their lifespan extension would require an entirely different approach from that of the lower- and mid-realm Card Apprentices.

Like the mortals, all of them were approaching the end of their natural lifespans.

The difference was that they weren’t suffering from ordinary illnesses and age-related ailments.

They were carrying injuries or were poisoned.

Some were recent. Others were old enough that the people themselves had probably forgotten how they received them. Injuries accumulated from cultivation, battles, failed breakthroughs, forbidden techniques, and years of pushing their bodies beyond what they could safely endure. Their cultivation had allowed them to live far longer than ordinary mortals, but it had also given them many more opportunities to damage themselves.

There was another important difference.

Most of these Card Apprentices had earned their merits themselves.

Unlike the mortals whose children or spouses had spent their hard-earned merits to purchase a chance at extending their loved one’s life, these people had accumulated their merits through their own service. Some had even continued working long after they could have retired because they wanted to contribute to the New Empire.

That made me even less inclined to give them some cheap, standardized solution.

Technically, I could have divided them among my clones and had Hive Spirit assist in treating their injuries one by one. Once their bodies were repaired, I could have created another smart array formation capable of producing the appropriate lifespan-extending potions, just as I had done for the mortals.

It would work.

But it simply wouldn’t be economical.

The number of variables involved in treating cultivators was far greater. Their injuries were intertwined with their cultivation foundations, physical bodies, spiritual bodies, and accumulated vitality. Simply repairing the visible damage wouldn’t necessarily restore what they had lost over the years.

It wasn’t just that.

Not that I was being a miser, but I simply couldn’t obtain all those ingredients from the market in the quantities I needed. There was a reason why, even in the Dark Realm, only a select few elixirs and items were mass-produced through array formations.

The limiting factor wasn’t always the complexity of the recipe.

More often than not, it was the ingredients.

Some ingredients couldn’t be cultivated at all. Others could technically be grown, but only under extremely specific conditions that made large-scale production impractical. Some had to be harvested from dangerous dungeons, while others were scattered across different realms or took so long to naturally replenish that any attempt to stockpile them would quickly exhaust the available supply.

Even when an ingredient was technically available, obtaining it in bulk could become a nightmare.

The ingredients used in Mortal-tier and other low-tier products were common enough that manufacturers could cultivate them, purchase them in bulk, and maintain massive reserves. The ingredients I needed now were different.

They weren’t necessarily precious.

They simply weren’t common enough to gather whenever I wanted.

I could spend a fortune buying them, only to discover that the market had already run dry because someone else had purchased the available stock. And even if I managed to secure enough for my current batch of clients, that wouldn’t solve the problem when I wanted to produce the same elixirs on a larger scale.

It was like having a perfectly good car with nowhere to buy petrol. Throwing more money at the problem wouldn’t magically create more fuel. I needed an entirely different approach. ree

I decided to take a page from the Dark Races’ book.

The races they enslaved from across the Myriad Realms often faced a serious problem after being brought back to the Dark Realm. They weren’t adapted to its atmosphere or ecosystem, and many arrived with injuries sustained during their capture or captivity.

Taken together, those problems should have made the slave trade far less profitable.

Yet the Dark Races had found a remarkably simple solution.

Artificial Demon Cores.

By implanting an artificial Demon Core, they could essentially force the body to adapt to the environment of the Dark Realm while also providing it with the power-system necessary to sustain itself in the Dark realm. It turned an otherwise complicated biological and environmental compatibility problem into something that could be solved with a single standardized tool.

That was what caught my attention. I didn’t need to copy their solution exactly. I only needed to apply the underlying principle.

Instead of trying to gather an absurd number of rare ingredients to create different Elixirs for every Card Apprentice, I could create an artificial core that would not only repair their bodies as though they had been reborn upon implantation, but also make them stronger in the process, and continue to help them keep growing stronger.

There were still other considerations to work through, but it was a perfect solution for the current batch of Card Apprentice clients. None of them had forged their Ego Gem yet, which meant their bodies and souls had not reached the point where the artificial core would face serious resistance.

After giving the matter serious thought and going through the details of each Card Apprentice in the group, I reached a conclusion.

I could administer the Demon Core to them as Origin Cards.

That way, the Card World’s power system wouldn’t reject the core. Instead, it would recognize the Demon Core as part of their own power system and, better yet, assist in integrating it into their bodies. Not to mention the baptism with every breakthrough, it would basically refine the core for the card apprentice.

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