Chapter 2920: Supreme Fallout
Date: Unspecified
Time: Unspecified
Location: Myriad Realms, Card World, Southern Region, Blossom District, Sky Blossom City
While the Mountain Supreme and Ocean Supreme were still trying to understand the nature of my Double Celestial Rule Domain, I focused on repairing the city’s damaged foundations before turning my full attention toward them.
As I stabilized the underground layers one by one, I gradually noticed something unexpected. A huge portion of the repair work had already been done beforehand. Countless underground support layers had been reinforced, redirected, compressed, or held together by Petra long before I intervened. Entire fault lines had been forcibly stabilized while collapsing underground caverns had been reshaped to prevent chain reactions from reaching the surface.
Only then did I finally understand why Sky Blossom City hadn’t already turned into ruins despite the absurdly violent tremors earlier. Petra had been holding the entire city together almost by herself while fighting Aqualas at the same time.
Realizing that brought me far more relief than I expected.
After all, Petra going from instantly trying to kill the first card apprentice she saw in ages... to risking her own life protecting an entire city filled with card apprentices wasn’t exactly something I ever expected from her.
Maybe there was more beneath that stone body of hers after all.
Leaving Jill to handle the aftermath while limiting my domain to the outskirts of the city, I finally arrived before Petra and Aqualas.
Petra was already familiar with my endlessly stretching space, but Aqualas wasn’t. Even so, she was frighteningly quick at figuring it out.
Streams of water drifted through the distorted space around her, repeatedly testing the flow, distance, and resistance of the infinitely stretched space. She looked less like someone trapped and more like a researcher calmly dissecting a puzzle.
That was the annoying thing about fighting equals or beings stronger than yourself.
Rule domains weren’t truly invincible. Against powerful opponents, they relied more on the element of surprise than overwhelming force. Once the enemy fully understood the mechanics behind the domain, it became little more than a glass cage waiting to be shattered. The same was true for celestial rule domain.
Which was exactly why I wanted answers quickly before Aqualas completely solved mine.
"What’s going on here?" I asked Petra while keeping one eye on Aqualas.
The Ocean Supreme completely ignored my presence. She was dangerously calm and focused, completely ignoring my presence. Her focus remained entirely on the endless space surrounding her as she manipulated threads of water through countless trajectories, trying to form a complete understanding instead of relying on fragmented observations.
"That’s Ocean Supreme Aqualas," Petra explained while still trying to traverse through the seemingly endless space surrounding her, only to realize it was far more troublesome than she initially expected. "She’s basically Bloodette’s estranged older sister. She came here to destroy everything Bloodette likes and loves before killing her."
"So... typical family drama," I commented dryly.
I didn’t bother asking for more details since Cortney’s chaotic messages had already given me enough fragmented context to roughly understand what was going on.
Meanwhile, Aqualas remained completely engrossed in analyzing my Double Celestial Domain. The more she analyzed it, the more serious her expression gradually became. Honestly, she looked exactly like that old meme: I Got This.
"Huh?" Petra looked at me in confusion, clearly not understanding what I meant.
Shaking my head, I instead said, "You should go take care of Cortney and Bloodette first. I’ll deal with her here and join you guys afterward."
Petra’s expression immediately changed, sensing I was preparing to remove her from the domain and hurriedly said, "Wyatt, wait. You can’t kill Aqualas."
"Why not?" I asked genuinely confused.
From everything I had seen so far, Aqualas clearly didn’t seem particularly concerned about killing Petra. Yet now Petra was pleading with me not to kill Aqualas in return.
Honestly, the more I learned about Petra, the more everything I previously assumed about her kept getting overturned.
"You do know that every time a Supreme Being dies, there’s always fallout, right? A calamity of sorts occurs in the surrounding area," Petra reminded me.
Only then did realization hit me.
"So you were trying to say that I can’t kill her here. Now that sounds more like you," I remarked, finally hearing something closer to the pragmatic Petra I knew. But Petra immediately shook her head and asserted with an unusually serious tone, "No. You can’t kill her anywhere. Period."
"The scale of the calamity caused by a Supreme Being’s death depends on how powerful that Supreme Being is. The stronger they are, the greater the calamity swallows the Card World after their death."
"If someone as strong and essential as Aqualas dies..." Petra looked toward Aqualas paused briefly before continuing, "the calamity wouldn’t stay confined to one region. It would affect the entire Card World."
For the first time since arriving, I even felt my expression stiffen slightly. Petra continued grimly, "One of the oldest predictions among the Supreme Beings states that if Aqualas were ever killed, the Card World would suffer a drought so long and severe that eventually all life would cease to exist."
Silence filled the distorted space afterward as the full meaning behind Petra’s words slowly sank in. She was basically telling me that killing Aqualas would amount to pressing the reset button on nearly all life across the Card World.
Except, of course, for the Supreme Beings themselves, who were essentially extensions of the Card World’s will and laws made manifest.
But then another terrifying thought suddenly crossed my mind: What would happen if Bloodette died?
Apparently, she had already died multiple times in the distant past. Yet back then, the Blood Rule Stream had been far less complete than it was now.
The current Bloodette was incomparably stronger than whatever version of herself existed in those ancient eras. And blood was one of the most fundamental aspects of almost most of the living organisms in the Card World.
If someone like Bloodette were to die now, especially within the Five Regions filled with blood-based lifeforms...
Then the consequences would probably be catastrophic beyond imagination. Countless species dependent on stable Blood Rules could simply start dying en masse like flies across the Card World.
The more I thought about it, the more horrifying the implications became. And then another possibility surfaced in my mind: Was this the real reason Bloodette had been sealed?
Honestly, if that were true, it would make far more sense than most of the theories I had previously considered. Sealing her away might not ever have been about punishing her, but protecting the rest of us from our stupidity.
