The Card Apprentice

Chapter 96: Perception

Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio

When he got back to his apartment, Chen Mu was thinking about how things were going. From what he’d learned that day, there was a huge difference between low-grade and high-grade. If he were to muddle along with his knowledge as low as it was, then his days would be awful, without any doubt.

Although Chen Mu had already gotten used to an awful life, he had an unusual fanaticism for cards, and especially for materials. When he saw those precious and rare materials, it nearly took his breath away.

Without contribution points, those materials were just a fantasy, and he could only look, with no way to use them.

It would be very difficult to move ahead around there without contribution points. Whether he was asking for instruction or for materials and equipment, it all required points.

He could tell from the commissions that he’d scanned that day that the cards involved averaged four stars. And he still had to complete those additional two hundred cards. He believed that they would mostly be four-star cards, or even higher.

It looked as though he was going to be there for a long time, since he still had a long way to go to before he could make four-star cards.

Leaving aside his house arrest, he really liked it there. Only after coming had he fully realized how shallow his knowledge was, and how frail his power was. But he also found out how much glory and beauty lay in front of him in the wide wide world.

The two most important obstacles he faced were perception and the structuring of his knowledge.

His perception had never broken through five meters, which was the deadliest obstacle at that moment. If he couldn’t break through five meters, not only wouldn’t he be able to make four-star cards, he would never be able to move to the next level in the mysterious card. Doing that was very tempting without a doubt.

He had been stuck at that level for quite a while. And he hadn’t been able to recover from the severe injuries to his perception from when he was battling to protect Copper. Fortunately, he had recently begun to feel some vague signs of a breakthrough.

The other thing that he needed to improve was the structure of his knowledge, which was very weak. It was only partially strong compared to ordinary card masters, and he didn’t have a solid foundation. And there were many types of three-star cards that he still couldn’t make sense of. If none of them were ordinary, it would be extremely challenging for him there even if they were all three-star cards,

But at the same time, Chen Mu did have some areas that others couldn’t reach. Because of his understanding of token card theory, when the card was more complicated or ingenious, it was easier for him to discern its underlying structure.

Then there was his terrific ability to learn, which was also what Copper had admired the most about him. Starting from the most basic and simple one-star power card to his current ability, he had finely honed his self-study techniques.

Sorting out in his mind what lay ahead of him, Chen Mu quickly grasped his main direction.

This was really a great place! Chen Mu didn’t know how many times he had felt that. Maybe the free materials at the self-serve materials supermarket didn’t mean anything to everyone else there. They all had very high ability, and they seldom had any opportunity to use them for the cards they made. But those free materials were extremely useful for someone of low ability like Chen Mu. Every card master’s proficiency depended on countless piles of materials.

It had been a smooth transition from his initial embarrassment to being able to act naturally and not seeming to notice anything. The materials supermarket and the library became his most frequented places. He would make a large quantity of cards each day for practice; his ability to control his perception wasn’t going to come from his understanding but had to be based on countless trials.

He already had fifty-five contribution points. The difficulty of getting there wasn’t enough for outsiders to talk about, and probably only that girl called Li Li knew. Li Li had already determined that Chen Mu was an offspring of the Ning family, so why would he be there with such low skills, if not to temper them?

She sometimes took pity on Chen Mu, since he always took the lowest level commissions, and often got hit with deductions. If it were anyone else, they would have given up a long time ago.

Apart from making cards, Chen Mu hadn’t dropped anything else, whether it was the exercise gymnastics or the swordfish training. He’d made a lot of progress with the swordfish training and had found that his reflexes by then were sometimes quicker than his thoughts. And although he didn’t know if it had anything to do with the water training, he had become much more sensitive to his surroundings from every facet of his body.

He could sometimes feel every slightest change in air/qi flows. That could sometimes be very inconvenient, especially during sleep when he would be suddenly awakened in the middle of the night because of a small worm crawling by.

He still slept in a dark corner as always, and he didn’t have to turn on the lights in his apartment any more to be able to see the designs on the cards clearly.

After he had been tortured by it for a while, he felt that his sleep was between being half awake and awake. All it took was a certain amount of breeze that might stir the grass, and he would be awakened.

Although things were fine there, he wasn’t in his comfort zone.

He’d been there three months by then, and his apartment was filled with all kinds of three-star cards. They represented every type of three-star card that he could find, wanting to try each of them at least once. No matter which type of card, they all had a basic standard composition. Even the more special cards were still made based on this standard composition.

The further along he got with his studies, the more important he felt that the power of token card principles was. Once he thought them through from the angle of token card theory, he would achieve breakthroughs with many of the transformations he couldn’t understand.

That inevitably puzzled him quite often. With the strong functioning of token cards, and with how advanced token card theory was, there wasn’t any reason to doubt it. But why hadn’t he ever found any knowledge related to it in books? If it had been created by someone before him, then why hadn’t it been passed down?

Chen Mu knew that if he were to publicize token card theory it would create a sensation such as had never been seen, and he would be pushed into the thick of things, bringing him unimaginable riches and recognition.

But he didn’t do that, since he knew his worth, and if he were to do it, it could be a calamity for him rather than a blessing. It wasn’t something that belonged to him.

The mid-sized v-shaped pen in his hand was moving in smooth circles, as though it was doing a small dance on the card. In the dark room, a faint light was glowing from the swirling flow where the pen nib and the card met. Chen Mu was sitting up very straight, with his gaze concentrated, and his right wrist was as nimble as a snake without any bones, pleasing to the eye and the mind.

He was precisely as accurate as a machine,

During those three months, he would repeat the same kinds of work dozens of times each day. Whenever his perception would come up empty, he would return to the swordfish training card to drill his perception. The pressure in the swordfish training was exactly the same as that in the simple water world.

Chen Mu had decided not to return to the simple water world in that mysterious card until he had experienced a breakthrough with his perception.

The fine filaments of perception were like tentacles winding around the v-shaped pen nib, feeding back to Chen Mu every change between the card ink and the card, so that he could then use his perception to cause the card ink and the card to achieve their fit.

Then there was a sudden emptiness in him, and the pen started to become a little blocked. Quite a few of the tendrils of perception that were wound around the pen nib had already started to snap.

Fine beads of sweat started to appear on his forehead, while Chen Mu’s expression hadn’t changed at all, calm as always. He didn’t know how many times he’d already run into that kind of situation, and he wasn’t as panicked as he had been at the beginning.

The rapid spinning of the shuttle-like vortex of his perception kept shooting out tendrils of perception, which wound around the pen nib. The broken tendrils and the ones newly shot out weren’t very different. And the two of them together formed a kind of clever balance.

Chen Mu had a thought. Could it be that the existence of the shuttle-style perceptual vortex spin velocity and the perceptual tendrils shooting out were related?

On the one hand the power maintained the perceptual tendrils which were wound around the pen nib, while on the other, Chen Mu had started to catalyze the shuttle-style perceptual vortex’s rotational speed.

With the impetus of Chen Mu’s consciousness, the spinning velocity of the shuttle shaped perceptual vortex increased little by little. And as its speed increased, Chen Mu could try getting the shuttle-shaped vortex to shoot out more perceptual tendrils.

The results were immediately apparent, as Chen Mu felt the pen in his hand become lighter, and the perceptual blockages that had been there disappeared and returned to the smooth perceptions of the past.

The discovery made Chen Mu overjoyed. Perception had always been puzzling to Chen Mu. Although the mysterious card had presented methods for training perception, there hadn’t been very many elaborations. And at Eastern Wei Academy, where he had been influenced by the lure card, the perception in his body had changed, to become the shuttle-shaped perceptual vortex that he had never heard about.

That had also immediately made his own perception feel unfamiliar, and then when he had received those heavy blows last time they had made him still more cautious toward his perception. That had been the basic reason that his perception hadn’t been making any progress.

Then today by coincidence he had finally found the key to unlock the treasure in his own body. That one little try also meant that he had finally broken the mental barrier of not daring to touch his perception.

He didn’t continue to increase the speed, but instead, he restrained the ecstasy he felt and stopped. He needed to consider it calmly, since he had always believed that while one needs passion to do something, if you wanted to get to the end and find the core, it would always take calm.

Although he had then already started gradually to get rid of his mental barriers toward perception, he was still more clear that, unlike other things, the sensitivity of perception also carries a certain danger, and he knew he hadn’t made a mistake by being careful.

He needed a complete and moderate plan to inquire about what secrets his own body’s perception contained.

There in the dark, Chen Mu’s eyes shone with a moving light.