The Card Apprentice

As a child living the life of a street punk, Chen Mu suffered malnutrition for a little while. Later, after his life took a turn for the better, his health started to become stronger; although judging from his appearance, you wouldn’t say he was well-built. But his health was essentially excellent, and he seldom got sick.

However, when Chen Mu attempted one of the exercises, he found it to be quite strenuous. It made high demands on his lower body strength, which wasn’t his strong suit. Both of Chen Mu’s legs were aching and as weak as mud after going through it a few times. While he didn’t know if he was really doing the exercises, the soreness that developed in his legs was perfectly real.

Chen Mu was able to try each of the eighteen actions once, but there were just three that he could do. Each time he did one of the activities according to the standard, that figure would immediately dim. There wouldn’t be any change in the figure if the activity he did wasn’t exactly the same as the figure demonstrated.

Apart from those changes, no matter how many times Chen Mu suffered through the exercises, there would be no change in the surroundings.

Suffering the unbearable repetitions had almost completely wiped out Chen Mu’s energy. His biggest problem now was not how to complete the eighteen activities, but how to get out from that fantasy realm!

He was surrounded by a void, empty of a single thing. There weren’t any other indicators apart from the eighteen figures. Could they be the indicators?

Chen Mu quickly vetoed the notion, since the eighteen figures were complete illusions. Or was it that he had to finish the eighteen actions? Chen Mu was smiling bitterly, since if that was how it was, he would certainly be miserable. He would have to go through quite a few trials before he could possibly complete them successfully, and it wouldn’t be right away. Break out of the fantasy realm? That wasn’t worth thinking about in such a brilliant fantasy realm. He certainly couldn’t break out by relying on his own power.

And so where could the key to exit the fantasy realm be? Chen Mu’s forehead was beading up in cold sweat trying to remember all the various legends about high-grade fantasy cards. If there were no way to find the critical key, then his future had only two possibilities. One was that the power-card which supplied the power for that fantasy card would get used up, causing the fantasy realm automatically to terminate. The other was that he could die of thirst or hunger before the power got used up.

A bead of sweat slid down along the bridge of his nose and finally dripped off into the endless dark void below. But even never having experienced that sort of danger, Chen Mu wasn’t flustered, since it certainly wasn’t the first time in his life that he’d encountered danger. Besides starvation and cold, there were many dangers which went along with being a young street punk. Vicious wandering dogs could be just as fatal to wandering children. Then there were those thoroughly awful and extremely vicious traffickers in people. In their eyes, street kids were like a piece of juicy meat.

But Chen Mu had never once encountered any danger which made him feel so utterly helpless. In his eyes, that fantasy card represented the highest art of fantasy cards; too high to touch. For a dabbler in card-mastery who had only just mastered the one-star fantasy card, he expected simply to be gazing upward, never being able to go beyond that for his whole life.

The feeling of danger wasn’t just coming from something outside of him but had also emerged from the deepest reaches of his heart.

Chen Mu forced himself to calm down. He knew that the goal of the card maker wasn’t likely to be to make the user die while trapped in the fantasy realm. If that were the case, the place ought to have been full of mortal attacks, and not so peaceful as it was. The only possibility was that he had not yet found the key for exiting the fantasy realm.

Since he hadn’t gone through any sort of orthodox card master training, it obviously didn’t seem practical to consider using his own knowledge to resolve the problem. After pondering a while, Chen Mu decided to use the crude method of the process of elimination. There weren’t many objects in the fantasy realm in any case.

However . . . just then, almost all the things in the fantasy realm came together by themselves and touched! It was quite clear that it wasn’t in response to anything. What could possibly be going on?

The figures in the void themselves!

Chen Mu had a flash of divine insight. Right! I ignored one possibility. Myself! Besides the eighteen figures in the whole fantasy realm, there is myself!

Chen Mu’s panicked glance fell onto his own wrist. Astonishingly, he could see the apparatus there. Chen Mu almost unconsciously pressed the activation button.

Phew! The scenery in front of his eyes changed and Chen Mu was back in his familiar room again.

His legs had gone soft. Heaving a huge sigh of relief, Chen Mu plopped on his butt onto the floor. He was so exhausted he didn’t even feel like shifting his finger.

He had almost entirely used up his energy attempting those actions. After both his mind and his body had gone through such a rigorous ordeal, his spirits had also become highly enervated.

Worn out, Chen Mu lay down on the floor and fell asleep.

Once again, Chen Mu was awakened by hunger! The feeling of waking up hungry was really awful. Chen Mu really loathed feeling starved, which was probably the left-over influence of growing up as a street punk.

He wasn’t picky about what he ate – he just wanted to fill his belly. He opened the fresh food cupboard, and a blast of cold air hit him in the face. The core of the fresh food cupboard was a cold-air card – capable of refrigeration – to keep the freshness of food items. Its price was low, but the power it consumed each month was not a small amount.

The fresh food cupboard’s cold-air card, or the hot pot’s heating card, and so forth, were not at all high-grade – not more than one or two stars. But they had become things which people couldn’t do without in their everyday lives. They had all gone into large-scale industrial production, which made their production costs even lower.

Low-grade card usage had radiated to all aspects of ordinary people’s lives. In the world of cards, there was no disputing who the great masters were; Rosenberg and Heiner Van Sant. As part of the first theory of cards that he proposed, the grand master Rosenberg made the first power-cards and fantasy cards in human history. Heiner Van Sant not only took Rosenberg’s fantasy cards to a level never achieved, he also made other cards which were entirely different from the Rosenberg style.

These two great masters both climbed to the very peak of the card world.

However, there was still one who was equally outstanding in that world, who used a different style. He shone forth with incomparably dazzling radiance and was called the ‘grand master most approaching the two sages.’

That was none other than Luo Qi. Luo Qi’s status as a high-grade card master is very dark among the outstanding card masters throughout history. But it was just that kind of card-master who stirred up an unprecedented revolution in the world of cards. He spent his entire lifetime’s energy devoted to integrating cards with the lives of ordinary people. Many cards which bad been too high to reach came into ordinary peoples’ lives because of him.

Fresh food cupboards, hot pots, shuttle cars . . .

He was always brimming with matchless wisdom and creativity. He brought about great value from unremarkable one-star and two-star cards. As a result, peoples’ lives underwent earth-shattering changes. That also greatly improved the lives of many low-level card-masters, whose livelihoods had been challenging. It also gave him enormous riches, since he was also wise in the ways of business. His wealth grew like a rolling snowball, and after a few short decades he had become the wealthiest person in the entire Heavenly Federation at that time. Right up until the contemporary period, Luo Qi’s descendants were still among the rich and powerful of the Heavenly Federation. There were so few that they could be counted on one’s fingers.

Luo Qi was a person brimming with controversy. In the eyes of traditional card-masters, he was the archetype of someone who didn’t attend to his proper duties. His contemporary, Heiner Van Sant, mockingly called him “a jerk who stinks of money from head to toe.” While to very many people, he was an out-and-out genius, though an unconventional one. That was also the way Chen Mu’s saw it.

Breaking through convention is not something everyone can do.

Chewing on a hard piece of bread, Chen Mu sat at the table and let his gaze fall again on that mysterious card. As of then, that enigmatic card was still an enigma. He still hadn’t found one of the answers he wanted to find. He had originally thought that once he had a three-star power-card, ‘the rocks would show as the water receded,’ and he would know after all what sort of card the mysterious card really was. He hadn’t expected that in the end he still wouldn’t know why it was as it was.

The life-like fantasy realm in the card seemed like a different world, cut off entirely from his surrounding environment. It had really shocked him when he couldn’t find a way out because of that.

Illusion had actually progressed to that stage!

Chen Mu felt a little defeated when he thought again about the fantasy card he had made on his own. But his feeling of defeat only lasted a few seconds. Chen Mu believed those who could make any kind of fantasy card were few enough. He felt an immediate boost in his morale. Fantasy cards, the most traditional cards in the Heavenly Federation, were awesome after all!

As he was chewing on the hard bread, Chen Mu’s mind was full of the eighteen actions, each one unique. They were certainly not methods for attack. Chen Mu was not a card artisan, but street brawls were his daily fare when he was a street punk. He was an old hand with them, so he could tell at a glance that these eighteen moves had no attack nature about them.

Somehow, the moves looked a little bit like tricks from gymnastics exercises.