The Card Apprentice - Problems
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Problems
He still didn’t understand why people were chasing after the raining shuttles card .II, to tell the truth. While it did have superior firing speed, many four star cards also had that kind of advantage. From his point of view, the biggest advantage of the raining shuttles card .II was its ability to scale. The results in man-to-man combat were not as good as one might think.
He didn’t know about the card artisans who had seen it on the battlefield that day, with its power to leave no survivors behind. If you were to add in Ah Shen’s results, their fanaticism wasn’t so strange.
The superiority of the raining shuttles card .II had been pretty obvious, with its satisfying penetrating power in addition to its firing speed. And another very important factor was that it was a three-star fantasy card. While other four-star cards may equal its capabilities, or even exceed them, they were a lot more difficult to handle.
Of course, the higher the grade of the card, the more power it had, but the difficultly of controlling it also increased.
And although the raining shuttles card .II used a lot of high grade materials, it still had a lot lower cost of production than four-star cards. And the number of four-star cards that a card master could make in a day was nowhere near the number of three-star cards.
Those were all things that Ning Peng had needed to consider.
Cost of production, ease of use, capabilities and more, were all factors which needed to be considered. And as a matter of fact, there weren’t many card artisans in the Ning household who used four-star cards.
It wasn’t only the Ning family, but it was the same in other places. Although it was said that mid and high grade card artisans could use three or four-star cards, being able to use them and being able to use them well were two entirely different matters.
For example, Ah Shen could use four-star fantasy cards, but he would never use them in battle, where he would only use three-star cards. For ease of handling and responsiveness, the two were miles apart. Four-star cards had a very high requirement for perceptual control, at a different ability-level than for three-star cards.
And even more, the price for four-star cards left people speechless. That was another reason that the raining shuttles card .II was so sought after. They all knew how critical a responsive and easy to handle three-star fantasy card was for them.
Chen Mu stared blankly at all the stuff he had traded for. He had cancelled the commission by then.
The trading was a spur of the moment idea, though what he had gotten from it far exceeded what he had imagined.
He had gotten altogether over a hundred three-star fantasy cards having unique capabilities, which was very important to him. He still had a long way to go before reaching the level for four-star cards, which also meant that he needed a lot more dealings with three-star cards.
He was already adept at making three-star fantasy cards, but there were too many things about them that he still hadn’t learned. Chen Mu believed that no matter what sort of knowledge it was, books would only have a small part of it. There were even many things about one-star cards which were worth delving into, which could only be more-so with three-star cards.
He hoped to go through the cards he had collected to extend the scope of his vision and his thinking. He could only keep progressing and perfecting himself by studying others’ strengths.
Most of the raw materials were amateur grade to Chen Mu. Nothing more need be said about how important raw materials were to card masters, but that was also a deep and vast field, requiring a great amount of time and accumulated experience and insight. Too vast for Chen Mu.
Anyhow, what he did had depended on the generosity of others. While the high-grade materials used for the raining shuttles card .II would be very expensive if he had to buy them, since they were free Chen Mu needed to expend only a little time to be able to make them. That was a big advantage.
The reason that he pulled the commission was that he felt that it had already served its purpose, and his time was very tight which made it impossible for him to spend very much time on such things.
His perceptual sensitivity training had begun to show results lately, and he had already advanced to level forty-five.
What made him smile bitterly was that while he had been able to make such a broadly well-received raining shuttles card .II, he’d had no way to optimize the tailless shuttle card. Its composition was already very mature, and to optimize it was intimidating for Chen Mu.
Still, he hadn’t abandoned the tailless shuttle card. There was a sharp distinction in its usage compared to other cards, differing even in the way perception was employed. And while the power of the raining shuttles card .II was huge, it was still not as good as the tailless shuttle.
Most importantly, he still hadn’t been able to fully excavate the latent power of the tailless shuttle card. Its power was very closely connected to his level of perception. If he could increase the level of his perception, he could greatly increase its speed. And if he progressed in his theoretical understanding of the composition of energy, he could sharply increase its power.
As the reward for his being able to complete the unwinding game, how could the tailless shuttle card only have such a small amount of latent power? That was something that Chen Mu had always firmly believed, so he hadn’t chosen to look at the more convenient and currently more powerful raining shuttles card .II. He still wanted to stick to using the tailless shuttle card.
Most those hundred-plus three-star cards were fine works. While their composition might not have been too surprising, all the concepts were fine and ingenious, with many areas that he could use for reference.
It was very important for a card master whether the scope of his vision was broad or not.
* * *
It had already been two weeks since Ning Peng had returned to the base, and he had been so busy that he didn’t have any chance to rest. His eyes were bloodshot, although his spirits were good, since after all, their gains had been considerable as the victorious side. It was because of those strong incentives that he had held on so long.
He called to his secretary, wanting to know whether anything important had happened on the base during that time.
“What?” The blue veins were popping out of Ning Peng’s forehead, and his face had turned ashen, looking scary. The secretary didn’t dare to breathe, standing off to the side shivering.
He hadn’t thought that the thing he least wanted to see would happen while he was away.
Chen Mu had actually traded the raining shuttles card .II with quite a few people!
His eyes flashed a chill, which was a sign of the anger to come, and the secretary’s shivering increased.
Then he calmed down.
He and Chen Mu had never talked about any agreement not to allow the raining shuttles card .II to spread, and he couldn’t blame Chen Mu for it. And Chen Mu was still quite useful to them. If he were to blame him, it would only cause a lot of damage to their relations.
And it would be a very common thing for those card artisans having seen it to do everything possible to buy it.
Ning Peng didn’t have to consider the card artisans, but he did have to consider the cooperative relationship with Chen Mu. He was the only one who could make the raining shuttles card .II, and until they succeeded in cracking it, not only could they not fall out with Chen Mu, they still had to make the relationship as positive as possible.
Ning Peng had always been wary of any unauthorized raining shuttles card .II’s. Once it realized large-scale production, that kind of card could give free rein to a terrifying amount of power. Despite what had always been said about the difficulty of making the raining shuttles card, what if it weren’t so?
So once the fighting had ended, he looked for Ah Shen and paid a high price to buy the card he had. He thought that would be foolproof. He had never thought he could slip up so much, with the situation then already beyond his control.
It had already been a week since Chen Mu had cancelled the commission, and so the most pressing matter just then wasn’t to find Chen Mu but was rather to find those card artisans who had the raining shuttles card .II’s.
After thinking for a moment, he ordered, “Get me a list right away of all the card artisans who have traded for a raining shuttles card .II, without any leaks. I need it fast!
After agreeing, the secretary immediately left Ning Peng’s office with a rushed look.
The training that Chen Mu was focusing on the most at that time was the perceptual sensitivity training, having felt with his own body the importance of perceptual sensitivity. He couldn’t abandon the practice.
Taking a deep breath and slowing his breathing to calm his mind, the speed of the shuttle shaped perceptual vortex within his body slowly increased. The increase was very fine, and had it been earlier he wouldn’t have been able to detect it. But he was able to detect such fine changes in perception after having gone through the training.
With the speed of the vortex a little higher, it quickly entered a steady-state, and then after an instant when he raised it a little more, he again made it constant, doing this back and forth, like going up stairs a step at a time.
Such practice looked very slow and it did need a lot of time, but the results were clear.
After probably half an hour, the rotational speed of the vortex had reached the highest it could go with him still being able to control it. At that speed, if he didn’t pay attention for even an instant, the perceptual vortex could lose its stability.
It wouldn’t be absolutely uniform!
Chen Mu had discovered a little fluctuation in the vortex. Although it was very slight, it caused his perception of his surroundings to become quite fuzzy. He concentrated all his energy on regulating the vortex to smooth out those fluctuations.
Chen Mu felt in all directions with his eyes closed, where there were countless fingernail-sized glowing pearl-like beads flying around at high speed like a crowd of demons. Each of them emitted a light glow. They flew all around Chen Mu at high speed without ever touching him.
They were flying so fast and were so numerous that their tracks were hard to discern at his level of training. Their number had already exceeded a thousand. If each small glowing bead were like an insect, then it would be a sea of insects.
The surrounding scene became more and more clear in his mind, with every finest detail becoming more and more distinct. The differences in the sizes of the beads and their speed . . .
Chen Mu opened his eyes to accurately quote the number “1367!”
“Congratulations, your perceptual sensitivity index has reached 45! Would you like to enter the next round?”
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