The Card Apprentice - What is This?

Everyone was looking at each other. All over the place? If that was really a card, would it be all over the place? Could it have been a depot for the disposal of card garbage? Chen Mu shook his head to reject that preposterous notion. He had seen the places where cards were discarded for recycling, and there were certainly cards everywhere in those places. But, they were now in a desolate jungle with wild beasts everywhere. How could there be a garbage recycling depot there? Moreover, from what could be seen of the age of that card remnant, there weren’t any card recycling depots in those days. Ancient cards were not nearly as highly developed as current cards, and their use had been limited to a very few people.
    

It was earth-shattering news for someone like Chen Mu.
    

Then, Chen Mu said, “You lead the way.”
    

The soldier called out excitedly and led Chen Mu and the others toward the place where he had made his discovery. Having heard the news, even Alfonso set off with everyone.
    

A stream of people soon arrived at the place the soldier was talking about.
    

Chen Mu stopped to take a look around. The vegetation covering that place was obviously different from its surroundings. There weren’t any towering trees to be seen along the way there, and as far as the eye could see was all knee-high grasses. That raised everyone’s guard; it would always mean some unusual danger whenever there was something distinctive about a place.
    

Without Chen Mu having to issue any orders, Xi Weide had lightly waved his hands, and the soldiers behind him all split to the sides. Entering that stretch of knee-high grasses filled them with guarded expressions. By contrast, Wei-ah remained beside Chen Mu with a placid face, not moving away from him by even an inch. Bo Wen and Cheng Ying had activated their energy cloaks, also showing guarded expressions.
    

“Down here!” The soldier parted the grasses on the ground so Chen Mu could see clearly. There were quite a few things on the ground that looked like card remnants mixed in with the mud and dirt. There wouldn’t have been any way to find them if he hadn’t parted the grasses.
    

He casually picked one up. It wasn’t as well-preserved as the other one, though it didn’t have any degradation where it had broken. The card had been through an explosion! Chen Mu immediately put forward that theory, while at the same time, Bo Wen pulled his gaze away from the card remnant in his own hand. His face showed an expression of surprise and doubt. Cheng Ying wasn’t any different, having never thought there could be so many card remnants in the jungle.
    

The age of the cards could be judged by the considerable transformation they had undergone. What would that place have looked like in some distant time?
    

Looking off, apart from grasses upon grasses, there wasn’t anything else to be seen. But, the treeless stretch of grasses was extremely large; it was a lot bigger than any of the large-scale training grounds Chen Mu had ever seen. Moreover, Chen Mu had discovered a special place that was extremely flat.
    

Just then, someone shouted out, “There’s something here!”
    

Chen Mu was aroused from his thinking to see a soldier standing in the middle of the area waving his hand and shouting. Everyone’s enthusiasm was aroused as they ran excitedly to where the soldier was.
    

The soldier’s finger was pointing to a slightly dug-up chunk of dirt with grasses on it where, astonishingly, a round metallic edge could be seen. It had the particular shine of metal! The discovery inspired everyone to start clearing away the dirt and grasses. Very soon, more and more of the metal was showing.
    

Once all of the mud and grass was cleared away, the metallic device was finally fully visible to everyone.
    

It was shaped like a round table—a thick metallic disk, three meters in diameter, held up by a similarly thick metallic pedestal. The pedestal was sunk into the mud, so no one could tell how long that part was. The whole device was suffused in a metallic luster that wasn’t too gaudy, though it had a kind of hardness that could have withstood the passage of time.
    

Everyone was drawn to the unique device. Everything about the place was just as incongruous—its unique form and vegetation, the card remnants scattered all over in the mud, and that finely made metallic device.
    

“A very fine level of construction,” Alfonso said in evaluation. Chen Mu couldn’t help but look up at Alfonso. It wasn’t very easy for something to elicit his praise. Alfonso was very studious, but he remained modest toward cards. But, when it came to metallurgy, he would be simply arrogant in his descriptions, frequently cutting down the things others made. Even Chen Mu had been ridiculed. But, his artistry with metallurgy was certainly commensurate with his temperament, being the best Chen Mu had ever seen.
    

“This is an alloy. It must be the cold-form alloy,” Alfonso said with a very professional tone. Though, apart from him, there wasn’t anyone who understood what he was talking about.
    

Chen Mu’s gaze then fell onto the surface of the disk where there were quite a few lines carved, all crisscrossed. It looked chaotic, but as though some pattern were hidden there. For such a metallic table to be found there, it must certainly have had some particular use. Those incised lines must also have had some application.
    

Chen Mu suddenly noticed the edge of the disk where the composition of the patterns made by the lines looked familiar to him. No, not just familiar; it was a recursive composition! That discovery immediately excited Chen Mu!
    

The recursive composition was one of the basic compositions of cards, which would show up on nearly 90 percent of them. It was one of the most familiar to Chen Mu, as one of the few things he would research ever since he had been making one-star power cards. In truth, there was something different about his research compared with others.
    

That recursive composition was a variant he had seen on a one-star power card with a non-standard composition. He had collected 12 different kinds of one-star power card compositions at first in order to reduce his costs. Those would look negligible to him now. He had put a lot of research into that recursive composition. It was a comparatively efficient composition, which he had borrowed. Even though he had come in contact with it later on, it would always be part of a far superior composition in terms of knowledge and difficulty. But, if it were the composition he was most familiar with, it would be that crude recursive composition—so crude it was no longer studied!
    

He very quickly found more of the recursive composition in the designs carved into the surface of the plate. The more he found, the more he believed the round, table-shaped metallic device must be a kind of card appliance. If there were only one recursive composition, it might have been a coincidence, but it couldn’t be any coincidence for so many to appear at the same time.
    

But, apart from those recursive compositions, the rest of the lines looked quite chaotic without any of the elegance of a card composition. Maybe in the eyes of an ordinary person, the composition on a card was nothing more than a strange design from a bunch of lines. A card master, however, could discern at a glance whether a pattern was a card composition, even though they might not be able to recognize the composition. With long experience making them, card masters would develop a unique feeling like what one might feel for language or art.
    

Chen Mu had such a feeling! The production costs for making cards were rising day by day, so there weren’t many card masters who had rich experience making cards. Chen Mu was doubtlessly among those who did.
    

The design of the lines on the metallic disk in front of Chen Mu still raised doubts in him. He couldn’t tell if those designs were card compositions in the end, since it was his first time to encounter such a situation!
    

Everyone else’s gazes were focused on Chen Mu. Who else could show the best possibility to decipher the riddle of that disk?
    

In his concentration, Chen Mu wasn’t aware of the crowd so attentively watching him. The lines on the round table looked rather chaotic and messy, dazzling everyone who looked at them. Chen Mu wasn’t at all anxious, being quite a patient person. During the process of studying cards, that was what he considered to be one of his rare strengths.
    

He might as well use a stupid method.
    

Everyone knew all card compositions have a starting stroke and a stroke of completion. The so-called initial stroke was the spot where the pen first fell, and the final stroke was the last stroke before completion. Superior card masters would be able to perfectly blend the two together. That became more obvious the higher the grade of the card, to the point where a card master’s exclusive cards were made to where it would be difficult to tell the strokes apart. In that way, they could protect against someone else copying the cards they made.
    

If the designs on that disk were truly compositions, then they would certainly have a starting and finishing stroke. Perhaps in the eyes of Cheng Ying and Bo Wen, a card master with an A-level of contribution points was already awesome. In Chen Mu’s own eyes, he was nothing more than a dabbling card master with pretty good luck.
    

Of course, even apart from a one-star power card, he had plenty of confidence in that regard.
    

Chen Mu couldn’t do it, but he believed there was someone who could.
    

Alfonso.
    

Alfonso’s knowledge of cards was a mess, but his metallic arts were unsurpassed. Those lines, which might have been compositions, were engraved on a metallic plate. If they had been carved, then the starting and finishing strokes would surely leave differing clues. He couldn’t discern them himself, but Alfonso should have been able to. Chen Mu was glad the lines had been etched onto a metallic disk; if they were on a card, he really wouldn’t have any way.
    

Chen Mu spoke in detail with Alfonso about what he was thinking.
    

Alfonso muttered to himself for a while before nodding and saying, “I’ll give it a try.”
    

While everyone was watching, Alfonso traced out all the lines with his finger, slowly moving along the inside of the lines. The others, including Chen Mu, were all holding their breath and staring, not daring to exhale.
    

There was only the sound of wind swishing through the underbrush.