The Card Apprentice

“A Method for Training Perception”

The caption made Chen Mu feel as though lightning had struck him dumb as a wooden chicken in that instant. Perception! My God, a method for training perception! Chen Mu felt as though he’d been engulfed by wild joy, and was tightly wrapped in a wellbeing which reached the heavens and covered the earth.

His hand was trembling uncontrollably, and his brain was raging and buzzing as though something had exploded inside him.

After who knows how long, Chen Mu felt as though he were slowly coming out from a dream, though he still felt as though he were walking on clouds, and couldn’t help mocking himself that he was a complete novice who knew nothing of the world.

It was no wonder that Chen Mu was so wild with joy, because ever since he had learned to make one-star fantasy cards, perception had become the biggest bottleneck in his way. Too bad that all the things which circulated on the market were of low quality, and that the costs of the somewhat better materials were completely unaffordable.

All the most advanced training methods were in the hands of the six great academies, and Chen Mu didn’t have the endowments to get into those six. And although there were some pretty good training methods among some smaller schools, none of them would be considered great. And you would have to be either a directly descended disciple or pay a lot of really high tuition to have them imparted to you.

And not every student could study the “two step breathing method,” which was the hallmark of the Eastern Wei Academy.

Chen Mu did his very best to decipher with his dazed brain word by word and literally what was written out in front of him.

Chen Mu could tell from the first two sentences that the method that was being described there was many times more advanced than anything he had purchased in the fancy shops.

As though dying of thirst, he gulped down every word that was written. He put everything else to the back of his mind, not even noticing the pressure of the water.

As soon as he had finished reading everything, Chen Mu realized that he had never come across anything like that perception training method. Chen Mu mused to himself what a good stunt it was to bury the unnamed method in history.

The perception training methods recorded on the screen were extraordinary. Even though Chen Mu hadn’t really seen other methods, what he considered to be extraordinary was that all of the training was to be done in the water. Once he had scanned the entire process, even with his paltry knowledge, he knew that the method in front of him didn’t have the slightest relationship to any of the more moderate methods.

Being underwater put one in a singular environment, where a person’s body bore pressure from all around. And the pressure increased the deeper one was submerged. And, one’s movements were sluggish underwater. The method took advantage of the harsh underwater environment to stimulate human potential.

While in general the training of perception requires a peaceful environment, it would be very difficult to maintain a calm state in the simple water world where there were all sorts of currents.

All perceptual training required some medium, and the medium which Chen Mu had used up until then was the one-star power cards that he had created himself. While the medium in that training method was water. The water that was all around Chen Mu!

The core of the method lay in using the pressure as a stimulus with water as the medium, complemented by special breathing.

Someone else might have hesitated when facing such a fierce training method, while Chen Mu didn’t have the slightest hesitation. From his point of view, based on what he would get in return, the degree of danger wasn’t even worth talking about. The risk of getting killed as a little punk outside was far greater.

But Chen Mu wasn’t an impulsive person, and he didn’t begin until he had carefully read all the precautions.

Still, the training didn’t get off to a smooth sail, with Chen Mu’s first try ending in failure. This was a common thing in his experience, since he had never considered himself more talented than others. Everything he had learned to that point was gained from innumerable failures.

He was already accustomed to failure, and to finding patterns from his failures.

He spent an entire three days before finding his perception. The world underwater was very strange to him, and it was no easy thing to maintain his calm state. Maintaining one’s calm while being immersed in the crystal clarity of the so-called ‘simple water world’ environment wasn’t easy. There were constant invisible currents, not to mention their transmission of all that energy.

To everyone’s understanding, perception was a mysterious thing. Only by deploying perception can one connect with power, and those with greatly enhanced perception can even control the shape and composition of energy.

The most basic principle of the entire card system began with amorphous energy.

It was as with the power card, where the source of power was contained within the substance of the ink. Taking advantage of perception together with the composition of the card, one could cause the power contained within that substance to be emitted. The kind of energy coming from a power card was the most basic kind of power, not having any set composition, and in a steady state. The composition of the one-star power card was the simplest, and it doesn’t really require any involvement with perception, while the two star and above power cards all required the involvement of perception for them to develop correspondingly.

The higher the level of the card, the greater the requirement for perception, which wasn’t only a matter of its power level, but also of the accuracy of the perception. That was one of the fundamental reasons that mid and high-grade cards had not yet been able to realize large-scale industrial production.

In the hands of a card artisan, the formless basic energy could be structured and organized to create all different kinds of energy. Those sorts of energy might be mild or fierce; sharp or blazing hot.

This all then evolved into the various current schools of card artisans.

There were then three components which pervade all cards from start to finish: power, perception, and composition.

One could see that perception was critical for both card artisans and card masters, neither of whom could do without it.

Chen Mu had achieved some calm by stretching out his breathing. And by emitting some perception little by little, he felt himself suffused by a light white glow.

A sudden current disturbed his perception, nearly breaking the fine connection between Chen Mu and his perception. He had to use all of his strength to carefully bring his perception back under his control to prevent it from being disordered by the currents. Those currents seemed strangely to know Chen Mu’s limits, pressing him each time to the extreme of what he could stand.

This was really a kind of torture. Chen Mu had always thought of himself as tough and resolute, but he was being tortured to the point of spitting blood. It got to where each time he was about to enter the water world, he would breathe deeply, and then taking a huge breath through gritted teeth, would steel himself as though he were going into battle.

He would have to learn to enjoy such suffering!