The Card Apprentice

Hearing Zuo Tingyi’s mild exclamation, Gu Ziling, whose eyelids had already become heavy, forced his eyes back open, arranged his face and smoothed his hair, and then gave a light cough, finally opening his mouth to say: “What’s up, Tingyi?”

Zuo Tingyi wasn’t listening, his eyes blankly fixed on the card in his hand.

Gu Ziling scowled a little, and said with a hint of annoyance: “Tingyi, what’s going on?”

Zuo Tingyi finally reacted, turning around at once: “Teacher, this card has something weird about it.”

“Weird? What do you mean by weird?” Gu Ziling asked, puzzled.

Zuo Tingyi promptly moved the card in his hand over to his teacher’s gaze: “It’s this card. This card . . . this card . . . ”

He was considering how to put it.

What’s up with this guy today? Gu Ziling furrowed his brow. Zuo Tingyi was normally decisive, straightforward in his speech, and never tepid. Gu Ziling said straight out: “Give me a look.”

Gu Ziling was a little skeptical about what kind of weirdness the card had that was worth making a fuss about – a one-star power-card that was being handed to him from Zuo Tingyi – but he still took a look at it.

“Yi.”

He sat right up. The skepticism on his face vanished immediately, replaced by an unusual gravity.

“There really is something weird about it,” Gu Ziling muttered to himself, his eyes remaining fixed on the one-star power-card in his hand. Even a highly ranked card master from Eastern Wei Academy such as himself couldn’t tell at a glance if there really was or wasn’t anything wrong with that one-star power-card.

From Gu Ziling’s ample experience, there were quite a few deviations from the standard in the composition of that one-star power-card. He discerned that the card was using the standard as its basis to advance some changes, but were those changes really changes? Or were they mistakes? He felt some consternation, since he’d never seen compositional modifications like those.

Zuo Tingyi saw Gu Ziling’s perplexity, and couldn’t help reminding him: “Teacher, it would be best if we try it and see if this power-card works.”

Gu Ziling’s eyes flashed. Yes! We need only examine whether or not the card actually works to see if these are errors or not. But there was something in his look which betrayed some earlier misgiving. He gave a little cough: “Eh, Tingyi. You’ve made some great progress, wanting to catch up with me . . . ”

Respectfully, Zuo Tingyi said: “Teacher’s knowledge is as broad as the sea, how could a student compare?”

Gu Ziling was pleased inside, while what he said was: “You shouldn’t be so modest, those who can compare with you can be counted on one hand.”

“Those are all teachers and instructors, and I’m only a student just now.” Zuo Tingyi gave a little bow.

“Tingyi hasn’t forgotten his teacher’s good graces, so rare, so rare . . .” Having finished their mutual praise, Gu Ziling took on the air of a profound thinker and said: “OK, let’s take a look at this one-star power-card, and find out what’s really special about it.”

Gu Ziling’s card-making lab was fully equipped with every kind of device.

Although card-making was an abstruse field, there were quite a few who studied it. Among card-masters, there was a lot of polarization, with an extremely large disparity between those with and those without. The lower-grade card-masters were often frustrated in their livelihood; it wasn’t easy for them to make a living. Middle-grade card-masters could get a decent income. But once one became a high-grade card master, one was immediately hot, with the power to attract all sorts of suitors.

Lower grade card masters could only make one or two-star cards, and at that time, one and two-star cards had basically become industrial products. That was the main reason it was so hard for lower-grade card masters to make a living. Grade-three and above cards could only be made by a card master, which was why mid and high-grade card masters were so hot.

In order to attract those high-grade card masters to teach at Eastern Wei Academy, they provided some generous conditions. Not only was the salary and status superior, the research funding and so-forth could make a person red-eyed with envy. So, Gu Ziling had his own private card-making lab, supplied with every sort of equipment, all paid for and provided by Eastern Wei Academy.

What he was then using was a card analysis device, a kind of powerful professional-grade apparatus. It was complicated to operate, and only card masters would technically be able to purchase and learn how to use it. But its capability was tops, able to analyze the card material, composition, when it was made, and so forth. Of course, it was exceedingly expensive.

“It really is a new type of composition.” Having seen the final analytical report and paying no mind to the dumbfounded look of Zuo Tingyi, Gu Ziling went into deep thought. He had a lot more knowledge and experience than Zuo Tingyi, so of course he knew that there were quite a few different types apart from the style of the standard composition.

The analytical report was extremely detailed. There was no deviation from the standard one-star power-card in the quality of material and power capacity of this one-star power-card. Apart from the style of its etched composition, there was no optimization at all.

There is no value to this! Gu Ziling thought, shaking his head, He was a bit discouraged. Having wasted half a day, he still hadn’t gotten anything of any value. How could a high stature card-master like him be likely to consider that the optimization with this card was not about its capability, but rather about its cost of production.

From his point of view, to rack one’s brains trying to optimize the production costs of a one-star power-card was in itself a strange notion!

Casually tossing the card to the side, Gu Ziling didn’t intend to waste any more time on the matter. An august high-grade card-master’s time was quite valuable!

In the same way, Zuo Tingyi hadn’t considered that the card might have been optimized for the cost of production. He was from a prosperous family, and thought money was dirty. How could he imagine that there were people likely to make the optimization of production costs for a hundred-some-Oudi one-star power-card their money-making plan! As a matter of fact, he had never used a power-card lower than three-star.

But still to have even one complete card from among those three paper bags, after going through so many rejects and discards, Zuo Tingyi had some rather good feelings about the maker of the card. He had originally considered helping him participate in the advancement test, but he didn’t expect that after searching for half the day he still wouldn’t be able to find out who the maker of this card was. He would have to leave the matter unsettled.

There was no change in Chen Mu’s circumstance. He continued to make one-star power-cards every day as always. But because of his gains from the recent training session, he made rapid progress with his studies. The most direct manifestation was the penmanship of his etching on the power-cards, which had become much smoother and fuller. In his rough estimation, that meant a three percent increase in the efficiency of his one-star power-cards.

Since one-star power-cards were basically low-capacity, how would anyone notice any result from that three percent improvement?