The Card Apprentice

Chapter 110: Breath Control

Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio

No one paid any attention to one more person on the base.

Untold numbers of card artisans wanted to join the Ning family by that time. Their victory in the conflict didn’t only bring them great material benefit, it also boosted their prestige to a level they had never enjoyed.

The Ning family also had to replenish the power from their casualties. This meant no rest for Ning Peng and Ning Yan, who were once again busy. They had to check out the identity and background of each card artisan, as well as determine their power.

So there were a lot of new faces appearing on the base. There were a few among the card artisans who got peoples’ attention, such as the previous leader of the ‘Wei forest tigers’ card artisan troop, Mark Victor, or Cheng Ying who was called “The Rose,” and so forth. But the majority were still unknown card artisans having exceptional power.

Compared with the card artisans that they used to get, the average power of the new card artisans was a lot higher, and they were a lot better known. The very rich reward structure of the base quickly adjusted to incentivize those newly arrived card artisans.

The base which had just been immersed in its celebratory partying had quickly returned to its ordinary bustle, adding to which was the urgent need of the Ning family for more hands. And all sorts of new commissions were being continually issued. The card artisans now had to to jockey for position all over again. Things were very busy.

None of that had any connection to Chen Mu. He was staying in his apartment as always, seldom going out. No matter from what angle you might look at him, he was an extremely typical card master, never going out, deeply immersed in experiments all day, with the library and the self-service materials supermarket the places he went to the most. Apart from his flight practice which would have been unthinkable, everything else about him conformed to the impression card masters made on peoples’ minds.

But if anyone were to stay in Chen Mu’s apartment, they would be dumbfounded by what they saw.

It was pitch black in the apartment, such that you couldn’t see the fingers on your hands. Standing by the wall, Chen Mu would slowly close his eyes, already used to the dark. He would take a deep breath, and then suddenly start climbing up the wall like a gecko, running over the walls and ceiling in a lively manner.

Differently sized red targets were pasted irregularly all over the walls and ceiling.

Keeping his eyes closed the whole time, Chen Mu wouldn’t touch one of those targets. His movements weren’t impacted by his closed eyes, though his nimble movements did have something weird about them.

His body was as flexible as though he had no bones, and he could twist and turn at will. He had gained consummate skill with the wall-climbing lotus, sometimes leaving only one hand on the ceiling, while his body swung forward, and then the instant his slightly bent knees hit the ceiling, the knee pads would be firmly stuck there.

He always kept the wall-climbing lotus with him. And he always kept those springy shoes on his feet, never having changed them.

His perception was more useful in the dark than his eyes. In the unfinished topic from the mysterious card which wrote about the use of perception in close-up fighting, there was something about how to use perception to examine all around in the dark.

That was related to the spinning speed of the shuttle-shaped perceptual vortex. The faster it was, the more perceptual tendrils it would emit and the more sensitive his perception would be. But if the rotational speed slowed, the number of tendrils would also decrease, while their scope would expand.

Chen Mu wanted to maintain the vortex at a slightly slower speed, so that he could extend his perception to the situation of the entire apartment. And he had discovered that no matter whether it was spinning fast or slow, as long as he held it steady, then the precision of his perception would be at its highest for that speed.

But these weren’t the skills Chen Mu was most interested in. Even without perception, he could easily tell the situation of the entire apartment in the dark. The results of his always having slept in the dark were evident.

The demonic woman had taught him how to hide his form in the dark, and his concealment skills had already proven their effectiveness. But there was still something that the demonic woman hadn’t taught him, which was how to evade detection by a probe card. The reason the probe card was invented was to handle people who could travel in the dark.

And some techniques for escaping the probe card had also been brought up in that incomplete report.

Chen Mu had always found reports like that, and things related to the topic, to be extremely strange. He really couldn’t understand what kind of a card master would be interested in such skills. And that mysterious card master had collected quite a few related techniques for comparative analysis, while at the same time that card master had never provided any final conclusions, which was another piece of incomplete research.

Even though they weren’t finished, Chen Mu didn’t doubt the authenticity of the techniques documented there. It had been proven countless times that whatever was in that mysterious card was always extremely effective.

The reason that Chen Mu was so interested in evading the probe card’s scanning was that he had to think about leaving the base someday, when that capability would be indispensable.

He was very clear about his predicament, and from the attitude of the Ning family toward the raining shuttles card .II, he knew his plight from then on. If he didn’t have value, then even survival could be a problem. Having value, although he could survive, he had lost his freedom. Chen Mu wanted neither of those things.

He had very closely read everything that had been described in those reports about the related techniques. There was a detailed listing in the report of several different genres or schools of techniques, along with some opinions from that mysterious card master himself.

Schools were a strange concept for contemporary people, though they had once been glorious in the history of the card system.

Before the time of Heiner Van Sant was the period when ‘a hundred schools contended.’ There were far more than a hundred schools at that time, among which was some legacy which could be traced back to a few ancient religions.

While Heiner Van Sant had reached to the clouds, what he hadn’t let the people of that time realize was that an entirely new period would soon arrive. He was one of the greatest card masters of all time who had wandered throughout the entire Heavenly Federation, and who had endured ten years of hard thought before he founded the Star Academy.

The Star Academy was the first school in the Heavenly Federation to impart knowledge about cards. It was said that on the first day of enrollment in the Star Academy that year, countless youth flowed in endless streams gathered up from all over the Heavenly Federation, converging on Star Academy. The number of youth who converged there that year went as high as three hundred thousand, and the work of admissions by itself was underway for three months.

At its opening, the academy had a strongly inclusive teaching style, which immediately had a dramatic impact on all the schools and sects such that over the next few months the schools disappeared from the scene, finally fading from the sight of ordinary people.

Also, there were several outstanding card artisans who each established their own academies during the following months, which finally took the form of the six great contemporary academies, with their competing strengths. The schools and sects have almost disappeared.

Chen Mu wasn’t interested in history, or in the so-called schools. What he was interested in was the techniques themselves.

And there was a reason he was thinking about this skill. A couple of days before, his perceptual sensitivity had gone up another level, reaching fifty. He remembered that the report had described a kind of skill to evade being scanned, which had the condition that your perceptual sensitivity index had to reach fifty. He knew that part of the report completely by heart, not dropping a word. There were a lot of related skills, with each type having different conditions, with only this one tallying with his current index.

Breath control was ascribed to the school called the “Night of the Cross.” Apart from the phrase, Chen Mu hadn’t found any other information related to the “Night of the Cross.”

The practice of breath control wasn’t difficult. At its core was the requirement to use perception to maintain a certain vibration frequency. Maintaining that certain frequency could cause one’s breath to stop completely, and at the most advanced stages of training, even the most advanced probe cards had no way to detect your existence. You would become like a ghost in the night, letting people feel nothing at all.

There were quite a few characteristics of perception, such as spin, or vibration, or transformations of state . . .

Even the greatest card masters like Rosenberg and Heiner Van Sant couldn’t fundamentally describe perception, which was at the core of card theory, its most mysterious and abstruse content.

Chen Mu had restructured his perception when he formed the perceptual vortex. After that, what he’d explored the most were its rotational characteristics.

He had never felt any perceptual vibration.

How would vibrations appear? Chen Mu frowned. The structure of perception determined all its characteristics, including his perceptual vortex whose biggest advantage was related to its spinning.

But breath control required the property of vibration, which had to give Chen Mu a headache.

The structure of the vortex within him seemed to be like a very small cyclone which took the form of a tube, emitting perceptual tendrils from each end.

None of the structure had the properties of vibration.

Could it be that he had no way to learn breath control? The frown on Chen Mu’s forehead deepened. The conditions for the other methods were even higher, and most of those were rigid requirements.

Among the few skills, breath control was the only one that he could learn, but how was he going to resolve the problem of perceptual vibration? Chen Mu was sitting cross-legged in the dark, with light flashing from his two eyes, like stars in the night sky, deep and blurred.