The Card Apprentice

Chapter 124: Breath Control!

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

To see a sallow-faced youth sitting cross legged and frowning in the middle of the hallway was something that would draw attention around that place. Everyone walking by was looking at him a little surprised. The card masters and card artisans who would show up there all had a lot of power and therefore high social standing, and so in that kind of atmosphere to see some guy so bold to sit there as Chen Mu was would naturally draw some strange looks.

Chen Mu didn’t pay any attention to such looks. Before, when he was treated as a beggar allowed into Eastern Wei Academy, he’d gotten naturally accustomed to it. And he didn’t have time just then to pay attention to those peoples’ looks, concentrating as he was on what that insight which had moved him so much just then.

If he couldn’t come up with something right then at such an opportunity for insight, then the longer he waited, the less likely it would be that he would ever realize it. So, he didn’t dare to move even the slightest bit until he realized what it was.

What had he been seeing at that time which sparked such a feeling?

Chen Mu carefully reviewed every detail in his memory.

He remembered that Mark Victor’s twisted thorns were expanding and contracting rhythmically, with the feeling of breathing.

Yi! Breathing! Right! That’s what it was! He suddenly realized that it was that feeling which had gotten his attention.

But why?

He kept going back to the scene at the time, with the rhythmic expansion and contraction of the energy vine.

And . . .

Rhythmic . . . expansion and contraction . . .

What was that? A word jumped out at him from the back of his mind. Vibration frequency!

Chen Mu’s eyes lit up then, knowing what he had realized. Breath control. There was suddenly some light toward the breakthrough that he could never find before. The circling spiral form of the structure of the energy thorns wasn’t only something that he hadn’t been able to think up, but didn’t it have both a rotational and a vibrating structure?

When he had previously studied breath control, that’s what had blocked him from getting any further. He had never been able to find a suitable structural model.

Overjoyed with this discovery, he stood right up and quickly returned to his apartment to carefully consider whether there was any feasibility in it.

At two in the morning Chen Mu was sitting in front of his desk which was covered in a pile of drawings. He had diligently analyzed the structure of the spiral spring, finally determining that it was very close to the structure of the perceptual vortex within him. He would only need to make some fine adjustments. After many repeated inferences, he had come to the conclusion that such changes wouldn’t be dangerous.

Should he do it or not?

Chen Mu finally decided to do it! He was very clear that Mark Victor would provide him will all the close-combat skills, without holding anything back. But depending on that to leave the base was impossible. For him to become an excellent or even just a qualified close-combat card artisan would probably take a number of years. That would mean that he would have to stay there a number of years. And he wasn’t certain about how many years that might be.

The problem was that even a little more time wouldn’t be nearly sufficient for him to learn to be a close-combat card artisan.

And even if he were to become a fine close-combat card-artisan, he certainly wouldn’t be able to escape the base if he drew the attention of the Ning family. It was certain that whoever the Ning family was focused on, even it if were Mark Victor not to mention himself, there would be a very small probability of successfully escaping.

As Mark Victor himself said over and over, Chen Mu could develop into an excellent close-combat card artisan. Even though Chen Mu didn’t quite believe that, if he could accomplish half of Mark Victor’s strength he would still be outstanding. For him to become stronger than that would take until he was forty, if he could even survive that long.

So, the thought of depending on his beginner’s ability with close-combat card artisan skills to escape the base was basically an impossibility. And breath control was what Chen Mu saw as his secret weapon, which had given him some hope. But he had later discarded that when he couldn’t get beyond the issue with the structure of his perceptual vortex. He had then gone looking in other directions.

He had never though that a new vista would open from him learning the skills of a close-combat card artisan, where he had been given that fresh insight.

Is there anything more wondrous than that in the world?

It took quite a bit of Chen Mu’s power to regulate perception. It was a good thing that his perceptual control had progressed so much, as he still spent two whole hours adjusting his shuttle-shaped perceptual vortex. Those two hours were spent entirely on adjusting the structure of his perception.

That was his first time taking the initiative to adjust on his own internal perception, although he didn’t make any big changes to the main structure. But he was still very cautious, not wanting to make any mistakes.

The whole process went rather smoothly, with the perceptual vortex as tame as ever, and with every adjustment accomplished handily. To optimize the structure, Chen Mu was making very fine adjustments, not bypassing a single perceptual tendril.

After two hours, his internal perceptual vortex was completely replaced by a spiral spring structure.

The thing that amazed him was that once the structure had taken shape, it started to spin on its own. It spun horizontally at a high speed, while the spiral spring was rhythmically vibrating up and down at the same time.

That made Chen Mu very excited, so that he didn’t feel the least bit tired.

Striking while the iron was hot, he started right then to practice breath control. Whether or not the spiral spring would succeed, he wanted to see if he could practice breath control, which had been his original goal.

The method for breath control could be called very simple, which was to cause the perception to remain at a certain frequency of vibration. It had the very demanding requirement that the vibrations be maintained at an absolutely constant frequency.

This was a very difficult demand to meet.

But even beyond that, the vibration frequency required for breath control was strange, and made Chen Mu feel very ill. Every time that the frequency approached that certain value, Chen Mu felt a kind of strange feeling. Any fluctuation would make the feeling go away, as though it had been an hallucination. Chen Mu determined from that that breath control had very stringent requirements for the frequency of vibration.

That stuff was hard to learn!

The cross-legged Chen Mu suddenly felt a jolt through his body!

After modulating the frequency through countless values, the vibration frequency of his internal perception had hit on the strange value required.

A very fine perception suddenly arose from his spiral perceptual center and followed along his spine to drill into the back of Chen Mu’s mind. It then quickly spread with a chill to his whole brain.

In the cold and dark, Chen Mu felt himself suddenly stripping away all his feelings. When he opened his eyes, and slowly looked around, every little corner of the room was fully present with absolutely no influence from the dark. By common sense he should have found that strange. Even though he had constantly tried to accustom himself to the dark, there still hadn’t been once when he could so fully integrate himself into the dark like that.

No, it was more like he had been born into the dark.

He still wasn’t surprised, not did he find it strange, but rather he felt as though he had become a cold machine or like a completely different person examining himself from the side in a detached fashion.

His heart started to race, and his temperature started to drop, and his vital functions were weakening. He could very clearly perceive every change in his body, discovering that green thread inside of him, which was very calmly dormant in his flesh from his hands to his feet. The green thread could be seen in every part of his flesh. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the vibrational frequency of his spiral spring-like perceptual structure.

Slow . . . stable . . . as precise as the gears in a clock.

He knew that he had entered a very strange state. Although his vital signs were dropping incessantly, he didn’t feel the least bit of discomfort. On the contrary, he felt that his strength and his explosive power had increased to a certain degree.

He lightly stepped over the material scattered on the floor, with each footstep accurate, feeling as though each step were following some carefully laid plan. His control of his body had gotten to a shocking place, him seeming to know the situation of each little part of himself.

But before he could place his foot on the floor, the scene in front of him suddenly quaked.

The last thing in his mind was ‘twelve seconds!’ before he was drowned in endless darkness.

Not knowing how much time had gone by, Chen Mu finally slowly awakened. But before he could stand up, a fierce irrepressible urge to vomit arose from his chest, and then he started to vomit. The vomiting lasted a whole ten minutes, with Chen Mu nearly vomiting up bile.

Such a powerful side effect! Before he could sigh, he couldn’t help vomiting some more.

After another ten minutes, Chen Mu finally stopped vomiting. He stood up with a bitter smile, as the room was a mess and an unpleasant smell filled the air. It had been a long long time since he remembered ever vomiting.

What a terrifying method of breath control! When he thought of those twelve seconds, with himself like a machine having no feelings, Chen Mu felt a chill through his bones.

Thinking back through every detail of what had just happened wasn’t difficult. And without knowing if it was because of the breath control, every detail from those twelve seconds was still clearly in his mind. He had never imagined that when he modulated the frequency of his perception to such a point, there would be such a stunning transformation which so far exceeded any expectations.