The Card Apprentice

Chapter 125: Turning a Weapon Against Oneself

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

His whole body went suddenly cold, as his stomach convulsed. The vomiting had stopped, but Chen Mu’s entire body was aching and limp, without any strength. The side effects of breath control were far more than he had anticipated. That report only included the method to control breathing, with no more detail than that. But he had discovered as soon as he started the training that the report was too simple.

It hadn’t brought up side effects, or how to keep the perceptions at a steady frequency, and it hadn’t brought up anything about the duration of the state of breath control and related matters, nor anything about the overall situation of the state of breath control.

The muscles on Chen Mu’s face didn’t have any strength, which gave his smile an ugly look. Although the side effects were extremely powerful, what he felt during those twelve seconds had been really too strong. There was a chill without even the slightest involvement of any mood, and without vitality. He had never had such a feeling of everything being in his hands. He was certain that breath control could escape the probing of the probe card.

That was the only thing he cared about, compared to which he felt it would be worth it even if the side effects were stronger. While in the state of breath control, he had even discovered that green thread inside of him. He wondered whether he could draw out that green thread if he were later able to increase his time in the state of breath control a little.

But . . .

Whenever he thought about those twelve seconds during which there was that cold indifference of being entirely beside himself, he was chilled to his heart, since in that state he had absolutely no human breath. He felt some terror in his heart that if he kept up the training he might become like that.

Without feelings . . . cold like a machine . . . would that still be human?

But he put those misgivings to the side, since for him just then the most important thing was to leave that base, and to leave Amay City. If there were side effects, he would just stop the practice after leaving that place.

As he was by then he was only eager to use the power of breath control to get out of his nice-seeming cage.

A whole night had passed without his realizing it. Chen Mu was instantly struck dumb when he saw the time, it being almost time to start actual combat with Mark Victor.

In the training room, Mark Victor was a little startled when he saw Chen Mu, and he immediately asked in concern, “Are you ill? Was yesterday not so good?” Chen Mu’s face was flushed, and his eyes were lifeless. His spirits sagged, making him look very sick.

Chen Mu took some effort to make himself look more natural, “I’m not so sure either.”

“Let’s cancel the next few days of practice so that you can get a good rest.” Mark Victor pondered, and then ordered, “There’s a health department on the base. Go for an exam. Contact me once you’ve recovered.”

“Mmmm, OK.”

Once he had returned to his apartment, Chen Mu had to endure the discomfort in his stomach as he took a pill to supplement his nutrition. He had paid a hundred points to buy it from the medical department, and it could quickly restore his body’s energy. Although it had a very high price, it was fortunate that among those things that Chen Mu lacked, he didn’t lack points. About ten minutes after he took the pill, he felt a lot better. He couldn’t pay attention to anything else just then, so he put his head down to sleep in his exhausted state.

It was already six hours later when me awoke.

The room was pitch dark when he opened his eyes. He quickly discovered that his vision in the dark had considerably improved to where he almost didn’t need to turn on any lights. He could see everything in the room very clearly, without needing to deploy perception. Even though he had already started to get used to the dark before then, he had still had to call on perception. This time he hadn’t extended any perception at all.

Could that be because of the breath control?

As he thought about it, he could only come up with that single factor. That wasn’t just a wild guess, since he remembered very clearly that during those twelve seconds not only was the darkness having no effect on him, but he had determined on the contrary that he was taking to the darkness like a fish to water.

Having had six hours of rest, he looked a lot better, and his body had gotten sufficiently strong.

Having only just recovered from the side effects of the breath control, Chen Mu immediately started it all over again. Even if the side effects were stronger, he had no better choice at that time. The best thing to do was to grit his teeth.

He sat cross-legged and started to modulate the spiral spring-like perception’s frequency, which was the most crucial step to breath control. It was a painstaking move, or one should say an extremely painstaking move. Chen Mu very easily adjusted the vibration frequency of his perception to the general range required by the breath control, though it was very difficult to make the precise match, with him narrowly missing many, many times.

What made a person up-tight was that missing by a little bit wasn’t without its own results. Once the vibration frequency had been modulated to very near the value required, an entirely strange and fascinating world would appear. But once there was the slightest fluctuation in the frequency, you would immediately depart from that world.

If one were to say that Chen Mu was in the range of 50 with the accuracy of his perceptual control, if he wanted to achieve the value required by breath control, his precision would have to advance to about 2, which is to say that he was about twenty-five times off.

Chen Mu had already made about thirty revisions without anything happening. But he wasn’t the least bit impatient, since the last time he’d entered the state of breath control he had tried over a hundred times. His entire being was absorbed in carefully controlling his perception, constantly making the finest adjustments that he could.

When he got to the sixty-seventh try, he entered again into that strange state.

He opened his eyes, and there was no emotional color in what his empty indifferent pupils could see. He didn’t spend any time assessing the room, but instead examined his own physical state. His brain was surprisingly clear, and it was only in that state that he could examine the breath control method’s secrets.

With insights from the state of breath control, examining the secrets of the method was something that Chen Mu had thought about before entering the entering the state of breath control. Since that report hadn’t mentioned anything other than the method of breath control, he would have to find it himself. That kind of clear insight from the last time had left Chen Mu with a deep impression, which gave him the sudden inspiration to use the state of breath control to examine breath control itself. He believed that the insights he could get under the altered state of breath control could help him to determine all the conditions and related information required by that state.

The only thing he was worried about was whether he would be able to remember what he’d thought of while in the state, with that state of having any emotion peeled away being really too strange for him.

But thankfully, apart from being separated from his subjective emotions, everything else remained normal. His brain actually became more sober, and his thinking more clear. And his control of his own behaviors reached a scary point.

Since there wasn’t much time, and he had to pay attention during the time he had.

Insights while in the state of breath control were stunning. He was able to take to heart every single little transformation in his body, even to the point of knowing the next step in the changes. He would find the critical part and then derive from that its basic factors, which all sounds very complicated but which actually all happened in a spark of time.

Data flowed by in his brain in flashing stream after flashing stream. With factors endlessly surfacing, and the structural relations among them constantly perfected, in a flash they seemed to have constituted an intricately interconnected spider web except that it was a web in three dimensions. Hundreds of factors become thousands upon thousands of different strands at differing depths, creating a model of an extremely complex structure every detail of which Chen Mu could grasp at a glance as though he had studied the model endlessly and memorized it.

And this all took fifteen seconds.

That time, Chen Mu wanted to remain in the state of breath control a little longer, and he made it to thirty-three seconds. That was because he had made adjustments according to the information he had gotten from his insights. He increased the speed of the temperature drops, which gave him an additional thirty-one seconds. That also demonstrated the validity and value of the information he’d gotten from those insights.

He wasn’t the least bit joyful, still like someone watching himself coldly from the side.

But thirty-three seconds couldn’t be considered long and wasn’t quite enough to leave the base. He came out from the state of breath control again after thirty-three seconds had passed.

The vomiting started again.

After about ten more minutes, Chen Mu finally stopped vomiting and quickly took one of those nutrition pills. The information he had just gotten from his state of breath control was that there wasn’t any way to get rid of the side effects, which could only be mitigated to a certain very small extent. And those techniques weren’t something that he could use at that time.

Which was to say that each time he would practice breath control, Chen Mu would vomit for ten minutes! This increased the suffering that showed on his face. Good lord, if he went on like that he would die from the daily vomiting.

That time, he had fortunately prepared ahead, and went immediately into the bathroom, which saved him a lot of cleanup work.

After another ten minutes the nutritional pill had started to kick in, and Chen Mu finally felt a little better. He need to start to organize the information he’d gotten from the state of breath control. No, to be more precise, he needed to recall the information.

A chaotic and complex structural model was taking shape in his mind, consisting of many points and lines, which struck his vision silly. If he had wanted to organize the information, who knows by what year and month he could do it. Fortunately, he had already analyzed it in his enhanced state during breath control. He was a lot stronger in the state of breath control than he was then.

All the issues which were most critical to Chen Mu had differing precise solutions.

For example, what Chen Mu had found as a solution to make his time in the state of breath control longer was to become more familiar with the frequency, to the point where his state under that frequency could increase his time in the state of breath control.

The skill of entering that state was related to his precision in controlling his perception, as well as his level of daily familiarity. The stronger his control of perception, the more familiar he could become with the frequency, and the quicker he could enter the state.

Chen Mu even knew that if he were to reach the first stage of breath control, his temperament and perception would sadly change their nature.

He took all that information and was finally able to keep his eyes open during the breath control training.

But why hadn’t he found any way to alleviate the side effects? That was the thing Chen Mu resented the most.