Anime Magic Card Era

Chapter 123: Chapter 122: A Mysterious Figure Cuts In

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"Mark, you showing up only now is genuinely uncool."

Mark Whitman had, at long last, hauled Luke out of the human tide. By the time he’d waded in to perform the extraction, Luke had nearly been devoured alive by the out-of-control crowd. He’d lost count of how many opportunistic hands he’d slapped away.

"Everyone’s having a rare moment of joy, and the vice principal gave the all-clear, so just roll with it," Mark replied calmly, which earned him an eye-roll.

Several of those hands had come dangerously close to sensitive territory. If Luke hadn’t been quick, his dignity would have been a casualty. Women, when they got worked up, were capable of anything, and this had been in broad daylight, in a public plaza. If any of them had succeeded, the social death would have been catastrophic.

"First place in the exam means Celestial Academy admission is a lock for you," Mark said, adopting the expression of a lonely undefeated master. "Who’d have thought my day would come too? Classmate of the Eastern Region’s exam champion, a Celestial Academy student no less. Hahaha, let’s see who dares look down on me now."

He burst out laughing. Luke promptly gave him a middle finger. The day this guy is reliable is the day pigs climb trees.

A moment later, Mark remembered the actual business at hand. "Right. If you’ve got nothing going on the next couple of days, don’t leave the house."

"Why?" Not going out wasn’t a problem. Luke had just finished the exam and intended to rest properly anyway.

He also planned to use the downtime to deepen his bond with his card spirits, especially Blanc. Her personality was still far too timid. With Mana around, though, the two of them would probably become close friends quickly, and eventually good battle companions.

"The vice principal just got a message from the principal. A VIP is going to come looking for you in the next two days. The principal’s worried you’ll wander off, so he had me give you a heads-up."

"What VIP?" Luke blinked. He didn’t know many VIPs in Ashenvale. Victor Ashford counted, but if it were Victor, Geoffrey Falk wouldn’t have specifically had Mark warn him.

Someone from the Capital, then? The Hargroves? If he was naming the highest-level figure he knew, Edmund Hargrove was at the top of the list. The only person Luke could think of was Edmund. And if it was Edmund, it would probably be about the dimensional plane expedition. But the exam had only just ended, and the full-moon night was still far off. There was no reason to come to him this soon.

"Who knows. I was hoping you’d tell me." Mark rolled his eyes. He was equally curious about the VIP the principal had mentioned, and the fact that Luke himself didn’t know was, frankly, deflating.

"Fine. I’ll find out soon enough either way." Unable to reason it out, Luke didn’t dig further. The answer would surface within two days. A couple of days of patience cost nothing.

Having extricated himself from the crowd, Luke finally made it home in one piece.

"Celestial Academy. That technically fulfills my original exam goal," Luke murmured. "I just don’t know when the Crescent Moon Land slot will actually come through."

The Crescent Moon Blessing was a prize he had a genuine interest in.

As he spoke, he activated the Crystallization Technique.

Having successfully constructed the D-Ark, Luke’s realm had broken through to the Leader tier. The corresponding Mana Crystal capacity inside him had increased accordingly. At the time, he’d still been mid-exam, so he hadn’t immediately condensed and tested the new crystals.

Now, he had ample time to experiment.

A few moments passed. His mana drained to empty, and a third Mana Crystal successfully condensed inside him. He waited several hours for his mana to recover to normal, then activated the Crystallization Technique again, and this time nothing happened.

"So it’s confirmed. Each realm level adds exactly one Mana Crystal," Luke noted without much surprise. The pattern had been within his predicted range from the start.

He waved a hand, and Mana’s card appeared in his grip. At the same instant, one of the Mana Crystals inside him surfaced from his palm and fused into the card.

On the card, the image of Mana flickered several times, as if responding to his action. Next came Red-Eyes Black Star Dragon’s card. As the Mana Crystal fused in, a resonant dragon’s roar sounded in Luke’s ears.

"Hang on a little longer," he murmured, brushing his thumb over Red-Eyes Black Star Dragon’s card. "Once I’ve gathered the rest of the materials, it’ll be time to upgrade you." He condensed another Mana Crystal.

He kept at it until deep into the night, fusing nine Mana Crystals into Sistermon Blanc’s card before he finally exhaled.

The Digimon cards were special. Sistermon Blanc was nominally a single card, but because the D-Ark had registered the data for Sistermon Noir and Angewomon, both of those forms were defined as new, distinct card spirits, which meant each of them could also absorb Mana Crystals.

That meant when Blanc’s internal crystals were depleted and she evolved into Noir, she’d gain three more crystals. Super-evolving into Angewomon would add another three. Three forms, three crystal pools.

The nine crystals were independent of one another, though. The mana stored in one couldn’t be drawn on by the others.

"That works out fine, actually. It significantly extends how long the Digimon cards can sustain independent action, which improves their safety margin considerably." Having sorted out everything he’d planned for the day, Luke collapsed into bed. His expenditure today had not been small.

"City Lord Ashford, we’ve come in extremely good faith. Blocking us like this is a little ungracious, don’t you think?"

Inside the Ashenvale City Lord’s Mansion, Fabian Reyes wore a faintly displeased expression.

He’d traveled a long way specifically to reach Luke first, to recruit him into Fabian’s academy ahead of the competition. The major academies couldn’t view the exam process directly, but they had their own methods, enough to learn which city the year’s first-place finisher had come from.

Fabian simply hadn’t expected the exam champion to emerge from Ashenvale. The city ranked only mid-tier within the Capital, and mid-tier across the Eastern Region as a whole. Producing an exam champion was the last thing anyone had predicted.

Still, it worked in his favor. If the champion hadn’t come from a mid-tier city like Ashenvale, the year’s first place might well have been out of reach for Astral King Academy entirely.

Astral King Academy couldn’t match Celestial Academy, one of the Four Great Academies, but within the Eastern Region it ranked solidly in the first tier. Fabian himself was the academy’s director of admissions, a man accustomed to being received with deference everywhere he went. And yet here he was, stonewalled by Victor.

"Director Reyes, it isn’t that I want to block you," Victor said with a wry smile. "I received an order directly from the Governor. For the next two days, no one is to see Luke alone."

He could have predicted that Luke’s first-place finish would trigger a flurry of academy activity. He simply hadn’t expected those academies to move this fast, or to come barreling into Ashenvale in the dead of night.

Do none of you people have anything better to do? Would coming back in two days really have killed you? If he hadn’t had his subordinates keeping watch, these people would likely have charged straight into Luke’s home.

This was, in fairness, a recurring phenomenon after every exam. The title of exam champion was simply too prestigious, especially in the year it was won.

But it was the first time in Victor’s long tenure as Ashenvale’s City Lord that one of his own candidates had taken the Eastern Region’s first place, which meant it was also his first time dealing with this particular circus.

"The Governor’s order? But even the Governor shouldn’t be overriding a candidate’s own choice of academy." The speaker was Celeste Brightwell, from Mistcloud Academy, another of the Eastern Region’s first-tier institutions.

Fabian and Celeste weren’t alone. Representatives from several academies located relatively close to Ashenvale had already arrived in the city. And every one of them, without exception, had been intercepted by Victor and detained at the Mansion.