Anime Magic Card Era

Chapter 138: Chapter 137: Giving an Undying Realm Boss Card-Crafting Inspiration!

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"However much your level rises, however long your lifespan stretches, a Card Master’s energy remains finite in the end." As she spoke, Lilith’s gaze settled on the Moon Spirit Ring on Luke’s hand. "Even with the Moon Spirit Ring, its effect only persists through the Emperor Realm. The moment you ascend to the Sovereign Realm, the ring’s effect will be lost."

On the question of whether Luke would ascend to the Sovereign Realm, Lilith had never once entertained a doubt.

"The higher the level of the card being crafted, the more terrifying the spiritual power it consumes. If you craft a card spirit that conflicts with your deck theme, then to a large degree, the work was done for nothing. It costs time and energy, and in a certain sense, it’s a waste of resources as well."

"For a Card Master, then, lacking a clear deck theme means your cards’ combat coordination becomes constrained, which in turn compromises the overall strength you can bring to bear."

Having finished, Lilith didn’t press Luke for an immediate response. She simply lifted the tea before her and took a light sip, her full red lips, moistened by the tea, turning more inviting still.

"The deck theme, is it?" This wasn’t the first time Luke had heard of it. The concept belonged to a Card Master’s foundational schooling; their teachers had drilled it into them back when they’d first become Card Masters.

But hearing Lilith raise the deck theme again now, Luke’s expression turned a touch peculiar.

"Master, my actual thinking is that the deck theme shouldn’t designate a single race. It should expand to cover an entire worldview."

Luke didn’t believe Lilith’s framing was wrong. Her approach was the path validated across the Magic Card Civilization’s countless years of development, the route best suited to a Card Master’s growth. It simply didn’t suit him.

The sheer stockpile of card spirits in his head, along with the system’s Authorities, guaranteed that whatever type of card he crafted, he could push its combat strength to the maximum limit. It was the difference between a specialist and a generalist. The ordinary Card Master naturally chose to specialize, because their energy genuinely was finite. But Luke’s circumstances were exceptional. For him, the generalist’s road was the better fit.

So on the question of the deck theme, Luke held a dissenting view of his own.

"A worldview?" Lilith froze for a moment at Luke’s declaration. Some instinct whispered to her that whatever Luke said next might bring her gains she hadn’t anticipated.

"That’s right." Luke nodded and laid out his thinking. "By your framing, Master, the deck theme designates a card’s racial type. By mine, the designation should expand to the worldview the card belongs to."

He weighed his words briefly, then continued.

"Take an example. The Magic Card Civilization we live in is itself one complete worldview. Within it, there aren’t only humans and card spirits, but all the other races as well. Even the fierce beasts, as I see it, count among the Magic Card Civilization’s races. That tangled, complicated diversity is precisely what built the Civilization’s present splendor."

"If a civilization held only a single race, then breaking through its developmental ceiling would become enormously difficult. Apply that to cards, and the logic holds just the same."

To an outside observer, the racial types of the cards Luke crafted looked hopelessly scattered. The Spellcaster lineage on one side, the Dragon lineage on another, the Digimon on a third, and the shipgirls still on the drawing board belonging to yet another category entirely. The card spirits shared almost no connection with one another, which naturally created the impression of a Card Master with no clear deck theme at all.

But in truth, divided along worldview lines, Luke’s deck themes were crystal clear.

The Duel Spirits of Yu-Gi-Oh.

The Digimon of the Digital World.

The shipgirls of the Warship World.

Duel spirits of different races, Digimon of different types, shipgirls of different ship classes. All of them were card spirits rooted in a shared worldview, and equally, the building blocks out of which that worldview was constructed. Naturally, that too could be regarded as a deck theme, one operating at an even grander scale.

"Choosing the race a card spirit belongs to as the deck theme isn’t wrong. But in my view, the scope can be drawn wider than that, with the worldview a card spirit belongs to serving as the theme instead." Luke shrugged as he reached the end.

"This might sound a little arrogant, but in a certain sense, we are the creators of our card spirits. And if a creator only ever builds a card world containing a single race, doesn’t that creator come across as a bit weak?"

Of course, Luke didn’t think the Magic Card Civilization’s long developmental road was a mistake. He simply had no intention of walking it on rails. Comfortable and safe, certainly, but it stripped out a great deal of the fun.

As he saw it, the Civilization’s accumulated development served, at most, as reference material.

Having laid out his thinking, Luke looked back toward Lilith, and discovered, to his surprise, that the pair of peach-blossom eyes capable of enchanting all things were fixed on him in a blank, unguarded stare, countless points of light flickering through their depths.

"Master?" Being stared at by a supreme beauty, and one with Lilith’s singular identity at that, was admittedly a pleasant experience, but Luke still wasn’t entirely used to it.

"Do you have any idea what kind of sensation those words of yours would cause, if they spread across the entire Magic Card Civilization?" Registering her own lapse, a faint flush crossed Lilith’s face, and paired with that nation-toppling, bewitching beauty of hers, even Luke, who’d built up a degree of immunity by now, drew a sharp, involuntary breath.

She truly is an enchantress fit to upend an era.

"It’s only my own thinking. Sensation or no sensation, it hardly matters. I never expected anyone else’s approval in the first place." Luke drew a deep breath and let his gaze drift slightly aside. The Lilith of this exact moment was far too tempting. Another second of looking, and he might genuinely transform into the protagonist of a forbidden teacher-student story.

"Confident indeed. That’s my student." Withdrawing her gaze, a faint smile rose on Lilith’s vividly beautiful face. "Still, that idea of yours is genuinely remarkable. Even hearing it secondhand, I felt something stir."

Beneath the surface, however, Lilith was nowhere near as calm as she appeared.

She was one of the Ancient Kingdom’s mere four Region Governors, an Undying Realm Card Master second only to The Supreme. Her refinement of vision and breadth of perspective towered over the ordinary Card Master’s, which made her receptivity to what Luke had just said exceptionally high.

Add to that the fact that Luke’s every performance to date had kept overturning their understanding of what was possible, and the conclusion followed naturally: his idea diverged from the Magic Card Civilization’s long-standing mainstream, but it could not, by any honest measure, be called wrong.

Turning it over carefully, there was no real flaw in Luke’s reasoning at all. He had simply expanded the deck theme from a single race to an entire worldview. And with that one expansion, the vision and the scale of the whole question widened in an instant.