Magic Card Era: Infinite Deck Enhancement — Chapter 55

Chapter 55: Just Thinking About It Is Exciting!

Creating Original Magic Cards didn’t strictly correlate with a Magic Card Master’s cultivation realm, but the sheer age gap was impossible to ignore.

Did this mean Luke possessed a raw talent even more terrifying than her own teacher’s? A rebellious, almost blasphemous thought bloomed in Meng Ningdie’s mind. She quickly suppressed it, shaking her head to clear the notion.

Her teacher was the Night Queen—one of the Ancient Kingdom’s four Undying Realm supreme experts and the absolute Domain Lord of the Eastern Region. It was absurd to think some random teenager could eclipse her potential.

Yet, despite her denial, her curiosity about this boy named Luke swelled like a rising tide.

“Oh, I nearly forgot to mention. Aside from being an Original Creator, Luke also independently destroyed a Black Gate recently.” Cang Ao stroked his chin, his tone deceptively casual. “If you hadn’t shown up, Little Meng, I would be processing his reward right now. That brat Fenghua even came to me personally to report it.”

Meng Ningdie froze. ‘He destroyed a Black Gate?’

While not as devastating as birthing an Original Magic Card, the context made the feat infinitely more terrifying. Luke was merely a Battle General Realm Magic Card Master.

Having crushed a Black Gate herself in the past, Meng Ningdie knew exactly how nightmarish the Extraterrestrial Beasts lurking within could be.

“Wait, that makes no sense,” she countered, her brow furrowing. “The absolute lowest tier for an Extraterrestrial Beast is Seven-Star. Even if Luke holds two Six-Star Original Magic Cards, it’s mathematically impossible for him to overpower a gatekeeper.”

The gulf between Six-Star and Seven-Star wasn’t just a single rank. It was a structural chasm—the brutal dividing line between intermediate and high-level Magic Cards.

When she had cleared her own Black Gate, she had relied on a fully synchronized deck of Seven-Star Magic Card Elves. Facing a Seven-Star Extraterrestrial Beast with mere Six-Star cards would be a death sentence.

“Under normal circumstances, you’d be right. But you’re forgetting the nature of his deck,” Cang Ao chuckled, the sound rumbling deep in his chest. “Original means stepping into the unknown. It means limitless possibility.”

“Remember that Dragon-type card I emphasized earlier? The one Luke constructed possesses a unique characteristic: upon death, it instantly ascends by one star level.”

“He weaponized its death to obliterate the Abyssal Predator and shatter the Black Gate.”

“Granted,” Cang Ao added, “the Abyssal Predator he faced was at the absolute bottom of the Seven-Star hierarchy, and the battle ended in a flash. With his Battle General Realm mana reserves, a drawn-out fight would have drained him dry.”

Cang Ao understood the technicalities perfectly, but the caveats didn’t change the absolute outcome. The Black Gate was gone.

A Six-Star card evolving into a Seven-Star entity upon its own destruction. The sheer audacity of the concept struck Meng Ningdie like a physical blow, and her eyes ignited with a fierce, brilliant light.

She suddenly realized her own optimization techniques had been far too rigid, trapped within conventional boundaries.

‘I am currently a visiting mentor at Tianfu Academy. If Luke enrolls there… couldn’t I claim him as my personal student?’ A thrilling, intoxicating idea sparked in her mind, sending a jolt of pure adrenaline through her veins.

Tianfu Academy. One of the Four Great Academies of the Ancient Kingdom, the undisputed pinnacle of education in the Eastern Region. It was the holy grail for every aspiring Magic Card Master.

Would Luke fail to get in? Impossible.

With his current track record, the moment his status as an Original Creator leaked, he wouldn’t even need to take the college entrance exam. Every elite institution in the country would be breaking down his door, Tianfu Academy included.

Despite her title as a visiting mentor, Meng Ningdie had never accepted a single disciple. No one at the academy dared pressure her, either.

The headmaster of Tianfu Academy might be an Immortal Realm expert on par with Cang Ao, but Meng Ningdie had the Night Queen standing behind her. The entire academy operated under the Night Queen’s ultimate jurisdiction.

Below the Immortal Realm headmaster and deputy headmaster were the Sovereign Realm instructors.

Meng Ningdie hadn’t crossed into the Sovereign Realm yet, but she stood at the absolute peak of the Emperor Realm. She was a force of nature in her own right, not someone an ordinary Magic Card Master could afford to provoke.

If Luke chose Tianfu Academy, she could absolutely secure him.

‘Taking an Original Magic Card Creator as my student…’ It would be more like a partnership than a traditional master-disciple dynamic. Just picturing it made her blood race.

She began silently calculating the logistics, assuming the boy truly lived up to Cang Ao’s immense praise.

“Come on, let’s secure the Extreme Cold Ice Spring first,” Cang Ao said, abruptly cutting the conversation short and taking to the sky.

As he turned away, a sly, calculating smile touched his lips.

He hadn’t brought up Luke just to hear himself talk. He was planting a seed. He needed Meng Ningdie’s raging curiosity to carry the boy’s name straight to the Night Queen. A supreme intellect like the Night Queen would instantly grasp the implications. It had been an agonizingly long time since an Original Creator had graced their world.

They said curiosity killed the cat, but a woman’s curiosity was a far more dangerous beast.

Before the Night Queen even caught wind of the boy, Meng Ningdie was already completely hooked, actively plotting to claim Luke for herself.

That particular development was something Cang Ao hadn’t quite anticipated.

…

Back in his room, Luke let out a heavy sigh.

“Running a simulated construction for an entire worldview takes significantly longer than simulating a single Magic Card. And one full simulation cycle only bumps the progress by a single percent.”

He had anticipated a grind, but the sheer scale of the task was daunting.

“At this rate, pushing the new worldview’s simulation progress to one hundred percent will take over a week—and that’s assuming I don’t sleep or rest.”

That was the theoretical best-case scenario. In reality, he had to carefully manage his mental power, keeping it from dropping below critical levels. The actual timeframe would be much longer.

Thankfully, he had the Moon Spirit Ring. The artifact continuously nourished his mind, offsetting the massive cognitive drain. Even with its steady recovery effects, mapping out the vast, complex architecture of the Digital World was going to be a marathon. He simply couldn’t keep the simulation running twenty-four hours a day.

“It’s fine. I still have time,” Luke muttered, stretching his stiff shoulders. “As long as the progress remains steady, I can finish the framework before the college entrance exam.”

The slow burn was an acceptable trade-off. “Once the core worldview is fully established, any subsequent Magic Cards tied to this universe can be generated instantly.”

“It’s a heavy upfront cost, but it makes future deck-building infinitely easier.”

A Magic Card’s absolute ceiling in power and quality was dictated by the depth of its foundational worldview. Back when he lacked the system’s simulation privileges, manually constructing the Yu-Gi-Oh! universe had taken him several times longer than this current Digital World project. That painstaking foundational work was exactly why the Dark Magician Girl and the Red-Eyes Meteor Dragon possessed such terrifying base stats.

“Since the system’s simulation is entirely occupied with the worldview framework, I’ll manually draft the background lore and individual settings for the new cards.”

Luke stood up, re-initiating the Digital World simulation in the background, and headed toward the dining room.

The system’s automated worldview generation didn’t lock him out of the creative process. He could manually design the specific character lore in reality while the system crunched the universal physics in his mind.

It was the ultimate multi-tasking. Maximum efficiency.