Chapter 8: Card Creation
Date 18 Mar 2321
Time 17:11
Location Sky Blossom City, Adventure Guild Association, Adventure Guild Mall Card Lab
Card lab is just a fancy name for the empty room with good lighting and better soundproofing. Card creation requires the complete concentration of the card apprentice as the card creation process is the most mentally tedious work.
The card apprentice has to completely map out the whole process of card creation in his mind. Slight disturbance can lead to failure. Therefore card apprentices tend to create cards in the place where they feel most secure, that is their home or office.
Let?s take an example of item card steel sword, in this card creation process the card apprentice has to mentally imagine the incredible temperature of furnace required to melt steel, cast to give shape to the sword, the pounding of casted steel sword to refine it, the sharpening of blade etc all these steps have to be mapped out in the mind of the card apprentice and with the help of grimoire he has to mentally refine the card ingredients following this process to get the end product, the card.
Now coming to the gale rabbit leather boots Item card that I choose to create, first I need to have a clear picture of the end product I am going to make that is how the gale rabbit leather boots will look? design? how comfortable will they be? what kind of model boots will they be made after?
After thinking hard I settled on the model, a pair of ultra fly boots sold in my previous world, those boots were normal but they still cost me 3000$. They don?t judge me, every man likes..no! Respects a good pair of ultra fly boots.
After deciding on the model of the boots comes the cutting of leather according to the requirements of the boot design.
Then comes the stitching part, this part is the trickiest as various stitching techniques are required to get the perfect shape and design to create a good pair of ultra fly boots.
Most important of all the boots should be built around the common core as the centre. The core is named core because it is the core of any card. After all, they house the soul abilities of the card.
Once the boots are ready then I have to transfer soul abilities from gale rabbit core to the common core of the leather boots.
All the aforementioned steps have to be carried out very carefully and precisely, otherwise slight mistakes can lead to a decrease in the durability rating and an increase in star rating.
Decreased durability rating means low quality while increased star rating means the card apprentice has to use more stare power to activate the card.
This will lead to a decrease in the price of the card. This is also the reason why most of the card apprentices do not prefer to use complicated models leading to most cards having just plain design.
And also the reason why card apprentices choose to create cards in the safety of the environment that they are familiar with.
After mapping out the card creation process I took out the first set of card ingredients and placed them on the card creation page of the grimoire.
After that, I closed my eyes and poured my mental strength into the grimoire to guide me through the process of card creation.
Since I had already chosen the model of boots, I immediately started to cut the leather as per the design requirements mentally.
But to my surprise this step turned out to be much harder than I had thought, the leather pieces were not cut cleanly, did I not apply enough mental strength or was it something else I don?t know.
If the leather pieces are not cut neatly then it will hinder the stitching process, so we will not get the desired design leading to the creation of a cheap knock off version.
I tried to trim the edges of the leather neatly but it made it worse, finally, I was beginning to understand why the card apprentice chose to go for plain models with less complicated design.
I began to sweat because at this rate the leather will be damaged before I even started the true process of card creation. I was frustrated since all the solutions I came up with didn?t seem to work.
Suddenly I had an epiphany, I remembered that once papa Wyatt said I should not focus on shaping and refining the ingredients itself but shaping and refining the aura of the ingredients and the card creation will become a lot easier.
What is the aura? When young Wyatt asked, papa Wyatt said that aura is like the soul of the ingredients, one can only feel it with enough concentration and experience but never see it.
Soul of ingredients, was he talking about the string pathways of everything I saw earlier using the soul pupils. I wasn?t confident but I decided to give it a try