Fine blue lines flowed smoothly from the ordinary pen-nib which glided easily over the light grey surface of the card. The light blue shadings spread over the palm-sized card so that an ever more perfectly beautiful complex and mysterious pattern emerged from its continuous glide.
Chen Mu's gaze was utterly absorbed in staring at this card. His breathing was very light, as though he were wary of startling something. The only thing moving on his motionless right arm was his wrist which had the supple and boneless flexibility of a snake. A fine arc appeared on the surface of the card. The agile pen-nib would layer these on, each terminating in a quick sharp hook, as though the nib were a knife point. The pattern on the card lit up, and then quickly dimmed to its normal state.
Chen Mu casually placed it in the pile of cards to one side of the desk in a smooth and natural movement, without any break in his pace. Finishing this card, his face took on its usual studied concentration. He was still ten short from his day's quota, having finished only fifteen cards. He was making one-star power-cards, which comprised the most basic grade of power-card. Those were the most widely used and most rapidly consumed cards at that time.
The room went suddenly dark.
"Damn! The power's used up again." Grumbling, Chen Mu deftly pulled a power-card from the pile with his left hand, and then pressed it lightly to his right arm causing a bright beam to shine from the instrument he wore on his wrist. With the help of that beam, Chen Mu carefully and deliberately walked to the corner. The room was such a mess, and he didn't want to knock anything over carelessly. In a cubby on the wall of the room was a meter-box, below which was a slot. Chen Mu stuck the card into the slot.
As soon as the power-card was inserted into the slot, the room lit up again, and the display on the meter showed one-hundred. He hadn't thought that the power would be used up and saw that he'd have to add another card to the day's assignment. Returning to his desk, Chen Mu promptly threw himself back into his work. His entire livelihood depended on this most basic card. After he'd finally learned how to make these cards three years ago, he'd never broken his output of 25 cards for even one day.
Chen Mu's room was quite small at not even forty square meters. There was only a single worn work table in it. Apart from the table which was relatively clean, the rest of the room was piled with mountains of debris everywhere. All kinds of stuff – from piles of old books to every sort of raw material – was scattered about.
Chen Mu had been living in this plain and simple place for the entire three years. It was subsidized housing, specifically furnished by the federal government. One only needed to pay 150 Oudi a month to live in a small apartment like that. There really wasn't anyplace so cheap as that anymore for a poor person like Chen Mu. He didn't consider the place to be bad at all for himself, since he'd seen even a four-person family stuffed into the same sized place.
Chen Mu had finally finished the day's work by five in the afternoon – twenty-five power-cards. He carefully counted the quantity of cards, and then counted them a second time. Only when he was certain that he hadn't made some mistake with the count did he carefully put them into the card-pocket of his clothes.
The night life was already slowly building up when he walked out onto the street, where the gaudy lights encouraged people to hang out. Shuttles would pass by from time to time, flashing out from all the streets and shooting dazzling flames out their tails, leaving a fiery arc in their trail. Chen Mu pulled in his coat a bit and lifted his face to the sky. A chill was descending; it looked as though winter was on its way. Without giving much thought to it, he felt the passing of time. Chen Mu was sorting out in his head how winter heating would use up more funds.
Although he'd been taking that route for three years, each time he passed in front of the rear gate to the Eastern Wei Academy, a certain nameless melancholy would sneak up on him, watching the chummy scholars coming and going. Pulling himself together, Chen Mu picked up his steps, and walked toward a small shop to the side of the Academy, called the "Eastern Wei General Store." There must have been at least twenty such shops with similar names all around the Eastern Wei Academy. Across three years, Chen Mu would frequent this shop every day without fail, no matter the weather. The thing was, he didn't go to shop for stuff; he went to sell stuff.
As soon as he entered, the shopkeeper perked up and called out, "Good Old Mu has arrived!"
"Hey, Uncle Hua," he responded to the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper Uncle Hua was an old man in his fifties, the years having left their indelible marks on his body. He was finely wrinkled with greying locks, and he wore old reading glasses.
"Here are today's goods." Chen Mu carefully pulled out stack of power-cards from his breast pocket, and dealt them out in front of the shopkeeper, "twenty-five."
Uncle Hua took the cards from Chen Mu, glanced at them, and then casually put them on the shelf, laughing, "It's a good thing I have Old Mu to send me cards every day. Otherwise I'd be running out of goods."
Chen Mu smiled diffidently but didn't respond. He knew that Uncle Hua was joking with him. The one-star power-card was the most basic power-card, but it was the most quickly consumed card. Anyhow, here by the Eastern Wei Academy it would be hard not to sell twenty-five power-cards.
Uncle Hua also understood Chen Mu's nature, and asked straight out without wasting any words, "Does Old Mu want cash or trade?"
"Trade," Chen Mu shot back, and then produced the light green ledger card which he had prepared earlier for Uncle Hua to see. After they settled-up, and after bidding farewell to Uncle Hua, he turned around to leave.
Uncle Hua abruptly called after Chen Mu, "Hang on a minute Old Mu."
Chen Mu stopped and turned back around with a little surprise and looked at Uncle Hua, "What's up, Uncle Hua?"
Uncle Hua pulled a light-yellow slip of paper from the drawer and smiled slyly at Chen Mu. "I almost forgot. This is an audit ticket for the card master training class, passed along yesterday by my dealer when we were restocking. It would be a waste to leave it here. You take it, Old Mu."
Looking into the kindly old face of Uncle Hua, Chen Mu couldn't help being touched. He well knew how much help this old man in front of him had given him those few years. If it weren't for him, the life he was then living would never have been attainable.
Three years earlier when he had just learned how to make power-cards, he would go all over to peddle them, although he seldom generated inquiries from anyone. There weren't any businesses which wanted to make a purchase. Since the demand for one-star power-cards was so huge, the businesses preferred to take in large quantities at a time, where the most that Chen Mu could produce in a day was thirty. For the businesses, those odd scraps didn't make up more than a fraction of their goals.
Luckily, he came across Uncle Hua. Uncle Hua agreed to accept his power-cards, but the price per card was one hundred and three Oudi, which was two Oudi lower than the wholesale market price. Despite that, Chen Mu was still eternally grateful toward Uncle Hua.
Four years earlier when Chen Mu was still a street punk with no fixed address, he once ran into a card master on the brink of death. He used five months' worth of his own accumulated provisions to save that card master, which gave him seven more days of life. During these seven days, he mastered a few techniques for the making of one-star power-cards. The card master didn't leave anything behind after he died. Chen Mu buried him in a barren field out of town. To that day, he still didn't know the card master's name, but from that time on his fortunes began to change.
He spent a year putting his effort into temporary work, doing six different temp jobs during this time. He was twelve. He also put aside a little bit of money that year – some thousand Oudi. He took the whole thousand and spent it on the raw materials he would need for the power-cards. That card master had always told him that the wholesale market price for a single one-star power-card was 105 Oudi with the equivalent retail price at 110. His production costs were only 98 Oudi.
Every card master could produce one-star power-cards, but there were few who could tell any difference in value among them. And even if they could tell, there were almost none who paid attention. The one-star power-card was one of the simplest. It had already realized industrial production. Even if you were a top-grade card master, the most you could make in a day would be twenty or thirty power-cards; a pitifully small output. Furthermore, as far as card masters were concerned, even if a sum equal to the profit margin were to drop to the ground, they wouldn't be inclined to pick it up. But that bit of money was enough to fill Chen Mu's belly.
By the time he first succeeded in making eight cards, he had lost nearly two hundred Oudi. That actually gave him hope, but he hadn't considered that he would be blocked when it came to selling the cards. The businesses didn't have the slightest interest in the meager quantities of power-cards in his hand. After running around for a whole day and not eating, he walked into Uncle Hua's shop at eight in the evening. Both of his legs were shaking as he entered. After a day without a grain of rice, he was pretty much on the edge of blacking out.
Even though a price of 103 Oudi was lower than the 105 Oudi wholesale price, Chen Mu still felt suffused in joy. He sold off all the power-cards in his hand, and bought the cheapest food. Then he bought raw materials for the power-cards with what was left over.
Chen Mu's life finally stabilized after that.
Twenty-five power-cards every day, without interruption.
Three years passed like that. Within those three years, he made only a single type of power-card – the one-star power-card. By the second year, he'd already managed his costs down to 97 Oudi. Even though it was only a difference of one Oudi, that was enormously encouraging for him. Apart from making the power-cards, he spent his time investigating how to reduce his costs.
Finally, in the third year, the costs of the power-cards had been managed down to 95 Oudi, leaving 8 Oudi profit. His daily take thus stabilized at 200 Oudi, which was a figure he couldn't have imagined three years earlier. Having 6,000 Oudi coming in each month would already enable him to lead a normal life, though he was still living in the 150 Oudi supported housing, as always.
So, the revitalized Chen Mu smiled toward Uncle Hua: "Thank you Uncle Hua!" he said, taking the audit ticket and carefully placing it into the power-card breast pocket.
Card master trainings were just then one of the most packed of the training classes. They were putting out the most incomparably outlandish advertisements, just like this audit ticket, which said something like, 'Credentials Recognized by the Eastern Wei Academy,''Presented in person under the authority of the most senior and highly ranked card-masters from Eastern Wei Academy,' and so forth. Chen Mu was perfectly clear about what was actually going on underneath. The only thing that constituted a relationship between the organizers of these trainings and the Eastern Wei Academy was that this group had to pay some expenses for each class, as consideration for them to maintain this nominally "jointly conducted" designation.
Chen Mu still planned to sit in on this training to see what they actually talked about. Card-making was one of the most complex subjects of study. While he had never given up his self-study all those years, he had little to show for it until just the last year, when he finally understood what it was basically all about. His fundamentals were really lacking. Across ten years as a street punk, he had never gotten any education or culture.
For someone who lacked the most basic foundation from his youth, wanting to teach oneself card-making was to heap difficulty on difficulty. It was widely understood to be an incredibly abstruse field. Still, he didn't doubt his own native ability. That card master had praised his talent that year when he had been able to learn how to make a one-star-grade power-card in the space of a week, on the strength of memory alone.
From then on, he would always find some time to grind through that knowledge no matter how exhausted he was by his work. He put aside any lofty goals.
After saying goodbye to Uncle Hua, Chen Mu walked South along a little alleyway. It was Friday, but he still had a bit of work to do.
Passing along two streets, he walked for maybe twenty minutes and came to a place where there was a worn-out second-hand card buy-back station.
"Eh, shop mate, you're here." The one calling him was a shriveled looking baldy, called Darky. He was the proprietor of the buy-back station. Every Friday evening Chen Mu would do three hours of part-time work there.
Chen Mu gave a little nod to Darky, maintaining a vaguely dull look on his face.
Darky had already gotten used to that look of Chen Mu. When Chen Mu first came looking for temp work, Darky had refused him. The buy-back station had been started by his father, and it had always been run by one person. When he took it over, he ran it single-handed in the same way. Darky certainly couldn't come up with the wages to hire anyone.
But once Chen Mu said he didn't need any wages, Darky agreed. Chen Mu was still rewarded, though. He was generally able to pick a few cards to take with him as his compensation.
Chen Mu was also sometimes able to pick out a few not-quite-used-up power-cards from the trash pile. When Darky did the accounting, what he saved in expenses this way added up to quite a bit of money each month. Still, he inevitably became curious about that taciturn Chen Mu, as in, how did that knucklehead know that those cards still had power?
Anyhow, from then on, he would beam with wide eyes each time he saw Chen Mu.
Chen Mu squatted down to sort the worn-out cards in the pile. There were quite a few types. There were power-cards, goods cards, representational cards, there were even some relatively rare plant and animal cards. It was just that, without exception, they were all useless. What Chen Mu wanted to accomplish was just to classify them.
The work progressed rapidly. It was evident that he was quite familiar with the work.
Chen Mu rummaged through them, tossing a card over to Darky. "Yo, this card can still be used a bit." The two-star-grade card still had at least half its power. Chen Mu couldn't figure out at all why the original owner of this card would waste it like that. The capacity of a two-star-grade power-card was a thousand, which was to say that there was about five-hundred left in it.
"He he, thank you little old Chen." Looking at the two-star card in his hand, Darky eagerly ran beaming and bouncing over to the meter and stuck in the card. When he saw the reading light up at 523, Darky smiled to the point of bursting.
Chen Mu paid no attention. He was entirely focused heart and mind on continuing to sort. Although some worn out middle-grade cards could still show up – like three-star or four-star cards – and their likelihood of showing up was rather high, as far as he was concerned, they still had no value. The only thing he was interested in for then was the one-star-grade power-card.
His three-year card-making career had given him his own understanding of that kind of common and low-grade card. There wasn't only one way to make a one-star power-card, and Chen Mu had already gathered up twelve differently composed one-star power-cards that way.
Chen Mu learned quite a bit from each of those differently designed one-star power-cards. It was because he had borrowed a few techniques from them that he could then succeed in reducing the cost of making the one-star power-cards down to 95 Oudi. But that kind of good fortune wouldn't happen every day. He had only gathered up those twelve up until then.
But that day's luck seemed pretty good.
Looking at the one-star power-card in his hand and judging from the lines composed on its surface, this was another differently constructed sort of one-star power-card, which Chen Mu had never encountered before.
He put it to the side, and continued to sort through the pile. There were really too many of the one-star power-cards, but Chen Mu patiently examined each one. He was fast, and so he practically only needed to swipe his hand over those one-star power-cards to be able to tell if they were something he wanted.
That was all because of his familiarity with the one-star power-card. This kind of familiarity came from ceaselessly making them over the course of three years. Without looking, and on the basis of feel alone, he could tell if a card was truly a one-star power-card, and if it was a type he'd already seen. Really, he was too familiar with them and all of their particulars.
His fingers suddenly froze as they were swiping over a card.
That card . . .