Some merchants were dishonest and mercenary—willing to trample over anything for profit. Others were upright and law-abiding, believing that a gentleman pursues wealth only by righteous means. Both were valid paths for a merchant, and both could serve as the foundation for cultivation.
The people at the Spiritual Energy Bureau weren't fools, however. Between those two kinds of merchants, only one would be given access to advanced cultivation methods—and it wasn't the former.
The former had nothing to offer Dragon Kingdom society.
Looking at things as they stood now, it wasn't hard to see just how beautiful Dragon Kingdom's future was going to be.
Everyone doing work they genuinely loved. Merchants who were honest and trustworthy. Sincerity, kindness, and courage visible in everyone you met.
If the threat of the mutant beasts could be resolved, the Dragon Kingdom's future would be almost impossibly wonderful.
But would it actually unfold that way?
This Spiritual Energy feedback had lowered the cultivation threshold enough for progress—but would the third Spiritual Energy Tide lower it further? And the fourth?
Until there was no threshold left at all?
If the threshold vanished entirely—if you no longer needed a path you were prepared to follow for your entire life—would these beautiful qualities survive? Or would they fade again, as they had before, lost a little more with every passing year?
Unknown. And genuinely fascinating to wonder about.
---
Vantora City Spiritual Energy Bureau.
Firewing stared at the people assembled in front of her, blank-faced.
"What's going on?"
"Why are all of you here?"
The beast wave had only just ended. There was no internal emergency. This was supposed to be a rare stretch of peace.
So why had all these people shown up at her office?
Skyler Quinn. Ethan Yates. Chris Frost. Nathaniel Gray. Charles Longfellow.
And Chu Han—recently designated First Sequence—and Zhang Hai, designated Second Sequence.
Nearly every First Sequence cultivator in Dragon Kingdom was here, aside from a small number on special assignment and those still growing into their power.
"It really does look different from the videos." Skyler crouched to get a better look and reached out to pet the Flame Beast Lion, who had tensed up the moment the group arrived—but relaxed again once it recognized Firewing. Perhaps it sensed some affinity in Skyler's fire element, because it didn't pull away.
Firewing had actually planned to introduce the lion to Skyler for a comparison sparring session after it was born, but then the situation with Zhao Feng happened, and after that she'd heard Skyler had emerged from seclusion only to immediately fight a First Sequence mutant beast—so she'd figured he wouldn't be interested.
The lion's registration had gone through the official channels, so everyone here already knew about it.
"Your scent is better than Firewing's."
The lion said this with complete sincerity.
"Shut up!"
Firewing's eye twitched. She knew the lion meant that Skyler's fire element was significantly denser and more powerful than her own—but that didn't mean everyone else knew that.
Especially Chris Frost, who had quietly taken half a step back. Was that genuine?
And Ethan Yates—what was that expression on your face? Put it away.
"You didn't come all the way here just to pet it, I assume?"
Firewing suppressed the urge to smack the lion, and looked at them with open curiosity.
"Don't overthink it. There's no special reason."
Skyler glanced at her expression and kept his voice mild.
"We're here for this."
As he finished speaking, Chu Han opened his hand. A card appeared in his palm—one everyone present recognized immediately.
Cardcaptor Sakura. One of the Clow Cards.
The Sword.
"Five-Element Armor, Imperial Arms, Devil Fruits, Sacred Beast Companions, Clow Cards—all of them are his creations."
"The Five-Element Armor and Sacred Beast Companions choose their hosts. The Imperial Arms and Devil Fruits rely on luck, circumstance, and compatibility."
"But the Clow Cards are different."
Based on what the anime had shown, the Clow Cards possessed genuine intelligence—and even without a master, they could still use their own power.
And some of those powers were anything but small. Several of them, in the real world, could easily cause mass casualties.
"So... you want to capture the Clow Cards?"
"Become magical girls."
Firewing looked at the group, expression strange.
She involuntarily swapped Sakura's face for Skyler's in her mind's eye, shuddered at the mental image, then caught Skyler's cool stare and forced a laugh.
"But based on Brandon's track record, the Clow Cards should be scattered across Dragon Kingdom—maybe the whole world—just like the Devil Fruits. How would we even find them?"
"It's not like we have any natural connection to them."
"Sakura had Kero. She was chosen as Clow Reed's successor and was exceptional even before that. Wang Xiaoming had a compass. Can we...?"
Something clicked, and Firewing ventured an uncertain guess.
"Exactly what you're thinking."
Ethan nodded, then pulled a compass from his spatial ring.
"William and one of the Daoist refining masters built this together. It can pinpoint the location of every Clow Card."
"Thirty-two cards are currently detectable. The stronger ones will get more per person; Charles and I take fewer. But the bigger concern is compatibility. If some cards have already been found by someone, we check their background first—as long as they're not a problem, we leave it alone."
"Still, stay careful. The Sword gave Chu Han fighting power that rivals First Sequence. The other cards won't be weaker."
That was precisely why all the First Sequence cultivators had come out for this.
The Sword had elevated Chu Han to near-First-Sequence level in direct combat—even developing sword qi and sword intent. The other Clow Cards would certainly be stronger than in the anime, amplified by the denser spiritual energy of the real world.
Second Sequence cultivators couldn't guarantee their own survival when attempting to claim them.
"Agreed."
Firewing nodded readily.
Setting aside anything else, the four elemental Clow Cards alone were almost certainly among the strongest of the set.
And the Clow Cards' powers came in extraordinary variety—the Create Card, for instance, had the ability to bring things written in a book into physical reality. In the hands of someone with a dark imagination and no moral compass, the things that could be summoned were too terrible to contemplate.
"If it weren't for you all confirming it over and over, I genuinely wouldn't have believed these things were all made by the White Emperor."
Chu Han listened to the discussion and let out a rueful smile.
He hadn't had the clearance to know any of this before. When he'd first been told, his immediate reaction was disbelief.
His image of the White Emperor had always been simple: overwhelming power. Dragon Kingdom's undisputed strongest, with the other three members of the top tier lagging far behind. Brandon appeared rarely—once in the earliest videos, then with the Snow Mastiff summoning device, then at the incident in Sea City—but every appearance underscored the same thing.
He had assumed the White Emperor was deployed on some classified special mission somewhere.
It turned out things were nothing like what he'd imagined.
If the rest of them were soldiers defending their homeland, then Brandon White was something else entirely—a god of this world. His gaze didn't rest on any single nation. It rested on all of Earth's civilizations. He didn't care about any individual's death. What he cared about was the planet's future.
(End of Chapter 278)