The simulation lasted less than a minute.
Luke's eyes snapped open. Sweat dotted his forehead, and his breathing had gone shallow. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand.
"Yeah. Not happening."
The results were definitive. At his current spiritual reserves, the absolute best he could manage was completing the backstory and setting input for Red-Eyes Black Dragon. After that, his mental energy flatlined. Card art? Empty. Material fusion? Not even a shadow of it.
And if the simulation couldn't be completed, the real construction had no chance.
Red-Eyes Black Dragon was Advanced tier. Seven Stars at minimum. The gap between that and the Intermediate cards he'd been building wasn't a slope. It was a vertical wall.
"Master?" Mana appeared in the doorway, hair still slightly damp, a towel draped over her shoulders. She'd changed back into her combat outfit for comfort. "You're sweating. Are you okay?"
"Fine. Just tested something that didn't work out." Luke leaned back and rolled his neck. "Red-Eyes Black Dragon is too expensive for me right now. Not even close."
"Aww." Mana drifted over and perched on the edge of his desk, legs swinging. "So no dragon friend for me yet?"
"Not the main one. But..."
Luke wasn't the type to quit because Plan A fell through. Red-Eyes Black Dragon was off the table as a direct build. Fine. The archetype had plenty of other options.
In Yu-Gi-Oh, summoning wasn't limited to one method. Normal summon, special summon, ritual summon, fusion summon. Several Red-Eyes terminal cards had built-in effects that could bring Red-Eyes Black Dragon onto the field through special summoning, bypassing the need to construct it from scratch.
The Spell Tome and Magical Hats had already proven that Yu-Gi-Oh mechanics could be translated into Magic Card Civilization. If special summoning worked the same way, Luke could build a terminal card now and use it to pull Red-Eyes Black Dragon out later.
"Black Metal Dragon, Red-Eyes Baby Dragon, Red-Eyes Wyvern, Red-Eyes Retro Dragon..." Luke ticked through the candidates from memory. "All of them can summon Red-Eyes Black Dragon under the right conditions. But most of them are support pieces. Too weak to hold their own in a real fight."
He needed something that could serve double duty. A card strong enough to function as an independent fighter and act as a bridge to Red-Eyes Black Dragon down the road.
"Red-Eyes Black Star Dragon."
Six Stars. The same tier as Mana. Maybe not as versatile in terms of skill variety, but in raw combat power? Dragons were apex creatures in every universe Luke had ever encountered, and Magic Card Civilization was no exception.
He remembered a news broadcast he'd watched a while back. One of the Capital's subsidiary Dimensional Planes had spawned a Nine-Star dragon beast called a Thunder Dragon. The thing had scales made of electromagnetic mineral deposits and an internal organ that could generate lightning rivaling natural thunderbolts. It had grown so powerful that it exceeded the Dimensional Plane's structural limits, shattered the boundary, and broke through into the main plane.
The Capital itself had taken damage. Civilian casualties had started mounting before one of the Vice City Lords intervened personally and put the beast down.
That was the weight of the dragon classification. Even in a civilization built around Magic Cards, dragons sat at the top of the food chain. A Six-Star dragon Card Spirit wouldn't match a Nine-Star beast, obviously, but within its tier, it would be a monster.
"Ooh, a dragon?" Mana's eyes lit up. "That sounds cool! Will it be big? I want it to be big."
"It'll be a dragon, Mana. They're all big."
"Hehe, good point."
Luke closed his eyes and initiated Simulated Crafting. Target: Red-Eyes Black Star Dragon.
The drain hit immediately, heavier than anything he'd felt simulating Equip or Counter Cards. His mental energy dropped at a steady, demanding rate as the simulation processed the card's construction blueprint.
Moments later, he opened his eyes. Sweat on his forehead again, but this time he was smiling.
The simulation had completed without aborting. Red-Eyes Black Star Dragon was within his reach.
But unlike the Spell Tome and Magical Hats, which had hit a hundred percent in a single simulation run, Black Star Dragon's progress bar had only advanced partially. Not even halfway.
That made sense. Card Spirit construction was fundamentally more complex than support cards. More variables, more moving parts, more ways for the process to fail. The simulation needed multiple passes to fully optimize everything.
"Workable." Luke compared his energy expenditure against the progress gained. "A few more days and I'll have it at a hundred percent. Way faster than setting up Mana's backstory was."
That made sense. When he'd built Mana, the lion's share of the time had gone into inputting the entire Yu-Gi-Oh worldview from scratch. That was the real bottleneck. The worldview was already loaded now, approved and locked in, which meant every new card built within that framework got to skip the most expensive step entirely.
A thought struck him.
"Does Simulated Crafting have to be active?"
Every simulation so far, he'd gone fully immersed. Eyes closed, total focus, the whole deal. But if the system only needed a target and a steady supply of mental energy... did he actually need to be present for the entire run?
He set the simulation running again, then carefully, deliberately, pulled his active focus back. Not shutting it down. Just stepping away. Like setting a download to run in the background.
His mental energy continued draining. The simulation kept ticking.
Luke opened his eyes. He could feel it churning away somewhere in the back of his mind, a quiet hum of spiritual consumption and data processing.
"Ha." He flexed his hand, then frowned. His fingers responded slightly slower than expected. The constant background drain on his mental energy was affecting his fine motor control. Nothing debilitating. More like the difference between being fully rested and being slightly sleep-deprived.
But the simulation was running. Without his active involvement. In the background. While he sat here with his eyes open, fully conscious, free to do whatever he wanted.
He ran the numbers. Passive simulation was slower per cycle than active. But the ability to run it continuously, during meals, during travel, during everything except sleep, compressed the total timeline by roughly a third.
For Red-Eyes Black Star Dragon, that meant shaving days off the schedule. For future Advanced-tier cards that might need weeks of simulation? The time savings would be massive.
"Needs practice, though." Luke shook his head. The coordination issue would fade with adaptation, but right now, operating at full capacity with a simulation running in the background wasn't quite seamless. A few more days of getting used to it and he'd barely notice the drain.
The second simulation cycle completed. The progress bar ticked up another increment.
Two cycles done. Luke let the simulation wind down, conserving his remaining mental energy. Between the day's constructions and the simulation runs, he was running on fumes.
He turned to the neatly organized materials on his desk and sighed.
"Dragon materials."
Beast drops from the exam: plenty. Plant-type, beast-type, elemental-type. All useful for various things.
Dragon-type: zero.
School reward from Graves: a generous package. Green through blue grade. Good stuff.
Dragon-type: also zero.
Dragon materials were in a league of their own when it came to scarcity. Dragons were apex predators. Hunting one was a suicide mission for anyone below the higher realms, which meant the supply of dragon-sourced crafting materials was perpetually microscopic. The few that existed on the open market commanded prices that made normal materials look like spare change, and even those listings disappeared within hours of being posted.
Luke had checked the public auction boards before. Dragon materials appeared maybe once a month, if that. And the bidding wars that followed made stock market trading look civilized.
"Nothing in the school rewards either." He'd already gone through every item Graves had given him. Not a single scale, fang, or claw from anything remotely draconic.
"No dragon stuff?" Mana had been watching from her perch on the desk, chin propped on her hands. "That's a bummer."
"It is what it is. There's still the City Lord's reward coming tomorrow. Maybe that'll have something useful."
He wasn't holding his breath. But he wasn't giving up either.
Luke stored the remaining materials inside the Card Editor. Storage Cards existed and were convenient enough for ordinary people, but for a Card Master, the Card Editor was superior in every way. More capacity, better security. Storage Cards could be stolen. The Card Editor couldn't.
He'd heard the news stories. Storage Card theft was a real thing. People lost entire material collections to skilled thieves. The Card Editor didn't have that vulnerability.
Everything secured, Luke stood and stretched. His joints popped in a way that felt earned.
"Bed?" Mana hopped off the desk.
"Bed."
"Hehe, today was a good day, Master."
It really was. Commander Realm breakthrough. Two new card types invented. Mana upgraded to Perfect quality. Second card already in the simulation pipeline. And a plan for the Red-Eyes archetype that stretched all the way to the endgame.
Luke killed the lights and called it a night.