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"Hm?" As Luke examined his own information, the floating tree-spirit Celestine Lucullus gave a soft cough, a flicker of confusion passing through her emerald pupils.
She'd felt a peculiar energy circulating around her a moment ago. It had vanished almost at once, but Celestine didn't believe her perception had simply glitched, especially not here, within the range covered by the Ancient Spirit Tree's main body.
The trouble was that the energy had appeared strangely and vanished just as strangely and just as fast, leaving Celestine no way to trace it back to its source.
"In all these years, you're the first Card Master who's wanted to carry off my main body." Having found nothing, Celestine withdrew her scattered perception, but her beautiful eyes settled on Luke with a long, searching look.
That peculiar energy had never appeared before. The likeliest explanation was that it originated from the young man in front of her. Yet even as the tree-spirit of a World Tree, Celestine couldn't fathom how a Leader Realm Card Master had managed it. Forget Leader Realm; a higher-tier Monarch, Master, or even Undying Realm existence shouldn't have been able to slip past her perception either.
Of course, that was only Celestine's conjecture. Whether it was actually true, she had no way of confirming with full certainty.
Her voice was as gentle as her appearance, but the words she spoke left Luke briefly without a response.
"Ah." Hearing his own muttered thought repeated back at him, Luke gave a slightly awkward laugh. He didn't deny it, though. He had, in fact, been thinking exactly that.
"A genuinely unusual Card Master." Seeing that Luke didn't deny it, Celestine let out a light laugh. "Has another year passed already? That would make you the first-place finisher of the Eastern Region's exam this year."
As she finished speaking, Celestine's emerald eyes turned toward the Red-Eyes Black Star Dragon beside Luke. "Dragon-type cards. One of the peak races among card spirits. And a solid mana attribute, too."
"Rrgh." Under Celestine's gaze, Red-Eyes Black Star Dragon let out a low growl. The ancient tree-spirit exerted no small amount of pressure on it. Dragon-class though it was, the Red-Eyes Black Star Dragon understood perfectly well that it was no match for her.
"Easy." Luke patted Red-Eyes Black Star Dragon, unconcerned. "She doesn't mean any harm."
Crescent Moon Land radiated strangeness at every turn, but from everything he'd observed so far, Celestine, the tree-spirit of the Ancient Spirit Tree, seemed to hold no particular hostility toward him.
Besides, if Crescent Moon Land were genuinely dangerous, Lilith would never have let her own student walk in to die. And across all these years, the Crescent Moon Blessing wouldn't have continued to serve as the reward for the exam's first-place finisher.
"Let me introduce myself." Withdrawing her gaze from Red-Eyes Black Star Dragon, Celestine turned back to Luke. "Celestine. Tree-spirit of the Ancient Spirit Tree, and keeper of this land's memory."
As Celestine introduced herself, the enormous boughs of the Ancient Spirit Tree behind her shook continuously, as if murmuring something of their own.
Then again, considering the Ancient Spirit Tree was Celestine's true body, Luke supposed it wasn't hard to make sense of.
"Luke." Unclear on what abilities Celestine might possess, Luke simply gave his name and said nothing further.
At the same time, Celestine gave Luke a powerful impression. Even Edmund Hargrove hadn't pressed this heavy an oppressive weight onto him, and Celestine wasn't doing anything at all, merely standing there quietly.
That kind of pressure, Luke had felt from only one other person: his master, Lilith Crescent.
Which meant the Celestine before him was, at minimum, an Undying Realm powerhouse on par with Lilith. Whether she might reach the even higher Supreme Realm was harder to say.
The entire Ancient Kingdom had only a single Supreme, after all, an existence far beyond anyone Luke could reach for now.
In fact, if not for the chain of coincidences involving Victor, Aldric, Selene, and the others colliding together, Luke doubted he'd have come into contact with the Undying Realm Lilith this early at all. She was the Eastern Region's Governor. Even an Immortal who governed a capital couldn't simply seek Lilith out whenever they pleased.
But even so, news that an Undying Realm powerhouse resided within Crescent Moon Land would, if it ever got out, cause an uproar. On the surface, the Ancient Kingdom had only four Region Governors whose strength reached the Undying Realm.
Celestine's presence only confirmed further that Crescent Moon Land was no simple place, that it might well involve secrets of the Ancient Kingdom. Otherwise, the Kingdom's upper echelons would never tolerate such a terrifying existence inside it. That, however, was not something Luke could pry into yet.
No one capable of taking first place in the Eastern Region's exam was a fool, and every candidate who'd entered Crescent Moon Land before him had surely reached the same conclusion. Perhaps that was exactly why information about Crescent Moon Land and the Crescent Moon Blessing barely circulated anywhere in the Eastern Region.
"Luke, is it?" Hearing his name, Celestine repeated it under her breath, her gentle voice carrying both curiosity and interest. "I find myself a little eager to see what blessing you'll receive next."
Beneath her pure white priestess robes, Celestine raised one fair, slender arm and swept it lightly forward. The space the two of them occupied transformed dramatically in an instant. They remained within Crescent Moon Land, but an enormous clock had appeared in front of Luke, its inner components exposed, the whole thing looking somehow broken and unfinished, hovering in midair.
Another clock? Luke realized he'd been running into a surprising number of clock-shaped objects lately. Am I fated to these things now? Should I look into getting a Time Driver or a Ride Driver to go with it?
"This is the Memory Interstice." Celestine's voice carried over from a short distance away. The ancient tree-spirit still hovered in the air, explaining the strange transformation in a gentle tone. "Every Card Master who enters Crescent Moon Land must draw from the Memory Interstice in order to receive the Crescent Moon Blessing."
"The Memory Interstice holds a great many blessings. But exactly which one a Card Master draws comes down to their own luck." As she spoke, Celestine's emerald eyes stayed fixed on Luke.
Oh, if that's what we're talking about, suddenly I'm wide awake.
Hearing Celestine's explanation, Luke felt a sudden urge to check his blood pressure. This gave him the exact sensation of playing a gacha game.
That said, Luke figured the blessing draw was probably fully random, true probability rather than the pseudo-random systems and big-data price-gouging of his past life's developers. At the very least, on the fairness front, there were no problems whatsoever.
Which meant drawing a blessing came down purely to luck. Let's see whether I've still got it.
Should've washed my face before pulling. No way to know how blessed I really am otherwise. The thought was a joke, but Luke still raised a hand and set the Memory Interstice in front of him turning.
He had reasonable confidence in his own luck. Even so, he couldn't suppress a certain instinctive urge.
The hour hand, the minute hand, and the second hand spun rapidly, and once they reached an extreme speed, the Memory Interstice disintegrated in an instant into countless streams of light that flooded the entire space.
As far as Luke's eyes could reach, the streams of light from the dissolved Memory Interstice had become diamond-shaped golden fragments, drifting all around him. In that moment, Luke looked as though he were standing in the middle of a golden ocean.