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A bonus discovery had emerged over the past few days.
Mana Crystals didn't only function on Card Masters and active card spirits. The crystals could fuse directly into a stored card, embedding mana-storage capacity at the card-object level. Mana had suggested it during one of the testing rounds, almost offhandedly, while Luke was filling her with a third experimental crystal that the system had immediately rejected. Card spirits intuit certain things about the mana ecosystem that even Card Masters miss, and apparently Mana had been thinking about whether the crystal absorption logic was strict on user identity or just on energy compatibility.
Luke had tested the idea, and it worked.
Red-Eyes Black Star Dragon now carried its own dedicated Mana Crystal, embedded at the card level. So did the Eye of Timaeus. Both cards had been quietly strengthened during the days leading up to the exam, their internal mana reserves expanded so that summoning either of them no longer drew exclusively on Luke's primary pool.
When he eventually deployed them in combat, the deployment cost would be significantly reduced. The Dragon Knight Dark Magician Girl fusion would benefit twice over, since both component cards were now reinforced.
It was, all things considered, an excellent return on the Capital City Lord's Mansion investment.
-----
"Luke, finally!"
Mark Whitman was already waiting at the school gate when Luke arrived, his uniform crisp and his expression a mix of relief and exasperation. He grabbed Luke's arm and started pulling him toward the central plaza without preamble.
"Come on, the exam's about to start."
"Hey." Luke kept pace, eyebrow raised. "Mark. The exam doesn't start for another hour."
He wasn't even close to the latest arrival. He was, by his own internal scheduling, comfortably early.
"You disappeared for days. The principal and the vice principal have been losing their minds about whether you'd show up at all." Mark rolled his eyes hard enough that Luke worried briefly about his ocular health. "I had to swear up and down that you'd be here on time. So forgive me if I'm a little tense."
That left Luke without a counterargument. He let himself be tugged forward and stopped trying to defend the timeline.
-----
The plaza of Ashenvale Third High School was already crowded with students and faculty when they arrived. Heads turned at Luke's appearance, and a low ripple of conversation spread through the gathered crowd.
The Standardized Examination and the Ashenvale-Moonvale exchange match had both happened months ago, and the immediate hype around Luke's name had dimmed. But it hadn't faded. Among the students of Third High, Luke was still the second-most-discussed topic on campus, narrowly behind the entrance exam itself, and only because the exam was happening today.
If the exam had been a week away, Luke would still have been the dominant topic.
At the front of the plaza, Geoffrey Falk and Rose Bellamy, the principal and vice principal of Ashenvale Third, both visibly relaxed at Luke's arrival. Geoffrey had been minutes away from sending Mark to Luke's house personally to drag him out, and the vice principal had been on the verge of suggesting alternative interventions.
Across the country, every high school was tense. The Ashenvale satellite, the Capital, the Eastern Region, the Ancient Kingdom as a whole, all of them were feeling the same anticipatory pressure. The entrance exam was a once-a-year event that defined the trajectories of everyone taking it.
Then the bells began to ring.
The deep, resonant peal of the Ancient Bells, struck only on the country's most significant occasions, rolled across Ashenvale and every other city simultaneously. The annual entrance exam was one of the few events that warranted the bell-ringing protocol.
Every student standing in every plaza across the country dissolved into white light at the same instant, vanishing from their respective schools and reappearing in the entrance exam's segregated dimensional space.
The Third High plaza emptied in a single coordinated flash.
"Now we see how far they go," Geoffrey murmured, watching the empty plaza for a moment before turning to Rose. "I'm heading to the City Lord's Mansion. The viewing arrangements should be set up by now."
-----
*Inside the exam space.*
Luke materialized in an open expanse, featureless and uniformly lit, similar in atmosphere to the Standardized Examination space but visibly larger. Around him, other students were appearing in distributed positions, each with enough personal space to perform serious card-related work without interference.
"Looks like card crafting again," Luke murmured, glancing around. The format was similar enough to past exams that the prediction was reasonable. Card crafting was the foundational skill for any Card Master, and it was a near-permanent fixture on entrance examinations.
The other students arriving around him wore similar expressions of anticipation, with subtle differences. Some looked nervous. Some looked confident. A few looked outright eager, students who had already settled on what they intended to craft and just wanted to start.
A flow of information cascaded into every student's awareness simultaneously.
*「 This year's entrance examination consists of two phases. 」*
*「 Phase One: Card Crafting 」*
*「 Within the allotted time, each candidate must successfully craft one card. Successful crafting advances the candidate to Phase Two. Failure results in disqualification. 」*
*「 Phase One opens in ten minutes. Candidates may use this time to prepare materials and finalize their crafting plans. 」*
The ten-minute warning gave the students room to position themselves, organize their materials, and steady their nerves. Around the exam space, conversation surged and receded.
"Card crafting again. Annual tradition, basically."
"I'm aiming for a Three-Star this exam. If I can pull it off, my placement will be solid."
"I've been pushing toward Four-Star crafting for months. This is the moment."
"The actual question is whether what we craft in Phase One affects Phase Two."
"If Phase One feeds into Phase Two, we need to think about combat utility, not just success rate. Any card we craft now is a card we might be fighting with."
The speculation about Phase Two's relationship to Phase One generated visible adjustments in several students' planning. People who had been preparing for a quick safe craft started reconsidering whether to push for something stronger, even at higher failure risk.
-----
"No minimum tier requirement for the crafted card," Luke noted internally. "Twelve hours. Plenty of time to craft a single card."
His eyes had begun to brighten with anticipation.
"But if I want to manifest every card concept I've been planning… twelve hours might actually be tight."
Luke wasn't planning to craft one card. Or two. He was planning to manifest his entire backlog of staged Yu-Gi-Oh and Digimon designs, the cards he'd been preparing for months, into reality during this exam window. It was the most ambitious crafting plan he'd ever attempted, and the exam space's standard time allotment was the perfect cover for it.
The other students would notice when they saw the results. The graders would notice. Half the country would notice. But by then, the deed would already be done.
-----
The ten-minute timer expired.
A massive golden clock materialized above the exam space, its face hovering at a height visible to every candidate. The clock began counting down from twelve hours.
Phase One was open.
Across the dimensional space, every candidate sprang into immediate action. Card crafting had a non-trivial failure rate, and a failed attempt during the exam wasn't just a wasted attempt, it was a confidence-shaking event that would echo through the rest of the day. Twelve hours sounded generous, but in practice, a single botched craft could effectively end a candidate's exam right there.
Most candidates were going to play conservatively. Pick the highest-tier card they could safely craft, commit fully, and pray for clean execution.
Luke, on the other hand, started building the Digital World.
-----
*「 The Digital World exists within a special networked space, possessing a planet-like spherical structure. 」*
*「 The Digital World is inhabited by special beings called Digimon. 」*
*「 Digimon possess evolutionary characteristics, adapting to environmental conditions to evolve into higher tiers, gaining commensurate increases in power. 」*
The information began streaming outward from Luke's position in dense, structured cascades. He'd already completed the worldview's simulation construction at one hundred percent, which meant the actual manifestation phase moved at significantly accelerated speed. The Magic Card Civilization's underlying ruleset accepted his contributions in real time, integrating each new piece of canonical information into the regional reality.
Around him, runic symbols began to appear in the air. Lines of structured glyphs that pulsed in slow harmony with his focused work. A miniature world began to form within his crafting space, shaping itself out of the streaming data, condensing the Digital World's foundational logic into a localized recognition pattern.
It looked almost identical to the process that had unfolded the first time he'd built the Yu-Gi-Oh worldview.
The Magic Card Civilization was, in its own way, acknowledging that the Digital World was a valid second worldview. A second canonical reality being added to Luke's personal craftsmanship portfolio.
A second Original Worldview.
In the entrance examination's first phase. In front of the entire country's monitoring infrastructure.