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"Is it really necessary for all of you to be huddled in my office?"
Victor Ashford regarded the gathering in his Mansion's main reception hall with an expression that walked the line between affection and exasperation. Harrison Cole and the three Ashenvale principals had effectively colonized his viewing chamber, complete with imported snacks and rearranged furniture.
The Mansion was, somewhat involuntarily, becoming a community gathering space.
Are these people really this bored?
"Who else has the security clearance to view every Ashenvale candidate's exam feed simultaneously?" Harrison Cole rolled his eyes elaborately. "It's certainly not us. Unless you'd prefer we go find someone else's exam to watch."
The City Lord of any satellite city held the administrative authority to view all entrance exam feeds for candidates registered within their city's jurisdiction. The privilege wasn't unique to Victor; every City Lord across the country had it. But it was strictly localized. A City Lord couldn't view candidates from a different satellite city. That privilege was reserved for the Capital Governor of the relevant capital.
A Region Governor, like Lilith Crescent for the Eastern Region, held even broader access. They could view every candidate across every capital and satellite city in their entire region.
The hierarchy of viewing access mirrored the broader hierarchy of authority. And right now, Victor was the access point Harrison and the principals needed.
Victor regarded Harrison with a particular look that Harrison absolutely deserved, then gave him a small, dignified middle finger.
He hadn't realized, until recent months, that Harrison Cole's personality was secretly this petty. The man had been hiding it well for years.
"City Lord," Geoffrey Falk interjected diplomatically, "perhaps we could move past the friendly banter and open the feeds. The exam has already started, and I'd very much like to see how Luke is handling Phase One."
The other two principals, Lawrence Cromwell of First High and Bianca Daly of Second High, nodded in agreement. They were here to watch their students. They were not here to spectate Harrison and Victor's adult-version-of-elementary-school-feud.
Victor relented with another silent middle finger directed at Harrison's general vicinity, then gestured. The Mansion's monitoring runes activated, and three large viewing displays bloomed open in the air, showing the live feeds of Luke Mercer, Brielle Hanson, and Walter Pence.
Those three were Ashenvale's realistic candidates for top-tier academic placement, with Luke as the only realistic shot at the Eastern Region's first-place finish.
"What the hell."
Both Victor and Harrison nearly stood up.
Their viewing window had opened just in time to catch Luke's Phase One activity, and what was happening on the feed was, by any standard interpretation, impossible.
"Is this real?" Geoffrey Falk slapped Lawrence Cromwell's shoulder hard enough that Lawrence's coffee splashed across his lap. Geoffrey didn't notice. His eyes were locked on the monitoring screen, transfixed.
"Geoffrey, you absolute son of..." Lawrence began, then trailed off, because his own eyes had registered what was on the feed, and his complaint about the spilled coffee suddenly seemed petty. He was, instead, staring at Luke's monitoring window with the same fixed attention as everyone else in the room.
Whatever was happening to his lap could be addressed later.
"Worldview Manifestation," Bianca Daly whispered. Her voice was trembling. "That's the second time I've witnessed it."
She was an Emperor Realm Card Master. Composure was a core operational skill at her level, professional steadiness that Emperor-tier Card Masters maintained as second nature. She had not lost her composure since reaching Emperor Realm decades ago.
She had lost it once already this year, when she'd witnessed Luke construct the Yu-Gi-Oh worldview during the Standardized Examination.
She was losing it for the second time now.
"Heaven-defying," Harrison murmured, then said it again with more force. "Heaven-defying. Heaven-defying."
He closed his eyes and pressed his hands against his temples, trying to compress the surge of excitement back into a manageable volume. With his eyes closed, he could just barely hold his face neutral. With his eyes open, the visible feed was overriding any attempt at professionalism.
"I thought we were already overestimating Luke," he said, words coming out slightly more breathlessly than he intended. "Apparently we were underestimating him. Apparently he can do this. Twice. In the same year."
"Constructing a single Original Worldview is already extraordinary," Victor said, his voice carrying a slightly higher pitch than usual. Even his trained gubernatorial composure was straining. "A second one, this fast, in the entrance exam, in front of every monitoring authority in the country..."
His grip on the armrest tightened.
"Thank the Ancestors we treated Luke well from the beginning. Thank the Ancestors he's a son of Ashenvale."
He paused, processing.
"Our city has produced a true dragon."
The phrase carried weight. Calling someone a true dragon, in the Card Master vernacular, wasn't routine praise. It was language reserved for figures of generational significance, the once-in-a-century talents whose careers reshaped the political and cultural landscapes of entire regions.
Victor wasn't being hyperbolic. He was being accurate.
The atmosphere in the Mansion's reception hall had shifted from social gathering to something approaching reverence. Every senior figure in the room was reassessing what Luke's continued development would mean for their respective institutions, and the calculations were running larger than expected by orders of magnitude.
Capital Card Master Association. Edmund Hargrove's office.
The atmosphere in the Capital was very different from the celebratory mood at Ashenvale's Mansion.
Edmund Hargrove sat at his desk with his hands folded in front of him, watching the same feed. Roland Hargrove stood beside him, his expression locked into a careful neutrality that wasn't quite holding under pressure.
"Father." Roland's mouth had gone dry. He worked through a few false starts before he managed a coherent question. "Is this actually possible?"
He felt his understanding of the world reorganizing in real time. His understanding of what 'genius' meant, what 'extraordinary talent' meant, what the upper bound of human potential actually looked like, was being recalibrated. Forcefully.
He'd already known Luke was an Original Card crafter. Edmund had told him after the Youth Training Competition, and the explanation had reframed several of Luke's earlier accomplishments. Roland had also expected, plausibly, that Luke would attempt to construct an Original Card during the entrance exam. That was the rational play. Build a high-impact Original Card during the highest-visibility exam of the year, secure a flagship placement, and use the resulting fame to leverage everything else.
That was what Roland would have done in Luke's position.
What Luke was actually doing was building a second Original Worldview.
Original Worldviews were generational events. The Magic Card Civilization's documented history listed only a handful of them across all four greater regions, spread across millennia. Each one represented a fundamental contribution to the Civilization's underlying canon.
Luke had constructed his first one during the Standardized Examination. By itself, that had been an accomplishment that placed him in the historical record permanently.
Now he was constructing a second one. Less than a year later. In an exam that was being monitored by every senior figure in three capitals.
Are Original Worldviews available in bulk now?
Roland's brain was producing increasingly irreverent thoughts under the pressure. He kept them internal.
"Are these doable for ordinary mortals at this point?"
He tried to suppress the wild speculation, but his focus kept sliding back to Luke's monitoring window. He had a sudden, undignified urge to crack open Luke's skull and examine the cognitive architecture. He wanted to see, anatomically, what kind of brain produced this output. The boy was a few years older than Elise. He was supposed to be a teenager.
He was instead apparently a once-in-an-era anomaly.
Ellie didn't lose to a peer. She lost to something the Civilization itself hadn't catalogued yet.
That single thought, more than anything else, was what reframed his daughter's tournament loss in his mind. Elise hadn't been outperformed by a peer with better resources. She'd been outperformed by an entity whose category didn't exist in the standard taxonomy of young Card Masters.
The loss made retroactive sense.
"Compose yourself." Edmund's voice cut across the office with smooth authority. The tone was steady, controlled, the unflappable measured calm that Immortal Realm figures projected as a professional skill. "We know very little about Original Worldviews and Original Card creation. Luke is the first Original Card crafter to surface in centuries. By definition, anything he does will appear unbelievable, because we have no reference frame for what to expect."
Roland nodded, taking the steadying advice on board.
Then he glanced down at Edmund's hands.
His father's hands, folded on the desk, were trembling. Subtly, almost imperceptibly. But unmistakably. The Immortal Realm composure was a presentation, not a state.
He's just as shaken as I am. The unflappable face is theatrical.
Roland kept the observation strictly internal. Voicing it aloud would result in consequences he was not eager to test. Edmund's professional steadiness might be a presentation, but Edmund's response to disrespect from his own son would be straightforwardly painful.
He composed his own face into something approximating Edmund's, took a breath, and went back to watching the feed.
The fact that even his Immortal-Realm father was visibly straining helped. It meant Roland's own reaction wasn't unusual. It just meant the situation was, by every reasonable metric, genuinely unprecedented.