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"Junior brother, keep this up and I get the feeling it won't be long before you catch me and leave me in the dust." Selene rolled her eyes at his explanation. Did the boy have no ceiling at all when it came to making cards?
"Senior sister, you're peak Emperor already, one step from Sovereign. The distance between us is still about a hundred million miles." Luke only shrugged.
"The problem is that at your age I hadn't even broken into Monarch." Selene was torn between laughing and groaning. "And what do you think reaching Sovereign is, exactly? If it were that easy, the Ancient Kingdom wouldn't have so pitifully few Sovereign-realm Card Masters."
The Kingdom's population was vast. Even with Card Masters only a fraction of it, they still numbered in the billions, and yet the Sovereigns across the Twelve Capitals and the hundred-odd satellite cities together came to a few hundred people at most.
Averaged out, a satellite city had a handful. The Twelve Capitals had more, but only by that same handful. One Sovereign in several million Card Masters. The odds could hardly be lower.
Student of the Night Empress or not, and with all the confidence in the world that she'd break through, even Selene wouldn't promise when she'd manage it.
She gave Luke one more grand eye-roll for good measure, then went through what he needed to know about the token. "There isn't much to it, honestly. It works about like the Crescent Moon Token."
"Except the Corridor's token sends only the Card Master's soul across. The body stays in the real world. So use it somewhere safe."
"I think right here suits nicely." Luke grinned, unbothered.
The Eternal Land was the safest place there was, without question, but he wasn't certain the token would still work once he'd gone inside it, and wasting the thing would be a shame. The dormitory was a decent option too. With its ward up, no ordinary Card Master could force a way in.
But between the dormitory and Selene's home, hers was plainly the safer bet.
"I knew that's what you were angling for." Selene was hardly surprised, but she still let out a small, pretty huff. "Stay here for the time being, then. But the transfer weighs heavily on a Card Master's soul, so the moment you feel you can't hold out, come straight back."
"Below Sovereign, a soul kept apart from its body too long can easily lose itself inside the Corridor."
Even in the Magic Card Civilization, the power of space and time ranked among the very highest. Otherwise the Corridor could never have sped time's flow in the first place.
"Understood." Luke nodded. He knew that much, and he wasn't about to gamble with his own life.
...
"For the next stretch, I'll be inside the Corridor working out new cards. The rest of you take it easy in the Eternal Land." Luke gave Mana and the others a silent word deep in his mind, then took out the token and activated it.
In the next moment he fell back onto the bed, still as a man whose soul had left him. Sensing the change, Selene turned her gaze toward his room and murmured, "Junior brother, how long can you hold out this time?"
"So this is the Corridor of Time." A ripple of space flickered past, and Luke's figure appeared inside the Corridor, faint and half-transparent, since it was only his soul that had made the crossing.
As a man-made secret realm, the Corridor differed from an ordinary dimensional plane in more ways than one, and the most obvious was that nothing lived here, not so much as a trace. That hardly made it the lesser of the two.
Quite the opposite. From inside the Corridor, Luke felt as if he'd stepped into a river of stars. Everywhere his eyes landed, starlight glittered like something out of a dream.
"My mental energy is far livelier than usual, and my thinking's sharper too. Small details I'd never even have noticed before are being magnified here, over and over." One glance around the Corridor, and Luke turned his attention to the changes in himself. "Though a mind fired up this fast is a real strain. Staying here for long isn't realistic."
"A pity only the soul can enter. If the body could come across with it, this might ease, and I could last longer." A trace of regret colored his voice, and then he gathered his focus and set to conceiving the new cards and the new worldview.
...
"Nearly ten days now. I never expected my junior brother to last this long." In the villa on Celestial's back mountain, Selene lay sprawled across a sofa in a loose pale-black nightgown, sheer enough to hint, slipping now and again with each small movement.
There was a tangle of feeling in her voice, and her eyes stayed on Luke's door.
And that was ten days of real time. However much time his soul had lived through inside the Corridor, it could only be more, and that already went far past anything Selene had imagined.
She still remembered her own first entry into the Corridor. She'd managed roughly five days before she'd had no choice but to leave. Even so, the harvest had been a good one.
And Luke had now held out for ten. Double her record, outright.
"I just wonder what he'll come back with this time." At the thought, Selene sat up, the nightgown shifting with her. "No, this won't do. At this rate he'll catch me before I know it. I can't keep drifting along like this."
"It seems the two of you are getting on well." A voice steeped in allure rolled through the villa, and the Night Empress, Lilith, stepped unhurried out of the void, as bewitching as she had ever been.
"Teacher? What brings you here?" Hearing her, Selene turned coy without meaning to. "You nearly frightened me."
"Spare me. The moment you so much as twitch your tail, I know exactly what you're thinking." Lilith poked Selene's smooth forehead, not entirely kindly. "A while ago I caught a spark of inspiration for a card from Luke. I'm still missing one piece before the new card comes together, though, so I came out to walk it off."
As expected of you, junior brother! Understanding what had brought the Night Empress here, Selene clicked her tongue. Feeding an Undying-realm great the inspiration for a new card was something only Luke could have pulled off.
Lilith's peach-blossom eyes swept past Selene and settled at last on the closed door, and a flicker of interest entered her voice. "The Corridor of Time? You put real thought into this welcome gift. How long has Luke been inside?"
Where Luke was concerned, the Night Empress paid genuine attention. He was an original Card Master, after all, with a fair chance of being this era's once-in-ten-thousand-years power.
And most important of all, Luke was her student. Having taken him on, the Night Empress could hardly leave him to fend for himself.
"Counting today, ten days." Selene answered, then slipped in a question of her own. "Teacher, your first time in the Corridor, how long did you stay?"
"Ten days?" Lilith went still for a beat, then lifted an elegant hand and pinched Selene's small cheek. "Girl. What mischief are you plotting now?"
"Nothing of the sort. I'm just curious. After all, my own first time, I only made it five days." Selene pouted.
The two of them had been together a long while, and it was only in front of the Night Empress that Selene ever showed this girlish side, so unlike her everyday self.
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