61: Chapter 61: The Birth of the Rainbow Card!

Li Qingyue did not participate in the daily bickering between the human and the cat.

She was already calculating in her mind.

Her Rank 9 Mental Power was deducing the adaptation system within her mind at a terrifying speed.

Deputy Commander Xiao Hongyan. Core Law: Blazing Heaven Flame.

Law characteristics: High density, high burst, comes with purification attributes. The flames can incinerate all impurities.

Optimal plan for the Magical Girl form adaptation:

The combat suit will be changed to a flame-red and dark-gold color scheme, retaining the high-temperature properties of the Flame Law.

The exclusive weapon will be changed from scissors to a Flame Halberd—a polearm capable of unleashing flame shockwaves.

Exclusive magic will link with the Blazing Heaven Flame. After transformation, the coverage range of the Flame Law will expand by at least three times.

Background BGM during transformation—

"No BGM," Su Bai suddenly interjected. "Deputy Commander Xiao said that she looks good in anything, and BGM would just make her feel embarrassed. Just give her a mute mode; she can just start setting things on fire before the fight starts."

"...Are you sure?"

"I'm sure. I was there when she said it."

One hour later.

The blank spaces on the fifth page were filled with dense, customized plans.

Combat suit style, weapon type, magic characteristics, Flame Law amplification rate. Even the shape of the heels on the high heels was noted. Thick heels, suitable for battlefield dashing, not thin heels. Su Bai insisted that this was determined by Deputy Commander Xiao Hongyan's temperament.

Li Qingyue reviewed the five pages of blueprints from beginning to end.

Then she closed her eyes.

Took a deep breath.

Opened them.

"Su Bai."

"Hm?"

"This design—"

She paused, as if searching for a sufficiently accurate word.

"Is the most ingenious card-making plan I have ever seen in my life. None compare."

Su Bai was just preparing to be humble for a moment.

Li Qingyue raised her hand to interrupt her.

"I am not talking about your Spatial Circuit. The Seven-Axis Circuit becomes secondary in front of the twelve axes. I am talking about this. Kyubey itself."

Her finger pointed at the smiling cat-like creature in the very center of the blueprint.

"It is a hub capable of simultaneously interfering with the four law dimensions of space-time, causality, soul, and concept."

"It does nothing. It only observes."

"But observation itself is interference."

"Interference itself is control."

"From beginning to end, this card stomps the principle of equivalent exchange into the ground. It is a brand-new law engine."

She looked up, her crimson eyes burning with a light Su Bai had never seen before.

"If you can observe, you can interfere; if you can interfere, you can control."

"This concept—how did you come up with it?"

Su Bai scratched her cheek.

What could she say?

Say that some old thief named Gen Urobuchi came up with it?

"Just... watch more anime."

Li Qingyue did not press further.

She no longer had the spare brain capacity to press further.

All of her attention was focused on the five pages of blueprints in front of her. Her Rank 9 Mental Power was dismantling the structural logic of every circuit with a near-violent efficiency.

"Begin card creation."

She said those four words.

Then the entire card-making room changed.

The lights did not change.

It was the space itself that had been rewritten.

The circuit nodes composed of stars above the dome began to light up one by one. They ignited layer by layer from the periphery to the center, unlocking in a certain extremely precise sequence, like a seal with the galaxy as its lock core being opened layer by layer.

Directly above the card-making table, a pale golden pillar of light descended from the sky.

Dense golden runes appeared within the pillar of light. Su Bai recognized a few of them; they were the imprints of the universal balance's Truth Law. But most were high-level runes she had never seen before, each rotating at an extremely slow speed.

[Su Bai, the magic concentration in the room has already exceeded your safety threshold. But the Sanctuary Blessing within your body is automatically filtering out the harmful wavelengths.]

Kyubey's voice carried a rare hint of seriousness.

[Your master—is about to get serious.]

Li Qingyue stood in the very center of the light pillar.

Her long silver-white hair floated up strand by strand under the scouring of the Law light, and the hem of her deep blue robe moved without wind.

She raised her right hand.

Her five fingers splayed open.

In the same instant, the arrangement order of all the stars on the dome underwent a heaven-turning, earth-shaking change. They orbited at high speeds along the extremely complex twelve-axis tracks, with each one carving out an independent trajectory on its own plane.

Then came the materials.

A fist-sized crystal of the Nightmare Lord's resentment flew up automatically from the shelf.

There was no external force pulling it.

It was the space itself that transported it into the interior of the light pillar. Li Qingyue didn't even need to move her hands; she only needed to think, and the space would complete everything for her.

The crystal dissolved slowly in the pale golden Law light.

It did not melt into liquid.

It was dismantled into its most basic conceptual units. Countless dark purple, nearly invisible filaments peeled off from the crystal's surface, each filament being a tiny fragment of the Fear Law that the Nightmare Lord had glimpsed during its lifetime.

Li Qingyue pinched one of the filaments with two fingers.

Then, she flicked it gently toward the rotating twelve-axis tracks above the dome.

The filament was precisely delivered into the starting node of the first physical axis. In the next few tenths of a second, it ran from the beginning to the end along the track of the entire physical axis.

The Spider Emperor's silk threads followed closely behind.

The silver-white threads unfurled within the pillar of light. Space itself stretched them into fibers thinner than human hair, with the end of each fiber simultaneously anchored to different nodes on the twelve-axis tracks.

Only then did Su Bai realize why Li Qingyue could complete a Rank 9 card creation within a single day.

She was not drawing the circuits.

She was using the entire modified card-making room as an external Mental Power terminal, controlling all the nodes on the twelve axes simultaneously.

Ordinary people create cards stroke by stroke. She used the entire space to print them.

Then came the Rank 9 formless spirit sand essence.

Fifty grams of sand grains, transparent to the point of being almost non-existent, drifted out from the magic-sealing bottle.

Each grain of sand expanded and unfolded within the pillar of light, turning into palm-sized, semi-transparent mirror surfaces.

All mirror surfaces aimed simultaneously at Li Qingyue in the center of the pillar of light.

Images began to appear on the mirror surfaces. They were not reflections, but possibilities that had not yet occurred.

Su Bai saw Deputy Commander Xiao Hongyan's Magical Girl form on one of the mirror surfaces.

A combat dress with a flame-red and black-gold color scheme. She held a flame halberd taller than a person upside down in one hand. Her amber pupils were burning.

On another mirror surface was an image of the same halberd sweeping across the abyss battlefield, with flames swallowing the entire land like a tsunami.

On yet another mirror surface was Deputy Commander Xiao Hongyan's hesitation before signing the contract. An extremely tiny fluctuation in expression, occurring a few tenths of a second after she heard the word "gender-bending."

[Causality prediction.]

Kyubey's voice resounded in Su Bai's mind.

[Your master is using the formless spirit sand to simulate all future possibilities. She is filtering for the optimal contract path.]

"...You can play like this?"

[She is a 9th-tier Supreme, Su Bai. A 9th-tier Supreme in their own card-making room is a creator god.]

Su Bai did not speak.

She was witnessing a miracle that she might never see a second time in this lifetime.

The twelve-axis tracks rotated at high speed.

The Nightmare Lord's Fear Law fragments were dismantled into individual observation nodes. The Spider Emperor's silk threads wove into an interference network. The mirror surfaces of the formless spirit sand constantly adjusted the adaptation parameters of the law of causality.

All materials were consumed simultaneously.

The linear process of placing A then placing B did not exist at the Rank 9 level. All dimensions proceeded simultaneously, as if someone had taken every step of the entire card-making process, dismantled them, and then placed them into the same frame of time to be executed all at once.

This was the true strength of a Rank 9 Card Creator.

Piling up materials is the method of an amateur.

The Rank 9 battlefield is at the level of laws.

Time passed bit by bit.

Su Bai did not know how much time had passed; there were no clocks in the card-making room, and the stars on the dome showed no signs of day or night alternating.

But she saw that the card was taking shape.

The color was completely different from the first-generation version. The dark pink had been recalibrated by some higher-dimensional law, retaining the miraculous core of a Magical Girl while incorporating the sense of oppression that only Rank 9 materials possess.

Fine beads of sweat seeped out on Li Qingyue's forehead.

But she did not stop.

The rotation speed of the twelve-axis tracks was accelerating.

The light of those stars on the dome was dimming. They were injecting all the Law energy they had stored into the interior of the light pillar.

Then.

At a moment Su Bai had completely not expected.

The light.

Exploded.

It exploded inward.

All the light was sucked into that card that was taking shape. It was as if someone had compressed the brightness of an entire galaxy into a palm-sized card face.

Then.

The card fell down.

Li Qingyue reached out and caught it.

Quiet.

Absolute silence.

That card lay quietly in Li Qingyue's palm.

The card face presented a color Su Bai had never seen before.

It had nothing to do with pink, nothing to do with gold, and nothing to do with dark red.

It was a color similar to aurora flowing over an ice field. Pale purple and deep blue intertwined, as if constantly changing yet always stable. The color of causality.

In the very center of the card face was a smiling Kyubey.

A smile exactly the same as the first-generation version.

But if you stared at those red glass eyes long enough, you would have an illusion.

That cat.

Was observing you.

Then.

A golden Law light erupted from Li Qingyue's body.

It was so intense it was almost blinding. It was as if someone had stuffed an entire sun into this card-making room.

Su Bai had seen the pale golden light of the Sanctuary Blessing before, but it could not be compared to this at all.

Li Qingyue's long silver-white hair flew wildly in the golden pillar of light.

The high-level Card Creator emblems on her deep blue robe began to light up one by one. One, two, three. All the way to the ninth.

Then, beside the ninth emblem, the phantom of a tenth one appeared.

Rank 9 peak.

Not just that.

Su Bai could feel that there was a third type of Law within Li Qingyue's body.

Causality.

Space-time plus causality, the fusion of three Laws, the perfection of Rank 9 peak!