Huh?
Come and eat!
Not long after, Dark carried a box stuffed full of materials back to his bedroom.
He took out all three portions of material and sorted them carefully by type.
Most of the materials for the [Zoo] were fairly ordinary, but two of them—though not core ingredients—were absolutely necessary and extremely rare.
Those two materials were hard to come by even within St. Marian's Academy, let alone outside it.
Dark hadn't done any market research himself, so this was just his best guess.
But judging from Claire's tone, he wasn't far off.
It was entirely possible that once these three portions were used up, there simply wouldn't be any more.
…
It was too late in the night, and though Dark itched to get started, he didn't begin the experiment right away.
He slept soundly through the night and went back to class the next day.
Alvit arrived at the small Armament Forging classroom at eight-thirty as usual.
Dark, Diana, and Aurora had all arrived early as well.
Alvit opened with, "We only have an hour today, so raise any questions you have quickly. I'll be away often over the next few days, so our lessons will be paused for a while."
Dark had already expected this, so he wasn't surprised.
Aurora hadn't really understood much of the material to begin with, so she wasn't particularly concerned either.
Only Diana let out an alarmed gasp, glancing around as if she'd seen a ghost.
Alvit watched her with a faint, knowing smile and said, "Even though the lessons are pausing, you're still welcome to come here to review what you've learned, or to run forging experiments. I'll have Jasmine keep this lab's material stores fully stocked."
Diana blinked, then brightened. "So that means I can still come to class?"
Alvit nodded. "If you have questions, you can ask Dark, or have him collect them for me and bring them along when I come back to the estate."
Diana immediately planted both hands on the table and sat up perfectly straight.
These past few days of "summer tutoring" had made her fall in love with lessons.
If the "summer tutoring" ended now, she'd not only lose her legitimate excuse to visit the Duke's estate, she'd also be dragged off every day to practice with sword and spear.
But what girl actually enjoys swinging swords and spears around?
Diana might have liked it once, but by now she'd developed the tastes of a perfectly ordinary girl.
Wasn't it so much nicer to sit in this classroom making clothes with her little cousin and forging armaments?
Sure, all she'd managed so far was failure after failure, but once her skill reached a certain level, maybe she'd break through some theoretical wall.
Besides, she'd already gotten a bit of a feel for the "Three Flowers Technique"—give her a few more days and she might actually learn it.
Forget forging "Armament Cards" for now—surely she could manage a few "Dress-up Card" at least?
Once she mastered the forging method for Dress-up Card, she could make some "sisters' outfits," some "couples' outfits"…
Diana was happily lost in thought when she noticed Dark pacing back and forth between the podium and the desks, firing off question after question like an avalanche.
Meanwhile she, with no questions of her own to ask, just sat there feeling like an idiot.
The hour passed quickly.
Dark set down his notebook with some reluctance and saw Alvit out of the estate.
From here on, both Alvit and Claire would be extremely busy.
And he needed to pick up the pace.
…
The morning after Alvit left, during second period.
Dark went on with his forging experiments for "Driver Armament."
He still failed, but by cross-referencing his notes, he finally pinned down some of the problem points—a real sense of things clicking into place.
By the time he came back to himself, lunchtime had already crept up on him.
Magical Transmutation experiments always pulled him into a kind of trance-like absorption.
The joy of creating something from nothing beat building with blocks or assembling model kits by a mile.
So after lunch he headed straight back to the classroom to keep experimenting.
This time, though, he switched topics.
It was time to try forging the [Zoo]!
He only had three portions of material, but not every failure burned through a whole portion, so the margin for error wasn't as slim as it looked on paper.
After explaining the situation to Diana and Aurora, Dark began his first attempt.
The [Zoo] belonged to the Field Card category, and Field Cards demanded a higher standard of "True Projection" technique than Equipment Cards did, which in turn meant far stricter requirements on the quality of the Manjusaka potion.
The potion quality Dark had used for his earlier Armament Forging simply didn't meet the bar.
So his first task was to break through on the quality of the Manjusaka potion.
That had been one of the problems he'd never been able to crack—but after Claire's late-night tutoring, he finally had a lead.
Manjusaka was a blood-red flower, said in legend to bloom on the far shore of the Underworld.
The dead, wandering through that empty realm, would sometimes stumble upon a stretch of that vivid crimson.
Once drawn close, the Manjusaka would transform into whatever they most craved, most longed for, most could never touch—luring them into a dreamlike stupor until, lost in that intoxicating vision, they were slowly consumed without ever realizing it.
The Manjusaka potion took its name from this flower precisely because it shared that same power of "transformation."
But the traditional recipe for the potion, as it turned out, contained not a single trace of actual Manjusaka.
It was named "Manjusaka," yet held no Manjusaka at all.
So to break through on quality, he needed to work out a substitute for Manjusaka itself.
The old method had blended multiple ingredients together to achieve the "transformation" effect.
This time, he planned to first brew a potion called "Phantasm Elixir," then use that as a base to further refine the Manjusaka potion.
As the name suggested, the Phantasm Elixir was a potion that induced hallucinations in whoever drank it.
Just the experiment to improve the Manjusaka potion alone ate up a full three hours.
But when the results finally came in, Dark couldn't help but smile, a deep sense of satisfaction settling somewhere inside him.
"If I drank this, could I dream of whatever I wanted?" Diana leaned in and sniffed at it.
Dark quickly pulled the finished vial out of her reach and warned her firmly, "Manjusaka is highly addictive—it's contraband among contraband. You can't touch it, not even a drop, understand?"
Diana smacked her lips. "Yes, ma'am, Diana's being good."
Dark reached out and pinched her soft little cheek, then laughed. "Good girl. Once I finish forging the [Zoo], I'll take you all somewhere fun."
"Somewhere fun? Will there be good food?" Diana's eyes lit up.
Dark smiled. "Probably, yeah."
With that, he went back to preparing for the [Zoo] forging.
Beyond sharing the "True Projection" element with Equipment Cards, the [Zoo] also shared the "spell" element with Magic Cards.
Which meant he needed to use the Magic Guide Language to write out his own personal [Zoo] incantation!
The deeper Dark got into the material, the more astonished he was that Claire had managed to develop a Field Card like the [Zoo] at all.
And it wasn't just the [Zoo]—Claire had gone on to develop even higher-tier versions: [Animal Kingdom] and [Paradise]!
Dark had firsthand experience of just how powerful and useful [Paradise] was.
His own goal going forward was to study the [Zoo] and the even higher-tier [Animal Kingdom] in order to develop a Field Card of his very own.
…
Field Card spells and Magic Card spells were roughly comparable in depth, but Field Card spells tended to run much longer in breadth.
So while a Field Card's spell wasn't necessarily more esoteric, it was always going to be far longer.
When Dark first tried writing it out, he found the [Zoo] incantation was nearly six times the length of "Fusion."
As he revised and refined it further, the length doubled again, bringing the [Zoo] incantation to twelve times the length of "Fusion"!
After his late-night discussion with Claire last night resolved the final sticking point, the [Zoo] incantation's length reached a full thirteen times that of "Fusion"!
Given the limits of his knowledge, he didn't fully understand the underlying theory of the [Zoo] incantation, and mostly relied on "formulas," writing it out in a fairly formulaic way.
Whether the incantation he'd written would actually work still needed careful testing, followed by fine-tuning based on various measured values, before he'd arrive at an incantation that fit him perfectly.
Claire had already taught him the detailed testing method, but it was every bit as tedious as the rest.
Keeping his patience up, he spent a full three hours getting the incantation adjusted just right.
By then dusk had fallen. Diana had already been reluctantly hauled home by Camilla, and Aurora had left the classroom too, off to attend to her own business.
Dark spotted DemiDevimon peeking around the doorway and waved it over.
DemiDevimon immediately flitted over, delighted, landing on the edge of the experiment table and settling down to peer curiously at the array of bottles and jars covering it.
As he prepared for the formal experiment, Dark asked casually, "How's the studying going?"
DemiDevimon launched right into a rapid-fire report.
The Magic Guide Spirits' learning progress had turned out to be considerably faster than Dark had expected.
The most diligent and clever among them had already mastered the fundamentals completely!
And the star representative of that group was none other than DemiDevimon itself!
At least, that's how DemiDevimon told it, chin tilted up proudly.
Besides DemiDevimon, Gatomon, Sylveon, Eevee, and the Magic Guide Scribe also belonged to that first tier.
The second tier, a bit behind in progress, consisted of Meowth, Leomon, Miltank, and Shuckle.
The third tier was Ditto, Hawlucha, and Popplio.
The rest—Vampire Young Lady, Phoenix Maiden, Misdreavus, Moon God Spirit, Blue-Eyes Baby Dragon, and Honedge—made up the fourth tier.
Trash Slime sat in a category all its own, dead last.
Vampire Young Lady and Phoenix Maiden, the two who most needed to master the fundamentals, had disappointing results.
The former kept getting distracted, while the latter's intellect had only recently awakened and had already picked up bad habits from her surroundings.
Still, with Ms. Cook keeping strict discipline, the two of them couldn't get too far out of line.
Dark praised DemiDevimon's hard work, then added, "Around the middle of the month, let's have the teachers organize a progress test."
DemiDevimon: "Ah—ah?"
Dark said lightly, "Depending on the rankings, I'll hand out different amounts of little red flowers as rewards. Since you're in the first tier, you'd better fight for a good spot."
DemiDevimon startled, shooting straight up. "I'll go back now!"
Then it spread its wings and bolted off in a flurry.
Dark couldn't help but laugh, then walked over and locked the classroom door from the inside.
Then he began the formal forging experiment.
The first attempt failed without any suspense at all, six minutes in.
Undeterred, Dark pressed on.
The second attempt made it all the way to the actual writing of the incantation, only to fall apart over a single misspelled glyph.
Dark drew a deep breath, remembering the miserable experience of copying out an essay again and again just to submit one without a single error.
This part, honestly, tested his composure more than any other step.
Once he realized his own mindset had slipped, he paused, reviewed the incantation from the start, and began again.
Right up until dinnertime, he still hadn't succeeded.
Tonight, neither Alvit nor Claire came home to eat.
Dark gathered Aurora and the Magic Guide Spirits at one table, checking on everyone's progress over the meal while unwinding a little.
The repeated failures had already eaten through a full portion of his materials.
What remained was just barely enough to forge two [Zoo] cards.
If he assumed he'd eventually succeed in producing one [Zoo], that left only a single portion's worth of room for further mistakes.
Dinner gave him exactly the breathing room he needed to reflect.
In the end he decided to pause the experiment, spend the evening reviewing and analyzing the day's failures instead.
Sure enough, when he resumed the experiment the next day, everything went far more smoothly.
Dark powered through in one unbroken run, completing every step and forging a finished Magic Guide Card!
He wiped the grime off the card's surface and found an open, roofless zoo pattern etched across its face.
Within the illustrated zoo, animals moved in faint, shadowy outlines.
Delighted, Dark immediately grabbed a pair of tweezers and picked up the Magic Guide Card.
But halfway through lifting it, the card's surface suddenly burst out with an intensely chaotic light.
Startled, Dark dropped both tweezers and card at once, and the three chakras inside him spun up at full speed, spreading their released qi through his entire body.
Then he lunged backward fast.
An instant later, two figures cut in between him and the experiment table.
From that Magic Guide Card, twisted structures came clawing their way out in a frenzy!
The structures swelled with terrifying speed, as if forcing themselves out through some impossibly narrow gap.
They flung the lab equipment aside and lunged outward in every direction at once.
But Diana and Aurora both threw their fists at the same instant, and the surging qi combined with their innate divine strength shattered the onrushing structures into dust in a single blow!
The structures scattered before they'd even finished taking shape.
Magic power burst apart like fireworks.
The classroom settled back into silence.
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