"There are things like that all over the place."
Everyone looked at each other. All over the place?
If those were really cards, how could they be all over the place?
Could this be a waste card dump?
Chen Mu shook his head, denying that absurd idea.
He had seen waste card recycling places, and those places were certainly full of cards.
But this was the desolate jungle, where wild beasts ran amok. How could there be a waste recycling station there?
Moreover, from the time indicated by the half-card fragment, there hadn't been any waste recycling stations.
The cards of ancient times weren't as developed as they were today, and they were limited to a very small number of people.
That news was certainly sensational for Chen Mu and the rest.
Chen Mu then said, "Lead the way."
The warrior gave an excited "hey" and led Chen Mu and the rest toward the place he had discovered.
Even Alphonso had set off with everyone when he heard the news.
The party quickly arrived at the place the warrior had mentioned.
Chen Mu stopped and looked all around.
There was a clear difference between the vegetation in that area and the surroundings. There wasn't a single towering tree that could be seen everywhere along the road, and all they could see was knee-high weeds.
This more or less made everyone more cautious. In the jungle, any place with obvious characteristics often meant that there was unusual danger.
Without Chen Mu's instruction, Xi Weide lightly waved his hand, and the warriors behind him immediately spread out to both sides, entering the knee-high weeds, their expressions full of vigilance.
Wei-ah was calmly at Chen Mu's side, not one step away.
Bo Wen and Cheng Ying had activated their energy cloaks and were also on guard.
"It's all over here!"
The warrior pushed aside the weeds on the ground, and Chen Mu could clearly see that there were quite a few similar card fragments mixed in the mud. If he hadn't pushed aside the weeds, he wouldn't have been able to find them.
He casually picked one up. It wasn't as well preserved as the last one, but it hadn't been corroded where it had been broken.
Those cards had been violently destroyed!
Chen Mu immediately came to that conclusion. At the same time, Bo Wen took his gaze off the card fragment in his hand, showing an expression of surprise and doubt.
Cheng Ying was no exception. She had never thought that she would see so many card fragments in the jungle.
Judging from the age of those cards, they had experienced countless changes over the years.
What did this place look like in the distant ancient times?
As far as the eye could see, apart from weeds and weeds, there were no other conspicuous objects.
But the area where only weeds grew and no trees grew was extremely large, much larger than the largest training fields Chen Mu had ever seen.
Chen Mu also discovered something special. The area was very flat, without any rise or fall.
At this moment, someone suddenly shouted, "There's something here!"
Chen Mu was startled out of his thoughts to see a soldier standing in the middle of the area, waving his arms and shouting.
Everyone's enthusiasm was immediately ignited, and they excitedly ran towards the soldier's location.
There was a small slightly arched mound of earth, covered with weeds. Following the direction of the warrior's finger, one could surprisingly see a trace of metal protruding from the soil.
Metal, this was the unique luster of metal!
This discovery made everyone excited, and they began to clear away the soil and weeds.
Soon, more and more metal parts were exposed.
When all the soil and weeds were cleared away, the metal device was finally revealed in its entirety in front of everyone.
It was a metal device shaped like a round table, with a diameter of three meters. It was a thick metal disk, supported by a similarly thick metal cylinder.
The bottom of the metal cylinder was all the way into the soil, and no one knew how long it was.
The entire metal device was suffused with a gloomy metallic luster, which wasn't conspicuous, but showed a kind of hardness that could withstand the passage of time.
Everyone was attracted by that unique metal device.
Everything there was so out of place with its surroundings. The unique terrain, the unique vegetation, the scattered card fragments in the soil, and that finely made metal device.
"Pretty good level of production," Alfonso commented.
Chen Mu couldn't help but raise his head to look at Alfonso. It wasn't easy to get a word of praise from Alfonso.
Alfonso was modest and eager to learn when it came to cards, but he could only be described as arrogant when it came to metal-making, often dismissive of other people's work. Even Chen Mu had been ridiculed by him.
But his skill in metal-making was in direct proportion to his temper, and he was the most brilliant Chen Mu had ever seen.
"This is an alloy. It must be a cold-phase tri-alloy."
Alfonso spoke in a very professional tone, though apart from him, no one understood what he was talking about.
Chen Mu's gaze fell onto the surface of the disk.
There were many lines carved on the surface of the disk. They crisscrossed, looking messy and seeming to contain some sort of order.
For such a metal round table to appear there, it would certainly have some special use.
The lines engraved on it definitely had their own uses.
Chen Mu suddenly noticed the edge of the disk, where the lines formed a pictorial structure that looked familiar to him.
No, it wasn't just familiar; it was a recursive composition!
That discovery made Chen Mu very excited!
The recursive composition was one of the basic compositions of card compositions, and it would appear in nearly 90 percent of card compositions.
It was one of the compositions Chen Mu was most familiar with. When he had been making one-star power-cards, it was one of the few things he could study.
As a matter of fact, his research in that area was indeed somewhat different from that of other people.
That recursive composition was a kind of variant, and he had seen it on a one-star power-card with a different composition.
He had collected 12 different kinds of one-star power-cards, and he had done a lot of research into those recursive compositions in order to reduce the cost, which now seemed negligible.
That kind of recursive composition was one of the more efficient ones, and he had used it as a reference.
Even though what he had come into contact with later were much more sophisticated knowledge and more difficult compositions, the card composition he was most familiar with was the most basic, so basic that almost no one had studied the recursive composition!
He quickly found a few recursive compositions among the lines and patterns carved on the disk, which made him more and more convinced that the metal device in the shape of a round table was something like a card appliance.
If it were said that there was only one recursive composition, it could still be a coincidence. But it certainly couldn't be a coincidence if there were several of them at the same time.
But apart from those recursive compositions, the other lines looked very messy, without the slightest bit of the elegance and fluidity of a card composition pattern.
Perhaps in the eyes of ordinary people, the composition on a card was nothing more than a strange pattern made up of a bunch of lines. But in the eyes of a card master, they could determine at a glance whether or not the pattern in front of them was a card composition, even if they might not recognize the composition.
After a long period of experience, card masters would develop a unique feeling, like a sense of language or a sense of drawing.
Chen Mu had that feeling!
In that era where the cost of making cards was rising day by day, there weren't many card masters with rich experience, but Chen Mu was undoubtedly one of them.
But the lines and patterns on the metal disk in front of him puzzled Chen Mu, because he couldn't tell whether those patterns were card compositions or not. It was the first time he had encountered such a situation!
Everyone else's gazes were focused on Chen Mu. Among them, the one most likely to crack the riddle of the disk was undoubtedly Chen Mu.
Chen Mu, who was so focused, didn't notice everyone's gazes.
The lines on the round table looked very messy and messy, which was dazzling to look at.
Chen Mu wasn't impatient, and he was quite patient. That was one of the few strong points he thought he had in the process of learning cards.
He might as well use a kind of stupid method.
As everyone knew, all card compositions had a starting stroke and a finishing stroke.
The so-called starting stroke was the first point in the writing, and the finishing stroke was the last stroke before completion.
A brilliant card master would be able to perfectly blend the starting stroke and the finishing stroke, which was especially obvious the higher the grade of the card. As for some of the card masters' exclusive cards, they were made so that it was hard to tell them apart.
That way, they could protect the cards they made from being imitated.
If one were to say that the lines and patterns on the disk were really compositions, then there would certainly be a starting stroke and a finishing stroke.
Chen Mu wasn't so arrogant as to think he could find the starting stroke and the finishing stroke among those messy lines and patterns.
Perhaps in the eyes of Cheng Ying and Bo Wen, a card master with an A level of contribution was already pretty awesome. But in Chen Mu's eyes, he was nothing more than a half-baked card master with a little bit of luck.
Of course, that was apart from one-star power cards, where he had plenty of self-confidence.
Chen Mu couldn't, but he believed there was someone who could — Alphonso.
Alphonso's knowledge of cards was appalling, but his metalworking skills were second to none.
Those lines that could be compositions were engraved on the metal disk.
If they were carvings, then the starting stroke and the finishing stroke would certainly leave different marks. He couldn't find them, but Alphonso should be able to.
Chen Mu was just glad that those lines were engraved on the metal disk. If they had been drawn on a card, then he really wouldn't have been able to do anything about it.
Chen Mu told Alphonso in detail what he was thinking.
Alphonso muttered to himself for a moment, and then nodded, "I'll try."
Under everyone's gaze, Alphonso stuck his finger into the lines, and slowly moved it along the inside of the lines.
The others, including Chen Mu, all held their breath and stared with wide eyes, not daring to breathe.
There was only the rustling of the grass in the air.