Nero raised his hand to pick up the first ingredient, and then paused. He had just been thinking about how amazing Silas' passive was for card crafting, but that is as far as his thoughts went. But when he moved his hand Nero experienced a whole new function of the ability.
He could determine the angle of movement, velocity, acceleration, deceleration and momentum of his entire arm. More importantly, the information was processed in a completely natural way that was easily comprehensible.
To be fair, the human brain already calculated all of these things on its own. An example would be trying to hit a moving target with a ball. Not only would the brain have to calculate the velocity, path and acceleration or deceleration of the target, but also that of the ball that would be thrown.
Consistent practice improved hand eye coordination and many other functions that the brain naturally took care of, but there was still a barrier between consciously knowing something and your subconscious knowing something.
But Arithmetic Perception seemed to break that barrier in an extremely natural way. So, when Nero moved his hand he was both consciously and subconsciously aware that it moved at around 1 m/s (metre per second). The same was true for all the other parameters as well.
Nero tried again, and this time, he moved both his hands. It was interesting to learn that unless he consciously chose to do so differently, both his hands had the exact same movement speed within two decimal points.
He took out a random piece of paper from his bag and crumpled it, learning an interesting amount of information about the paper. He learned exactly how much pressure it took before the paper began to crumple, what its weight was while holding it, its air resistance and more. He then threw it between his hands and was thoroughly amazed at the information feedback he was getting.
He changed his mind. Silas' innate ability was not just perfect for card crafting, this ability was overpowered! He could not even imagine the kind of things he would learn if he used his own innate skill while Arithmetic Perception was active, or if he trained with his spear with it.
Heck, even during an actual fight he could see how this skill would help one identify weaknesses or flaws in an opponent's stance or movement.
The key factor was not the information feedback, but how natural the information seemed. Normally, having so much extra data would distract Nero from whatever it was he was doing, but that was not happening here.
It was fascinating, and Nero decided to test the card out more when he was training with Footer on his innate ability. But, as beneficial as the card might be, for now he would have to restrain himself from using it too much, at least until he made the radix Augmentation card. That was his first priority.
The base of the card was made from plant fibre amalgam, but just saying that was misleading. The fibres needed were from specific kinds of plants only, and needed to be collected from the leaf, stem and seed before being mixed into the amalgam. The extraction method for fibres were also different for all three.
Whether it was fortunate, or unfortunate, Nero did not have a licence to handle plants so it was impossible for him to actually get his hands on such plants and extract the fibres himself. That is where Silas came in.
Silas was able to purchase pre-extracted and well preserved fibres for his use, though these ingredients could not be preserved for more than a few days with their quality dropping with each and every hour.
Technically this allowed Nero to skip some steps which would have been complicated to learn and master, but the cost was a loss in quality of the ingredient. Not only would this make the final fusion harder, it would affect the durability of the card.
This was merely the first obstacle in the prelude to the very first layer of the card. Each layer of the card presented its own obstacles.
Nero extracted the prepared fibres from their sealed containers and placed them in a stone mortar in the proper ratios. He added exactly ten drops of a serum that would help the fibres hold together, before he began crushing the fibres using a pellet.
Once done, he extracted the paste and placed it in a rectangular tray with exact dimensions of a card and put it in a small heating compartment where the amalgam would be baked for 10 minutes.
While that happened, he began working on the other ingredients that he needed to prepare. Nero had a steady hand, which helped a lot, but even so, if he had been doing all of this without the aid of Arithmetic Perception then the task would have been infinitely more difficult.
The way Nero saw it, even if Silas never gained a single recipe his entire life, he could still be massively successful only selling his innate cards.
It took Nero about fifty minutes just to get all the ingredients ready. Surprisingly, he had avoided messing any of them up - as far as he could tell. After placing everything on a table in front of him, he once more reviewed the steps in his mind and then began.
Nero moved very methodically, first setting the base and then creating each subsequent layer atop it. Sometimes the layer needed to be created first and then added to the stack, while other times the ingredients needed to be placed atop and then treated with various chemicals. The process was complicated but Nero never paused, or in fact, even reduced his speed.
After all, with Arithmetic Perception, he could maintain the perfect speed for his body and mind to work together.
Another thirty minutes passed, and Nero managed to complete the entire stack. He did not feel like he messed up, so the only thing now was to fuse the layers using aether. This final step was a bewildering one, not because of how it could be either hard or easy depending on the recipe.
It was because, for some unknown reason, even without an actual spell, it achieved a magical effect, which was to fuse the various layers into a card with a complete spell model. Many believed that this step in itself should be considered a spell, but humans were essentially incapable of consciously casting spells. That was the whole reason they relied on cards.
Whatever the secret was, it was buried in the recipe itself.
It was also a step Silas had managed to do using an aether shard, and Nero himself had failed countless times already in the past two days. Before doing the final step, Nero channelled some aether through his hand to see if he could get a feel for his aether manipulation through Arithmetic Perception. He could.
So with everything ready, he placed his finger on the stack and channelled his aether into it. He felt the cards absorbing his aether, and saw the size of the stack decreasing. The fact that it hadn't immediately burnt out was a sign of Nero's tremendous growth.
With bated breath, he continued to feed the stack his aether, ensuring that he did not speed up or slow down. Everything seemed to be going in the right direction.
Then a corner of the card caught fire, and Nero knew he failed. He lifted his finger and watched in silence and the crimson flame spread over the entire stack and reduced all his hard work to ash.
Nero had to admit, he felt a little disappointment. Or maybe a lot. Although he had come prepared, knowing that he would most likely fail in his first attempt, Silas' card had given him hope. That hope is what allowed him to go further than he had ever gone before, and it is also what caused him disappointment now.
The problem was, he could not tell where he went wrong. He took out a copy and noted down all the changes he observed during the fusion process. When passing on the recipe his father hadn't made any special comments regarding the fusion, so Nero assumed that it was more his fault than some special requirements of the recipe.
Once he was done, he put the copy away and began packing everything. He did not have the time for another attempt. He would have to wait until next week to try again. In the meantime he would consult Ms. Zim as well as Silas for where he went wrong.
When Nero exited his school building, he discovered that the rain had finally stopped, and the cloud cover was beginning to disperse. Faint streaks of sunlight were passing through where the cover had thinned enough, creating random spots of silver - since it couldn't really be called a silver lining yet.
With a feeling of mild bitterness in his heart, Nero walked back to his dorm under the beautiful cloudy sky. What right did it have of looking so enchanting after nearly 24 hours of pure darkness? Nero did not know.