Everything had to be balanced.
Fang Zheng's current problem lay precisely in that regard.
Although Sakura and the other Magical Girls seemed to live easy, happy lives in their world, they still had duties to bear and Trials to face as Magical Girls.
If Sakura failed, everyone connected to the Clow Cards would lose their memories of "the person they loved most."
If Nanoha failed, she would be left half-paralyzed—or perhaps never be able to fly through the skies again for the rest of her life...
Only by overcoming all those Trials had they ultimately gained complete mastery of a Magical Girl's power. Naturally, everything was fine if they succeeded, but if they failed, the situation would immediately become something entirely different.
The issue now was that what Magical Girls gained was completely disproportionate to what they gave. Take Momoe Nagisa, for example. Her wish had merely been to let her seriously ill mother eat a cheesecake, yet she had ended up having to make a contract to become a Magical Girl and step into a cruel world to fight?
Anyone normal would find that unbelievable.
Yet QB had done exactly that.
Not only that, QB's kind used the energy produced by that imbalance for themselves.
Put bluntly, they were more like unscrupulous merchants. They "bought" Magical Girls at a low price, then let the world balance out the "cost" in the middle, while QB's kind harvested the energy generated by that balance.
To put it more plainly, even if Momoe Nagisa had truly made a contract with QB to fulfill that wish and become a Magical Girl who fought, even if she herself gave it no thought, the world would surely have silently "reimbursed" her for what she should have received in the future.
For instance, after eating the