When I got back to Mundus, it was another late morning for our party. The others had obviously been up for a bit and Adra had convinced Ylva and Sigmir to go out hunting with her. It was a good idea, while we had enough supplies to last us a while, the dried jerky and hard tack were obviously made to make them last, not to make them taste good. I was reasonably sure that there was cardboard that was more edible, at least easier to eat and potentially more tasty as well.

It also meant that Rai was the only one left in the area when I got back. They had packed up the camp around me, reducing the footprint we were having as much as possible. We had decided that we would treat the centaurs as hostile forces, avoiding them as much as possible, just in case they actually wanted to do us harm.

“Rai, good morning. Did you do your forms already?” I asked, after getting up and stretching, working out the few kinks my body had developed over the night.

“Good morning, Master. No, not yet. I’ve had a strange feeling when experimenting with my shadow-shift and have been trying to make sense of it. Without success, so far, but I’ll keep trying.” he answered, standing up as he got the idea that I wanted him to move.

“Good. Come, I’ve got a few new forms for us to train.” I told him and began to warm up, not wanting to damage myself needlessly. Rai joined in, following me through a series of easy stretches and exercises, designed to limber the body for what was to come. From the warm-up, I went into the easiest series of stretches Mrs. Wu had shown me. It was still something I had to work on with my physical body, but not to the point that I’d hurt myself if I did them carefully. Rai watched for a moment, before starting to copy me, or at least he was trying to. It turned out that, while he was faster and stronger than the body I had outside of Mundus and even slightly more agile than my Avatar was, he was not as flexible.

It made me wonder if there were hidden attributes, of if I would be able to train my Avatar’s flexibility and how Pantheon Entertainment was handling that. I doubted they’d give out attributes for normal training, not with the slim amount one got from levelling up. I also had to consider that I had never gained a single point, despite the training I had been doing with Sigmir, Adra and Rai on a regular basis, not to mention the fact that we’d been travelling by foot for months, which should increase either Endurance or Agility, depending how you measured things like that. There was an advantage to training, one I hadn’t just observed when looking at myself but also when looking at Rai and his progress since I had started training him.

But there was no reflection of that in the Attributes shown in the character-screen, making me wonder if there was any way to view those ‘hidden’ stats. They had to exist, in order for the game to function as it did, at least according to everything I knew about computers and computing.

I had to hide a grin when Rai started to struggle with the movements, trying his best to keep up, but somewhat failing. It made me wonder if I was enjoying seeing him suffer in a strange sort of retaliation for the suffering Mrs. Wu had put me through, or if maybe the old adage that misery loves company was proving true once again.

I let him struggle for some time, moving through the exercises which slowly became strenuous to me, while watching him move, before stopping and actually teaching him, instead of simply letting him flounder around, trying to copy me and suffering for it. Some of the movements, I had to adapt on the fly for his different physiology, not just because he was a beastman with a different body-structure but also because he was male, with all the differences that made in a body.

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We continued a little longer, before I let him move on to the normal form-training he was doing every day, practising the basics for fighting with two blades, the movements that had to be trained to a level that you could do them in your sleep. I had been doing them for years and still went through the basic forms every day, just to keep myself sharp.

But for now, I continued the strange forms Mrs. Wu had shown me, even if the progress I made with my Avatar didn’t translate into higher flexibility in the real world, knowing how it felt and how to move in the form, those mental experiences would translate over. Knowing that there was no way my normal armour would stretch in the ways needed for those movements, I considered for a moment how to make do. The solutions seemed to both be obvious and another useful way to train myself, I created a thin layer of opaque ice, right around my body, using the “diamond dust”-rune. Or maybe calling it Ice would be wrong, the tiny particles of diamond dust only adhered to each other while keeping their relative positions. It posed less resistance to me, moving than being in water, while keeping me from being naked. The only downside was that even I felt a little chilly wearing it, but I had a feeling that once I was moving through the strenuous forms, I would warm up quite quickly.

I wondered if some of the forms had an actual purpose, other than making someone suffer, I couldn’t divine a reason why I would ever want to support my body on one arm behind my back while having both feet behind my head. Other than maybe some very strange and rather unique sex-acts but it felt like a lot of effort for such flimsy reasons. It was something I had been unable to do in the real world, but on Mundus, it seemed that my strengthened body allowed me to do so, causing Rai to stop in his movements, looking at me with a mix of fear and wonder. Maybe he was afraid that I’d ask him to join me in those exercises, a feeling I could fully understand.

“That looks…” I heard Adra’s voice from nearby, out of my sight. “interesting.” she finished, obviously at a loss for better words. I decided to show off a bit, even if I needed to use magic for it, and manipulated the “diamond dust”-shell I was wearing while pushing off with my arm, allowing me to exert a lot more force than physiologically possible from my current position. It allowed me to launch myself up, apparently just using the arm behind my back, high enough to unfurl my legs from behind my head and land on my feet without obvious effort. The disbelieving look on their faces, especially of Rai and Adra, was well worth the effort, even if I deliberately affected a nonchalant air. Sigmir, on the other hand, had a quite different look on her face, one that sent just the right shivers down my body, shivers that had nothing to do with the cold material around me. Maybe there was a point to the exercises after all.

The others had managed to bring down a rather large hog and had yet to fully process it. Just from looking at the state of the carcass, I knew that we’d be here for an hour or two, giving me more than enough time to finish my exercises and relax afterwards. But first, I wanted to see how far Rai had progressed with his Bladework.

After taking a moment to dismiss the shell of diamond dust around me, I dressed in my usual armour. When I wrapped the cloak with my frozen shuttles around me, I noticed that it was getting a little warm, making me realise that unless I wanted to go around naked, I’d have to start looking into some lighter clothes. What I was wearing had served me quite well in the cold temperatures of the North but the combination of travelling south-west and the change of seasons conspired into making me sweat.

But when I started thinking about lighter clothes, I quickly realised that just lighter clothes wouldn’t be sufficient, at least not once spring was taking hold. At that point, I’d likely feel as if I was in a hot desert, which was a rather unpleasant idea. I’d have to look into either enchanting my clothes or maybe some sort of permanent cooling-spell, maybe some sort of icy cold mist that I could wrap around me, or I’d be in for a very unpleasant time. Or I might have to convince the others to travel during the night, that would at least spare me the heat of the sun.

Shaking my head, I walked back to Rai, drawing my blades as I went.

“Come, Student, show me what you’ve got.” I challenged, grinning as he took up his stance, before launching myself at him.