The others were quite intrigued with my story, even if I had to get rather creative how I described the events to make sense to them. None of them were stupid but what I was talking about was so far outside the scope of their world, it simply didn’t make sense. Lenore had the best chance to understand, as she was able to see and experience my memories, imperfect as human memories might be, but even with that it was alien to her.

Once I was done with my retelling we had walked and talked for most of the afternoon and it was time to make camp for the night. After a short discussion, it was decided that Rai would be responsible for cooking and Adra volunteered to help. That left Sigmir and me to our own devices, with me, unsurprisingly, ending up on her lap in short order. Once she had me where she wanted me to be, she had a few more questions about my past, questions I happily answered. Mostly, she wanted to know about past relationships, none, and my family.

That took a little longer, but I told her my story as best as I could, even giving her context to it.

I had been a miracle-child for my parents, very late in their life. My mother, when I had been sixteen, had told me that quite a few people had advised her against carrying me to term, that she, forty-six at the time, was taking a huge risk. But, both mother and father had persisted, calling me their late miracle.

For the first time, just thinking off them, made my chest feel strangely tight, as if I there was someone sitting on me. They had been great parents, doing their very best to raise me, who, in hindsight, hadn’t been the easiest child to raise. I knew that my mental peculiarities had been a challenge for them, that my mind wasn’t working the same was everyone else’s did. Thinking back, just remembering them, remembering the looks on their faces, the tone of their voice and the pressure around my chest increased, as if an iron band was being tightened. I even remembered the last time I had seen them, I had been home from University for the break. A few weeks later, I had been called and told that they had been in an accident, one of those many, stupid accidents happening every day. A long-haul driver, trying to make ends meet, at the end of his shift, had fallen asleep at the wheel and a little over thirty-tons of truck and freight had followed their motion-vector, ending with the small car my parents drove crushed by the unforgiving laws of physics.

“Shhh, love, it’s alright. Everything will be alright.” I heard Sigmir gently whisper in my ears and realised that my cheeks were wet with tears. The pressure on my chest was still there, now slowly choking me out. But Sigmir was there, so, a small part of my mind knew that I would be fine, that she would protect me.

Clinging to her chest, desperately trying to breathe, I managed to fill my nose with her familiar, calming scent, the scent that told me I would be fine. I felt her arms wrap around me, gently cradling me while I was sobbing into her chest. I had no idea what was going on, why I was feeling as if someone was choking me, but at the same time, I knew I didn’t want to leave Sigmir’s embrace.

We sat there for a while and I must have drifted off to sleep, awaking when it was fully dark, still in her arms and in our furs. Still feeling strange and out-of-sorts, I considered waking her but decided against it, instead triggering the log-out process after telling Lenore that I would be back soon.

I tried opening my eyes after logging out, panicking just a little when they didn’t instantly cooperate. I needed to use my hands to physically open them and I realised that my physical body must have cried while I was crying in Mundus. The knowledge made me feel a little weird but somehow, what had been choking me in Mundus was now more distant, as if I was looking at it through a thick pane of glass.

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Shaking my head, not quite understanding what was going on, I stood and realised that, despite the brutal workout Mrs. Wu had put me through in the morning, I was feeling great, making me smile. Meanwhile, my stomach reminded me that I was no longer conserving energy but working out quite a bit between gaming sessions and that I was supposed to feed it before continuing, so I threw a few things in a pot that could simply simmer for a while, turning into a cross between risotto and stew. I would have to stir every couple of minutes, but I could easily work out in the meantime.

Which I did, slowly going through the exercises Mrs. Wu had shown me, making sure that my body was moving as I wanted. Before long, dinner was finished and I sat at my table, looking through the forums while eating.

“That was… disturbing on so many levels.” I muttered, before pushing the plate I had just eaten dinner from away, not sure how to react. Leonidas, the Traveller I had met on the road, had uploaded a video of our meeting on the forum and there were a few answers that were just weird. Asking to be stepped on, calling me Mistress? Just, No, go away.

Shaking my head in bewilderment, I decided to check the book I had been given by the Mrs. Wu, curious what else she had written down for me. Instead of reading from the beginning, as I had on the bus, I decided to leaf through it. As I did, a letter fell out, addressed to me. Curious, I quickly opened it and started to read.

It was, unsurprisingly, written by Mrs. Wu, explaining that what was in the book was part of whom she had been in the past but she felt that knowledge was something that shouldn’t be discarded, instead, she had wanted to pass it to a worthy successor. It sounded like something out of a wuxia-novel, passing on a technique or something like that, but it made me even more curious.

So, I flipped through the book and, at a few points, had to blink in disbelief. There were detailed anatomical drawings and, at least the first few at which I looked closely, had added notations, clarifying things. The notations were giving even more details on how to break the human body, each drawing and method designed for a specific effect or with a specific purpose in mind. Some were designed to make it look like an accident, some assumed the use of poison, with a footnote to another page that had the recipes, some assumed that absolute silence was necessary, some allowed to use the least amount of force.

Further back in the book, the drawings were still similar but the notations, I glanced at were different. Instead of bringing death, they described how to bring pain or pleasure, how to use the body to break the mind. Not just using pain to torture but also pleasure, how to use the invoked feelings to weaken a person’s defenses. Curiously, the torture parts were mostly incidental, used to create chinks in a person’s personality, chinks which could be pried open, until the person’s core was bare, their secrets yours for the taking.

There was a lot more in the book but I decided that if I started to read randomly, I would just waste time. I had glanced over the pages, read a few descriptions next to the images, even a few whole pages if the notations were interesting enough, but for now, I closed the book, sitting back and taking a deep breath.

It wasn’t just a single, martial technique, it was so much more. It was a veritable, step-by-step guide to assassinate people and get away with it. It was an instruction-manual to become a secret agent of some kind. I was, or maybe I wanted to be, horrified that the gentle, friendly Mrs Wu had a quite obvious dark side. Another part, deep down, was curious and wanted nothing more than to read the book from cover to cover, to accept the honour I had been given by her.

“There is nothing bad about knowledge, is there?” I asked my empty apartment, before tearing myself away from the book, walking over into the bathroom, stripping my clothes off as I went. It wasn’t as if I would use the knowledge, so was there anything wrong with reading the book?

I questioned myself under the warm spray of water and when the sweat I had worked up while cooking was gone, I decided that no, there was no problem with knowing things. I would read the book, it seemed very interesting.

What could go wrong?