Clay shifted her point of view to directly above Khorun then pulled out so she could see both his opponents.

The one behind Khorun crept toward him. Khorun stood stock-still for a moment until he got into range, then spun around, corkscrewing down to almost a sitting position, and letting that momentum bring his staff hard against the man's knees. There was a slight crack as the man's knees buckled and he fell.

Khorun spun back around, activating the qi spear ability. He caught the other would-be thief in the midsection with the point of it. His opponent seemed almost to fold in half and fell to the ground, wheezing.

Khorun spun to face the one behind him. He had gotten into a crouch and was scuttling back, a hand held up in front of him. "No no no--wait!" he cried. "I give up, okay?" He tossed a wicked-looking knife on the ground.

Stepping aside so he could keep both assailants in view, Khorun watched as the other robber caught his breath and began to sit upright. He too held an open, pleading hand in front of him. "We're sorry," he gasped, "we tried... to rob you."

"We really did need the money," the other said. "We got desperate enough to try to steal food, but we were caught and banished from town. Some really high-level traveler gave us some money, but one of the lawless zone bandit gangs stole it from us."

Khorun shook his head. "A Jean Valjean chain of events."

"Who?"

"A guy who stole bread once."

"Okay, so... you won't beat us up any more?"

"Not unless you attack me again." Khorun turned to leave.

"Wait!" the first would-be robber said. Khorun paused, head cocked as if tracking them by sound.

"Um, we would like..." He edged next to his companion, and they both bowed low. "Master, please teach us."

Students? Surely they would just be a liability? But then, there was some safety in numbers, if they could be trained. They could help watch for signs of Neuronet activity without being told exactly what's going on.

Khorun nodded solemnly. "I will give you instruction," he said. "In return, you must perform some tasks for me, without asking questions about the nature of the tasks. Is that agreeable?"

"Yes, Master," the two men said in unison.

"Very well. Then we shall need a place to train."

"We only know of the temple master. He's the only one who's trained us," said the boss of the two, who introduced himself as Riktivish. "The Dragon Guard will kick all our asses and throw us in jail if they find us in town, and maybe even you for teaching."

Khorun nodded solemnly. "We must find a way around this." Clay was now determined to check this "Skilledex" and find out if there was a skill-transfer ability. She remembered Tai-shan had had a training and teaching subcomponent.

"Well, we can go back to our cave," Riktivish said. "You're welcome to stay there, Master. Maybe we can train close by where it's safer."

Khorun nodded, and Riktivish and Lum--the smaller, quieter man--led the blind monk to a rock face of a small rise. They squeezed in between two plates of rock, ducked down, and took a few steps into the mound of earth. Khorun followed them into a smallish chamber. Riktivish started working at a tinderbox with a torch. "I'll just get this going--"

"This place will do fine," Khorun said. The light flared on, and the two men stared at Khorun and his blindfold, wondering.

Khorun, for his part, was looking at the floor as Clay wondered at the natural cave. This part of the Kingdom of Jade mapped roughly to a part of China in the Tai-Shan sim that had an extensive cave system. She determined to figure out how close it was. If it could be reached by digging... She pondered the command that allowed her to change one object to another object. Could that be done with a quantity of earth or even stone? What if it wasn't a lump, like a pile of dirt or a boulder, that she could put Khorun's hands around? She would just have to experiment.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

"It should be safe here to 'sleep,'" Riktivish said. "We're pretty well hidden away. The larger clans can camp more in the open because someone's usually around when you're not in the world. They can recruit people from different time zones. Some people even have Flunky watchmen, but those are only for the rich bastards."

"Rich bastards," Lum said with feeling.

"For tonight, you need not worry," Khorun said. "I will stand guard. I need little sleep." The truth was, Clay got little sleep, at least not without a chemical aid. But she had out-of-game research and in-game experimentation to do.

"Vonzell, I won't need my sleep medicine tonight," Clay called out.

"You sure, Miss Clay? You'll be all sorts of tired tomorrow."

"I'm certain. I have important things to do in Everhome."

"Mm-mm," Vonzell said. "I can't see what's important about a game."

"Games have been with us since culture began," Clay said, then had a thought. "Say, how are your beloved Steelers doing this season? Are they still without their star running back, that Roman what's-his-name?"

"Lewis." Vonzell said the name halfway between a prayer and a curse. "Don't even get me started on my Steelers--"

Clay interrupted them. "So you can see how a game can be important."

Vonzell was quiet a moment. Finally they said, "All right, no sleeping medicine tonight."

Keeping an eye on Khorun's surroundings inside the game, Clay felt around for her hand unit. Using up-close, sidelong looks, she brought up information on the Skilledex. She skipped past the information they offered directly to curious users and went instead to learn how to create an interface with their database. It took two hours of halting work using half-remembered code blocks, but eventually a separate box for Skilledex queries floated near Khorun's stats.

Once she had the Skilledex in her Crown of Thorns-enhanced field of vision, she started running queries. Teaching, instruction... she found an IMPART KNOWLEDGE skill that required MUD-style text commands run in a console window. She didn't remember the command; it must have been an afterthought added to Tai-Shan after she left the project. She gave Khorun the skill and moved on, distractedly eating a late-night snack Vonzell brought her.

Khorun was alone in the cave; Riktivish and Lum were both out of the world. He experimentally put his hands on either side of a sharp outcropping of rock. Taking a guess at the amount of mass between his hands, he morphed it into mud. The stone immediately turned to a dark-brown goo and slid off the rock face. Khorun dropped the ball of mud in his hands and smiled.

Khorun studied the rock face. An outcropping was fine, but what about walls? He couldn't get his hands around a flat piece of rock without some way of digging out a handhold--

He had an idea. He knelt to where the ball of mud sat and hefted it. He searched around for a few loose stones and brought them to the ball of mud, making a squishy rock pile. These he morphed into a mining pick. Perfect.

What followed was a long several hours of Khorun chipping angled handholds into the rock while Clay divided her attention between the game and a geological survey of China. She had to awkwardly use her handheld to look at maps while mentally guiding Khorun's actions. She compared a map of the game world pieced together by a player to a map of contemporary China, focusing on the northeast coastline because that was where the Tai-shan simulator began. She zeroed in on an area that was nearly a peninsula, its long coastline serving as half the boundary of the invented Kingdom of Jade.

Clay pulled back Khorun's top-down view until she could see features that agreed with both the Kingdom of Jade map and that of China. She had thought there was a cave system, a tourist destination, that was in this area. Khorun's wireframe view of the underground, usually textured with striations and minerals, was oddly blank save for tree roots. Clay pulled back the view wider. She began to see textures again some distance from the Riktivish's cave. She zoomed back in and behind Khorun, then "sank" into the earth. There was nothingness mere feet below where Khorun stood. She sank a bit more, and more, and then saw more wireframe textures.

It was a cave.

Not just a small cave: a huge one, and likely part of an even vaster cave system. Clay's eyes narrowed as she considered the possibilities.

Several hours later, Riktivish and Lum woke to see Khorun, covered in dust and mud, sitting cross-legged near a pit in the floor. The blind monk bowed to them and unrolled a rope ladder into the pit. He began to climb down.

"Follow," he said.

Khorun's two students scampered to the pit and, despite the utter darkness, climbed down until they reached solid footing. They watched as Khorun used a firestick to set the end of a torch aflame.

In the torch's light, the two bewildered men saw whitish, curving stone walls around them. Little mineral chips in the stone made the wall glitter, adding to the unreality of the scene. Both were speechless.

"Gentlemen," Khorun said. He made a sweeping gesture that encompassed the vast darkness beyond the light of the torch. "It appears we now have a monastery."