Jade turned her small pudgy face away from her mother to the side as she witnessed a strangely dressed woman holding her mother’s hand with her own as a small deep green light appears to move along the mother’s arm. Her eyes grew wide before a smile surfaced on her baby face as she urgently commanded Jason:

“Record this phenomenon! Quickly!”

The light lasted only a minute or two, before the old woman staggered before falling into a nearby chair, her mother’s face had regained some colour; seeing the result Jade was in shock before her mind faltered and she fell into a deep sleep. As she did, she whispered internally “Set the cell growth as a continuous process and adjust it to energy input, even during my unconsciousness. Begin compiling a databank of the spoken words you hear so we can translate them later.”

“Yes Ma’am”.

When Jade had finally fallen asleep, the largely built man stood at the bedside gently lifted her from her mother’s chest into his arms. He turned towards the worn out and sweating healer asking nervously: “How is my wife Lady Lie? Will she be well?”

Lady Lie shook her head slowly and still panting heavily, “her longevity itself seems depleted; it isn’t a case of a simple illness. I am unable to do anything more than relieving the accumulated pain and fatigue and doing so used up all my qi…”

“Depleted longevity? Xue xue was a practitioner on the 5th level of qi infusion… Ordinarily she should have at least another 80 if not 100 years left, but what about now? How long does she have?

“At most 5 years… Senior Gan I must return and rest, I shall bid farewell”. The woman stood up, bowed and left the building; leaving Yu Gan and his wife alone with Jade in the room. Yu Gan stood there with a stern face - hiding the sadness in his eyes and carrying Jade’s sleeping baby body away.

A few months have passed; Jade continued to learn about this new place she had found herself. However she was still an infant and could not go off to explore - whilst Jason had re-worked the central nervous system as well as the muscles, tendons and bones so that she could walk as soon as she was born. But doing so would cause too much attention.

Thus she could only observe from her parent’s and servants arms. Within the few months that have passed Jason had managed a complete grasp of this place’s new language - combined with her improved senses meant she could still learn a great deal.

If Jade were asked to describe her this world in a few words; she would undoubtedly respond with primitive sociopathic anarchy. It seemed as if many of this place’s inhabitants had varying levels of superpowers from qi; this is also combined with martial arts. However with such varying strengths between people; it meant law enforcement was near impossible if a group or family had strong fighters.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Even the strongest families could not control everything due to pressure from other powerful families. There was a state controlled government yet they refused to impose strict law enforcement against the strongest local families or other powerful individuals for fear of retaliation or grudges. It could be said that law and order was only brought about through certain powers restraining the others and taking advantage of vanity and “face”.

This point was made abundantly clear when Jade was carried through a large city and witnessed an entourage of 3 men kidnapping a young woman after violently beating her screaming male friend to death. This was all under the orders of a well dressed teenage man. Her mother, father and accompanying party merely watched without batting an eyelid as they walked past, ignoring the fate of both of the victims.

Thus this world could be said to be a free for all of strength.

Luckily the family to which Jade was born into was one of the more powerful families - which will make survival a lot easier. She was born into a branch of the Yu family, her name here followed the chinese naming style from Earth, her given name was Jiao.

She was the only child of a senior elder in the Yu clan;  however Yu Gan’s position was far from ordinary. He was the only spiritsmith in BlueCloud City - a highly sought job that comprised of blacksmithing weapons then adding inscriptions - strange circuits that would aid the function of weapons. With the vast amount of practitioners and martial artists, weapons were a huge asset - especially to those who could only fight with a sword or spear. Yet with such a massive demand Yu Gan was the only Spiritsmith in all of BlueCloud.   

BlueCloud is a medium sized city tens of kilometers in area, with thousands more kilometers of farmlands built around it; at the centre lies the city lord’s mansion estate, and surrounding that was the noble quarters, as one went further out the city became steadily poorer. The only exception to this were the four main roads that led in all cardinal directions out of the city. Outside to the north was the Zhan forest range - A huge area of forestry inhabited by many types of demon beasts.

Demon beasts appeared to be just a blanket term for any type of beasts that went through a so called “demon awakening” and was thus able to absorb qi from the world to grow stronger.

The key difference between Earth and this place was the existence of qi. Qi simply appeared to be the key to everything - the abnormal strength and power of practitioners, the various tools that worked inconceivably without any knowledge of applied science and physics - it all came from qi.

There seemed to be many different variations of qi, but they all take the appearance of radiation, yet trying to find an individual particle of qi seemed impossible - even for the current Jade and Jason; whom previously had managed to isolate and analyse gravitons with various equipment of their own devising.

Qi seemed present in the atmosphere constantly, though certain places had differing concentrations - this was noticed by Jade as she stood up in her crib alone and tried punching out only to discover the weight of her punch was 0.03% more than what it should be. Thus for now they could only conclude that it was a phenomenon that they could ignore until they could gain access to a library or be taught.

For now Jade stood up alone in her crib - practicing a set of exercises that Jason had created to further improve her body’s condition. She had also tasked Jason to begin assessing the archived martial arts from earth and then to cross reference this information with the inherent flaws of humanity and the prevailing body types of larger animals. Things like blind spots in the eyes, pattern recognition, pressure points, and other inherent weak spots would all be calculated to birth a new martial art.

She stood with her legs wide apart, knees bent bringing her arms in slowly before rotating her arms and pushing it back out before collapsing back on her crib. On one hand she was happy to have been reborn again, but annoyed that she had to keep up the facade of having the capabilities of a baby.

As she relented, Yu Jiao heard footsteps coming from outside, by the sound, she guessed it was her father. She quickly jumped back under the covers, wiped off the sweat from her head and shut her eyes.

“Kacha”

As the door unlocked; Yu Gan walked into the small room and seeing that she was awake picked her up and brought her away with a gleeful smile.

“Jiao-er today you’ll finally see father at work!”