Chapter 6

  Know Thyself

  -Wall inscription found in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi

  I next woke with the healer’s apprentice leaning over me, one palm pressed to my forehead, and a look of intense concentration on her face. I waited for her to finish her inspection. The golden letters of my status still hovered in my vision. Three stats all at one, not much other information. My memory blend with Dean seemed smooth, now close to complete. All ones in my stats, according to said memory, were terrible. Dean had spent years training his body and studying to improve his initial stats. On his sixteenth birthday, which was five months ago, he’d had a Body of five and his Mind and Soul were both four. Better than the threes that most people had on their sixteenth birthday.

  I focused on the other specifics listed. Dean’s memory didn’t recognize any of them.

  Aetheri- She didn’t tell you, did she, gremlin? You’re one of the chosen, a literal divine being. My power flows through you. If this thing had emojis, I’d put a hundred of the little laughing so hard it’s crying ones right here. Comedy or tragedy, however it works out, it will be entertaining. For me.

  Apotheon- You embody the divine. The universe bends to your will, gremlin. Your old world has a story about a man whose touch turned anything to gold. Gift, curse, blessing, burden. All of that and more. I hope you are ready, because no one around you knows what’s coming.

  Logos- A meta aspect. You see the path, the strength, the weakness. You find the solution to unsolvable problems. You understand the logic of the universe on a fundamental level. You scare me with this one, gremlin. There are trillions of minds on my crown. This sort of power isn’t unique, but no one else has it to the same degree you have it, and I didn’t give it to you. Will it lead you to reward or ruin? I know which one I’m rooting for.

  After a dozen messages with often hostile commentary calling me a gremlin, I still didn’t understand. It seemed like the same entity who’d confronted me before I’d been embodied in Dean’s slightly used and damaged vessel.

  Hints in the messages and Dean’s memories led me to think the entity sending them could be the mind of the System. Without Dean’s memories I don’t know that I’d have so easily accepted the idea that a massively powerful artificial intelligence existed, let alone one that ran a system of five ring worlds and linked the many trillions of sentient minds on those worlds together.

  I blinked the messages and my status away, much easier than using hand gestures. Gestures were for children without a status, and people who couldn’t learn the more intuitive means of interface control.

  Róisín made eye contact with me when my eyes focused back on reality. Her blush this time wasn’t as fiery, and it didn’t travel all the way to her ears. She pulled her hand off of my forehead and stepped back.

  “You seem better. Your status is clear except for a few lines now. How do you feel?”

  My stomach chose that moment to announce its intentions. I sat up and brushed my hair out of my eyes.

  “I feel better, thank you. Hungry, though.”

  She summoned another large tray of food from her inventory and set it on the nightstand. “You cook, your silver ranked cook, sent this for you.”

  I threw one hand up with a slight shrug and let Dean’s memory guide me. “I’ve known Cook my entire life. He’s worked with my parents for a few hundred spins. He knows his business well.” I pulled the cover from the tray and ate. I ate a lot, again.

  “Nothing wrong with your appetite,” Ríosín said. “I’ll update my master.” She turned and headed for the door.

  “Thank you, Healer,” I said around a mouthful of food. “I am grateful for your care and attentiveness to my recovery.”

  She paused and turned back to me with a quick bow. “You’re welcome. I’m just doing my duty and trying to learn as much as possible.”

  I stood and returned her bow. “You still have my gratitude, Róisín. Thank you.”

  Her blush returned full force as she spun away and bounced through the door to my sitting room and then into the hallway. Sixteen spins is full adulthood in the kingdom of Virelion, and as far as Dean knew, the neighboring kingdoms as well. I was stuck in the body of a sixteen-year-old, but my mind was much older. I couldn’t help but think of anyone this age as a child. Dean’s memories told me that while sixteen met the minimum requirement to be an adult, the true passage into adult responsibility didn’t happen until most were well into brass rank. His sister, a peak iron ranker, was one hundred spins old. A fast advancement through copper to brass would be three or four spins, and another five to get halfway through. Families would negotiate marriages early, but they rarely took place until the individuals had proven themselves.

  Not having that worry relieved some of my stress, but I also remembered being sixteen. Emotions run strong in the young, and they are slaves to their hormones. My new body certainly had an effect on young Róisín, and I had a stack of love letters from another girl tucked away in my inventory. I thought I had, as a parent and grandparent, the ability to navigate teen life. I hoped I was right.

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  I finished the entire food tray again, at least three pounds of meat, cheeses, fruits, and vegetables unfamiliar to me but well known by Dean. Less ravenously hungry this time, I could savor the bites and my appreciation for Cook’s skill grew. I washed the meal down with a fruit juice Dean identified as glowcider made from emberquince fruit. Chilled and delicious. After I downed the glass, a notification flickered at the bottom of my interface.

  Emberquince Glowcider- a delicious fruit beverage with stamina restoring qualities. Best served cold. Icy cold is best, gremlin. Your cook must be fond of you. He hasn’t poisoned you, yet, and it requires real skill to extract a cider from emberquince.

  Energized, I stood and stretched. I needed to move. I’d never been sedentary, nor had Dean. Mind and body in agreement, I grabbed the empty tray and left my rooms for the first time since waking up there earlier in the day.

  My rooms were on the third floor of one building in the local Oketani compound. I knew the layout. Dean spent most of his time here. He visited his mother and father in the provincial capital once a week, but since his tenth birthday he’d been under the care of his older sister here.

  I admired the blend of Japanese and Celtic styles in everything from the architecture to the interior décor. It seemed like the mix of stone walls and sliding paper doors should create a disjointed effect, but skilled crafters blended them flawlessly. The tiled hallway outside my rooms spoke to me with a blend of ancient Celtic knot and scrollwork around the doorframes, floor tiles with shippo interlocking circles, a stained-glass window depicting trees and a forest hart, a wall painting of cherry trees in the spring. It resonated with me and with Dean’s memories. I felt comfortable here, the kind of comfort you get only when in a familiar place surrounded by family.

  I dropped the tray in the kitchen on the first floor and headed for the dojo. It should be empty now, most people still busy with work for the rest of the afternoon.

  The dojo’s sense of familiarity helped calm some underlying anxiety I hadn’t been fully aware of. It matched what I expected of a large training room from Earth except for the vaulted ceiling. Dean’s clear memories from the many hours he’d spent in this room informed me that people here were superhuman compared to Earth standards.

  I walked along one wall and eyed the racks of practice weapons until I spotted a large suburito. I grabbed the hilt and couldn’t move it.

  Large Suburito- A training sword crafted from the heart of a Stonebark tree, treated and conditioned with alchemy, and enchanted with a weight shifting rune. Push some mana into it, gremlin, to control its weight.

  I willed some mana into the training sword, and a small icon appeared in my interface with a slider to adjust weight. I blinked the slider down until I could lift the thing easily and pulled it off the rack.

  The o-katana sized suburito felt good in my hands, familiar, comfortable. I banished my boots, socks, and shirt to inventory and stepped into the training area. A bow to the center, and another to the front, then I walked to the center and took up a basic stance with my left foot slightly behind the right, weight evenly distributed. I held the trainer out in front of me at full extension and increased the weight until it hit the maximum I thought I could control with slow movements. I brought it into a forward pointing kamae and held it there.

  I closed my eyes and brought my focus down to the feel of the floor under my feet and the weapon in my hand. One slow breath in, left heel off the floor, slow exhale, then one step forward with the right foot, then the left. Another slow forward set of steps, then the same but backwards, breathing coordinated with each step’s deliberate pace.

  With all combat arts, the foundation is key, and footwork is the foundation of most. The power and intent of your strikes, grapples, and throws begin there. Forward, backward, forward, backward, I repeated the steps one hundred times each. Then to the left and right one hundred times, then diagonal steps. The final set of basic steps is like the first, but you bring your trailing foot even with your leading foot before you step again. One hundred repetitions later and my new body felt the strain.

  Back in the center of the floor I closed my eyes again and held the stance for several breathing cycles, in, hold, out, hold. I changed my grip on the suburito, put my left hand forward, right hand back, and changed the position of my feet. Right foot behind the left. I pushed my mind into a new configuration, a mirror of the visualization and technique, and went through each of the five movements again for one hundred repetitions.

  The steps all had names that flowed through my head with two distinct sets of memories and slowly combined themselves into a single, coherent whole. Dean’s instruction here had some minor differences from what I’d learned on Earth, but the central ideas remained the same.

  I went through the same deliberate slow steps, with a left-handed and right-handed grip, with the suburito in ten different basic kamae. With my warmup finished, I returned to the center of the floor and stretched. None of my old injuries and stiff joints followed me into Dean’s body, and the magical healing here seemed to have been thorough and effective at restoring this body to a pristine state. I would thank the Iyasha healers again.

  I stood back in the first stance and breathed in. With the exhale, I moved into the first primary kata. Slow, deliberate steps, deliberate strikes, synchronized with my breaths. A full pass through the seven long sword katas with a right and then left-handed grip. Then I increased my speed, and again for each new iteration. On the tenth repetition, I pushed into the limits of my new body.

  Logos activated: your understanding of the sword grows.

  I noticed small imperfections in my foot placement, a strike that pulled my blade a millimeter off the line, and a clumsy transition that left my guard open for a half second. When I completed the last move, I slowly dropped to my knees and rested the training sword across my legs. Eyes closed, I focused on absorbing the insight I’d gained. Several notifications flashed into my interface while I slowed my labored breathing into a normal pattern.

  Mind +1

  Body +1

  Soul +1

  Skill detected: Sword (katana)

  Sword (katana) +15 -your skill with a blade is obvious, gremlin, show me more and earn more rewards.

  A voice familiar to Dean interrupted my reading.

  “Shin-Ki-Ken-Tai-Ichi,” the voice said. “Some people can’t get there even after they make iron rank.”

  My body jumped to its feet almost of its own accord, turned to the voice, and bowed.

  “Well done, lad,” the voice said. “I should send more students to be trampled by marns. Seems to have improved your skills.”

  Lorcan Oketani- lore-kan, silver ranked sword master and general ass kicker. He’s been training you to fight since you, well, since Dean, was five spins. You’ve been a mediocre student, at best, but you impressed him today.

  “Sensei,” I said, and held my bow for another full second.