Chapter Two

A child of around Lee's age would not be expected to understand the details or implications of a discussion like what his Grandmother was having with his parents, no matter what hidden talents had been revealed. Neither would anyone anticipate him having anything of value to contribute to the conversation. Thus... he was being left out of it, in order to avoid biasing him one way or another by accident, through strong opinions and heated words.

Lee supposed that he could change that, through a demonstration of his mature, almost adult outlook by way of having lived a life once before. He wasn't going to be swayed to a rash decision one way or another just because it made a parent happy, for example. He had plenty of opportunity to let his own motivations form into rash decisions, like revealing his cultivation ability at all, thank you very much. In the end though, it just didn't seem like it served any purpose to reveal either just how mentally matured he was or the fact that this wasn't his first life.

So he didn't, and accepted that it meant that he was going to be treated like a child that couldn't just yet be completely trusted to make their own decisions in life. It was one of those things that couldn't be had both ways, and besides, it was a little relaxing to not have to make any of the important decisions just yet.

It meant that Lee had more time to develop himself in other ways, as older clan members discussed political implications and risks versus reward of this or that potential venture. They were better suited to it anyway, Lee reasoned. For all that he had the experience of a past life to lean on a little, he didn't have a lifetime of being an anime ninja to work with, and so things that made perfect sense to him might just not be viable for reasons outside of his scope of context. There was a saying about that... something about fools and wisdom and silence. It boiled down to the fact that the common sense of an urban ninja might not seem very sensible to him, or vice versa, and so he should probably keep his mouth shut for the time being and go with the flow of whatever came next. That was probably fine.

For the time being, Lee meditated... Or, rather, he gave the appearance of it. He wasn't napping or anything. He just shut his eyes, let his body still, and went to the Library.

... Well. 'The Library' was what he called it, but it wasn't much of one just yet.

It was a gleaming expanse of gaudiness and gold, with soft and comfortable reading chairs immediately present, a vast panorama of shelves as far as the eye could see...

And each and every one of them had been empty, the first time Lee had found himself here.

An empty library. Shelves and seats, but not one book or scroll of ancient wisdom to be found in it. Lee hadn't known quite what to make of that the first time he came here. It hadn't been much better on the second, the third, or the fourteenth. All he knew was that there had to be some key to it, something beyond the scope of a private mental retreat. His first thought had been that his memories were supposed to be stored here, in a sort of mind palace reflecting media tropes of genius investigators so that he could review them later. But that hadn't made sense... if so, shouldn't the memories of his past life all be stored here, somewhere? And it wasn't like nothing had happened in this life, either. The shelves should have been packed full of inconsequential minutiae, stretches of time where he was picking his nose or using the toilet faithfully recorded alongside looking in on basic training lessons and watching people cook.

Eventually, he had found his way back to the center of the Library in his wanderings. There had been a simple stack of paper sheets waiting there, on a table with an un-ornamented ink pen sitting by their side.

Currently, those papers were floating in the air, revolving around one another in orbit around a glowing mass of something bright as sheets crumbled away into dust to make way for new ones to appear. A few rolled sheets and small booklets sat in cubbies to the side of the table.

It was a Library after all, of sorts. A repository of knowledge and reference material. He just... had to fill it up himself.

It wasn't as though he had to personally go out and witness everything that was added to the Library, though. He did, and those were added to the meager repository, of course... but typically with the bold-faced notation up at the top indicating that they were 'Flawed' or 'Incomplete' renditions of what he had observed.

There was one 'Complete' item that he had picked up from that sort of observation. The Basic Kato Shuriken method... a brief document detailing how the Kato clan were trained to throw their shuriken. How it had wound up complete... that was simple, in retrospect. Rather than peeking in on other clan members quietly training or testing one technique or another on their own, doing things he didn't fully grasp to achieve results he wasn't sure he fully understood, with no explanation for him to follow beyond what he could see with his own eyes, Lee had sat in on and listened to an actual lesson.

In other words, the direct observation method recorded things that he wanted to know, but it was limited to his own understanding of what he was observing. If his comprehension was flawed, then the recorded instructions would themselves be flawed... potentially hazardous. Well, at least it was kind enough to let him know before he tried something himself.

On the other hand, the observation method responded well to taking in actual tutelage. With a demonstration from a skilled user of shuriken arts, paired with an actual lecture going over what they were doing, and why, to achieve the results that they did? The recording had been complete. Perfect.

Well, it was still only a how-to guide on properly throwing a shuriken, though. Not much to write home about on its own. If nothing else, though, Lee could probably record a duplicate of any book he read in this Library and would thus never risk failing a written exam.

... Was it cheating to refer to a library that you kept in your head while taking a scored test? ... Lee would rather think of it as leaning on a natural advantage, the same as being born with a better memory for detail, or ability to memorize lines of text. For the most part that was all tests were anyway... in any practical situation, while it would be hard to justify a doctor stepping away from an emergency situation to consult his surgical texts, for example, if he had a way to reference the malady in front of him that did not involve time passing and the patient's condition worsening then he should do so. It wasn't only a matter of 'should' either, he was all but morally obliged to take advantage of that ability, even if it might be called cheating in a schoolyard setting. The same was true for almost any field, unless you were doing something so often, day in and day out, that you knew it by heart and better than the writers of the textbooks it was taught out of it was usually best to reference the instructions whenever you were even mildly uncertain about what you were doing. 'Measure twice, cut once' and all of that... the time spent double-checking something was typically nothing compared to making a potentially costly mistake that needed fixing.

Besides, it wasn't like he could just produce a list of answers to a multiple choice exam either... It was closer to making every test an open-book exam, testing the ability to quickly and effectively locate data in the process of researching on a deadline rather than testing rote memorization.

Lee almost felt sorry for the school-children who didn't have this kind of advantage. Almost. And not enough that he would be willing to give it up. He'd done his time in the school lifestyle, and he would happily take any advantage presented to him.

And it wasn't like that was even the really good bit of his Library, either.

Lee stretched up, reaching up into the air, and plucked one of the shifting paper sheets out of the localized storm. They all came to a sudden halt even as the energy mass they were circling around in the air continued to pulse.

The top of the sheet had a bold 'Incomplete: Refinement according to provided parameters in progress' marked across it.

Lee didn't bother reading the rest and just tossed the sheet back up to join the rest once more, setting them all into motion again.

That was the good part, right there. Direct observation of something that Lee wanted to record in his Library was only one method. Another was to provide prompts to it, writing down the general description of what he wanted before setting the thing here going. Bit by bit, as time passed, it would take that initial prompt and develop a final product that matched the requirements.

An uncharitable person might say that at this point Lee was letting the library do the thinking for him, as he let it develop techniques and combat styles that he might later use. Lee disagreed. It was definitely cheating, of course, but it wasn't like he was letting the Library think for him. What it was doing was the testing process. The long, painstaking, methodical process of testing if something worked, making a note of it, and then either progressing or attempting something else. The initial idea was his... the Library just... simulated, he might say, potential hypothetical ways for it to happen until it found a workable solution.

... Probably. So far Lee hadn't received anything like an error message without making directly and blatantly incompatible statements... even sometimes when things seemed incompatible, which he wasn't sure that he wanted to pry into. Something like a hentai-doujin's body training? Memory erasure? Apotheosis into a mighty dragon, or a wicked devil, or an awe-inspiring godly figure of some kind? They all seemed to be possible, or at the very least the Library's refinement system hadn't immediately rejected them as flawed inputs the way it had some testing-the-waters suggestions.

It was still possible that it would run through every available possibility before producing a result that was flawed by way of reality not allowing for something like that to happen, or that the time it would take to produce a functional result would exceed the normal human lifespan as it, like a learning AI, explored every possible permutation of options.

So what he had started it going with at first was a method for cultivating and refining his Qi. The one he had demonstrated. The one that, given time and dedication, would potentially be able to give Lee the time to see what the results of the Library's possibility-refining turned up. Terrible as it would be to patiently wait for decades only to receive an outcome of 'this can't be done', it would be... less harsh of a failure, at least, if his lifespan was measurable in millennia instead of years. Still bitter, but not soul-crushing.

Time was the most important factor for this Library. Time and forethought. Empty as it began, after all, it wasn't going to be able to just produce instructions for something the moment he thought of it. It needed time to process inputs and produce a result. Real time, and not... whatever passed in here, where Lee suspected he could sit down for a thousand years right now and see no time pass and no progress made on the papers in the air. He could check them, he could refine his inputs, and he could add more requests to process or throw one of the incomplete or flawed partial instruction sets that he had from observation up to join them, but they wouldn't ever complete if he waited for them here.

In other words, as much of a cheat as it might be, it wasn't something like a magical super-eye that could instantly replicate an observed technique in the course of a battle and let him return fire with it against the original user. On the other hand, even if it had his drawbacks, it could allow for innovation and the creation of new tricks instead of just monkey-see aping the achievements of others. It just needed time to work, and so he would still be vulnerable to being caught by surprise with a problem that he had no prepared solution for ready and waiting in his pocket.

Give and take. As new-life cheats went, Lee would say that he was pretty satisfied with this one. Sure, it wasn't exactly going to be an instant win button for every occasion that he could retroactively produce superhero emergency-shark-repellent-spray sort of gambits out of, but it also wasn't 'Observe rock to determine it is a rock one thousand times before you can observe a rock to determine the kind of rock it is', either. Somewhere comfortably in between the two, where Lee could see some pretty great results as long as he put in the required amount of personal effort into things, but which didn't require him to fruitlessly beat his head into a wall for the sake of incremental improvements like he was grinding for skill levels on an MMO just before the big update, either. A fair balance overall.

And, of course, while it wasn't really any use in combat situations all Lee had to do was shut his eyes, take a moment, and then he would have all the time he needed to think and plan out a course of action. If he had a moment then he had all the time in the world, limited only by how smart he actually was and how much of that theoretical time he wanted to commit to developing a plan of action before actually acting.

With that in mind... Lee relaxed, faded out of the Library in his mind, and became conscious of the real world around him once more. A few more moments passed as he took the opportunity to cycle Qi in from the world through his body and out once more before he opened his eyes.

Well. He had a little time. He might as well move his body and exercise a bit. It couldn't hurt, when a lot of the ninja lifestyle seemed to be highly active.