Eight months. That was how long my mother was kept alive. I do not know how the bandits were able to survive their executioners for so long even whilst dragging their "toys," but they did.

Assuming the theory of myself being the rape-baby to a bandit is true, then I was probably born a month or so prematurely. I'm surprised I lived, perhaps my system had a hand in it?

I am unsure.

I'm unsure about a lot of things.

Between the "child-friendly" version I was told and the more accurate snippets I hear from eavesdropping, I am certain what I have gathered is not the entire truth.

There are too many holes. Just how did the bandits run for an entire eight months, why were they allowed to roam free so long in the first place, why were the pursuers so slow to chase?

Most of all, why was my mother's home the only casualty? No other village was attacked like mother's was. One might presume that was because it was the only place within "safe" raiding distance, but then their following actions don't make any sense.

The burning of an entire mountain, the rampant lust and arson, why they felt the need to so openly attack a village in the first place… none of these actions speak of people caring for safety.

The raid was a focused strike, but I don't think it was the village itself that was their objective.

A plot? An undercurrent of politics? A diversion? Meant to attract soldiers away from someplace? Meant to attract soldiers to someplace? Is that why it took so long for the bandits to be put down?

Was this a statement?

The more I ponder it the likely it seems.

It sickens me. I don't understand any of it… no, actually I do. I just don't want to understand it.

The implications of the entire incident are not things I wish to understand.

That a person could order a fate worse than death to make a point is only the beginning. That is politics; a pit of scum and waste no matter what universe.

But what I truly have no desire to comprehend is the mindset of the "bandits" themselves.

For the incident (the focused attack on only a single village) to have played out the way it did… The bandits stuck to an unknown plot throughout.

Even whilst being cut down to the last.

They never destroyed another village, never strayed from the region, yet also never stopped making noise. Noise that others could not ignore.

Though no other village was destroyed, many were attacked; raided for food, the occasional girl stolen, yet nowhere near what happened to my mother's home.

They did not deviate from that unknown plan.

Were they truly bandits in the first place? Could you even call that discipline? Was it loyalty? Maybe fear instead? Did the mastermind have hold of families and loved ones?

How could anyone with such familial love commit the atrocities I was told of? Or maybe they could? Driven into a wall, with certain death approaching, might they snap?

I am unsure.

But I am sure of one thing. If this indeed was a plot, a notion becoming more and more possible, then my targets will most likely be harder to reach than I first thought.

I realise just how young and small I am, metaphorically and literally. It is galling. Alas, I lack a more reliable source of information, I lack foundation, I lack means and I lack strength.

This conclusion I have reached is based on a heavily edited version and second hand eavesdropping, yet there is still so much I do not know:

I do not know if anyone other than myself survived that Incident, I do not know if there were any to have survived contact with the "bandits".

I do not know who or where the soldiers that killed the bandits have gone, I do not know which villagers aided them, I do not know who found me that day, I do not know who named me-

I do not know to many things.

The circumstances of my birth, it's prior events, and events immediately after remain a mystery to me.

However there was one thing I know for a fact. From those fuzzy memories that have imprinted itself onto my mind, I recall a certain place.

A ruin. Old ash choked my little lungs and only the final laboured breaths of a woman unseen reached my ears. No birds nor beasts. No aid nor nanny.

I was wet and warm, but the floor I was lying on was hard. There were two fleshy walls either side of me, and I had my feet still in the place I came from.

That was my mother. The fleshy walls were her legs, the hard floor a table. My umbilical cord was uncut.

I can never tell when the memory ends, it just sort of fades into dream or shadow.

My earliest recollection from a time before thought.

I was born in a ruin. A person unknown delivered me. Birth should be a beautiful thing, yet all I can remember was the numbing loneliness and bitter desolation of the place.

I may have been unwanted, but by mother suffered to birth me in that unbefitting ruin. She suffered for nothing other than me. She never saw my face, I never saw hers, yet she gave her life for me.

Such thoughts fill me with rage.

I was born in a ruin. I will bring ruin to all those that made it so.

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I mentioned the skill possessed a ridiculous level of synergy with the system no?

Let me introduce you to the previously thought useless… notepad feature.

Dun, dun, duhhhh~

The notepad; a place to jot down thoughts and random scribbles. My system feature is much the same. A blank canvas, lines and grids optional.

Except psychic.

Which is pretty cool by itself to be honest. Simpler and easy to use, direct you might say. Cuts out the "whole pick up a pen- find paper- write it down" bits. And in all honesty, is it not these very processes that stop us from writing more?

What laziness, such wastefulness no? How slothful we humans are.

But with this physic notebook, all I have to do is think what I want written, what I want sketched, and it is done.

How does this fit in with the [Observe] skill huh? Why am I nattering on about it?

Nfufufufu.

First thing: as long as I will it, anything can be recorded on the notebook as long as the outcome is 2D and unmoving.

Second thing: I don't have to see it, only know it's there, for something to be recorded.

Third thing: the [Observe] skill is "three dimensional" in nature (I'll get back to that).

Final thing: I can overlap my vision with the notepad feature to varying degrees of transparency, just like my minimap.

These may not seem like much at first glance, but when you really start thinking creatively, the applications are far beyond what you'd have expected. For now though, I'll just tell ya about the most important use I got out of it;

Learning how to read- and everything that led up to the achievement.

It starts with a merchant caravan.

Merchants are rarer than you'd think- in the state of Qin anyway. My homeland is still reeling from the decrees of King "God of War" Sho.

To say King Sho militarised the state is like saying North Korea is camera shy. A gross understatement. At his, and the State's, prime, Qin was a war machine. There was a time when damn near all men outside the capital were either farmers or soldiers.

Infrastructure, trade and commerce sidelined in favour of supply chains, munitions, and Generals. Qin's farmers farmed so they could feed soldiers who could take from other states to feed the farmers in turn… a perpetual, and efficient, war machine.

Great Qin was reliant on war.

Merchants, save for weapon dealers, were rather thin on the ground in Qin in the first place due to the mountainous terrain and location, but grew even fewer during King Sho's reign.

Even now they have yet to fully "repopulate", as it were. Thus, out of necessity, the few merchants that are bumming around, are multipurpose to the extreme,

The civilians ranked merchant caravans are basically walking convenience stores; food, fabric, lumber, herbs, spices, pets, nails, needles, pretty much any form of miscellaneous needs are stocked, piled and lugged about everywhere.

Weapon merchants are a class of their own and can vary greatly in prestige and trust. There is the social stigma of being merchants of death, but they are also necessary to the State for restocking and repairing an army's tools.

Their "class" depends case by case on the situation and are monitored heavily by pretty much everyone I gather.

The higher ranked, noble backed merchants are the highest rank the common farmer would ever see. They transport arts, paintings, women, salt, refined spices, oddities, silks and horses.

They also, most importantly to me, double as an affordable messaging system for the mid upper-class.

I deviated a tad, but we now get back to the crux; how I learnt to read, the notepad function and the merchants role in it.

During this time period, messages are written on wooden or bamboo slips, basically a segmented scroll. An upper class merchant caravan happened to pass through my village briefly, they didn't stay, we had nothing to offer, nor enough money to buy, but they slept on the outskirts for a day and bartered for water.

Some of the womenfolk that had been travelling with the caravan, for whatever reason, played with the children and showed us some of their wares.

[Observe] was used on everything I could lay my eyes on while jotting down the organisation of the caravan in my notepad, when I happened to get a brief glimpse inside a tarp covered wagon.

There was a small pyramid of slips piled on top of each other, I of course used observe, thinking I would get the material or making process of them... Instead got lines upon lines of Chinese characters imprinting themselves onto my psychic notepad.

It took quite an effort not to boggle at them as the tour continued.

They were just squiggles to me at the time, but that is where [observe] once more saved the day. It was [observe] that translated whatever language my system was written in to English, and did the same here.

Over time, by focusing [observe] on the letters in my notepad, I was able to get the rough foundation of an English to ancient-Chinese alphabet.

It was at this time that I learnt how to write my name in the local language and the [Language: Ancient Chinese] appeared in my skill menu.

Though I would see no other high-class caravan pass through my home village ever again, over the course of the next two years I would beg whenever possible to whomever possible to show me the "squiggly lines".

My youth and unexpected politeness worked nearly every time.

[Observe] was the camera, my notepad the film. I had my very own psychic spy-camera. It was through this process that I taught myself how to read and write, without any formal assistance, at the tender age of twelve.

I studied my letters and characters, my numbers, my speech, my martial arts, my crafting, my farming and all the people around me.

These skills, unheard of in a peasant at this age, were kept secret. Not for any particular reason other than habit really, I was just used to keeping secrets at that point.

Sometimes I even forget I'm keeping them in the first place.

Nothing lasts forever though, and my secrets, my knowledge that is, would be revealed completely by accident, in the most innocent of ways. Not that I would mind.

It was this misstep, this slip of the tongue that would propel me into my next stage of life.

It was this slip that would see me thrusting a spear through another man's throat in the melee of a battlefield just a year later.

It would see me taking a step forward. Looking back, I couldn't have worked it better if I tried.

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AN: Ugh. I'm not too happy with this one. Written snippets over time, this is me organising it. As a result it's very dry, basically filler, but necessary.

On the plus side, the next chapter is already half written, due to all the snippets that I couldn't have fit in this chapter coming together in the next.

The plot! is coming, so look forward to that.

Not sure when I'll update next, working on whatever interests me right now, I'll just see as it goes.

Thank you to those liked and favorited, thank you to those who messaged me, thank you to those who reviewed.

Your words spur me on. Thank you for reading.