The Wanderer

Chapter 1

Chaos has always been clever. She knew from a very early age that she was not wanted in this family. Her mother was a prostitute that her father had taken a fancy to. She had died during childbirth and so the unwanted daughter was given such an evil name.

Her father was a minister in the court. He wasn't particularly powerful but he was filled with greed and ambition. Chaos knew very early on that she couldn't leave her life in the hands of that man. The moment she had her first menstrual cycle, he'd sell her off to any minister that would help him be promoted.

She didn't want that kind of life. She felt life should be exciting, dangerous or exhilarating. Maybe even all of them together. She never understood why women were so willing to be obedient to men, but even if they told her, she'd still think they were morons.

She had the luck to find an inner strength manual in the library of her family's house. This dust covered book forgotten in the corner was the perfect partner of this unloved little girl. Seeing as no one was around she pocketed the book and ran back to her dilapidated yard. The servants didn't care where she ran off to. They believed that nobody would care if they slacked off. At first they were a little worried but they soon saw that the lord of the house never even remembered this daughter and the madam of the house just treated her as air. As long as she had enough food to eat, that fulfilled her duties as a "mother". So the servants gave her enough food. Enough to them isn't very much, but Chaos never thought about relying on these selfish people.

She would usually sneak into the kitchen and grab a few steamed buns that were always available, but she knew this was not a long term solution. She knew that the kitchen staff were beginning to become suspicious at the constantly missing buns. So finding this manual was the best thing that could've happened to her. As it was said before, Chaos is not an ordinary child. She has a level of intelligence that far surpasses her age. She can be considered to be a genius in almost every aspect. She taught herself to read and write as soon as she could walk on her own. By spending day after day slipping into the library that was rarely used, she had nothing but time to practice. It was after learning to read that she came to understand the situation of women like her in society.

She wasn't happy when reading about the virtues a woman should have and the rules she must abide by. However not every book was as useless as that one. There were many books on business, agriculture, strategy. She could remember everything she had read. After all, a genius can not be held to mortal standards, but it wasn't until she found the sections with novels that she found a path that called out to her. She read a simple story about a lone martial artist falling in love with the daughter of an official. The story talked about how the man was unmatched in ability, joining the army and rising to the rank of general, just so he could marry that woman he fell in love with.

Chaos didn't care about the drivel that was a love story. It was the mention of martial arts that piqued her interest. She read over the sentence time and time again. 'He had martial abilities, that allowed him strength beyond that of normal men'.

"Beyond the strength of normal men" she thought. What if she also had strength above normal men? Would she be able to avoid the life of being relegated to a mere concubine for some minister?

Those questions would be hidden away deep in her mind. Always showing themselves when the night was quiet and her thoughts were plentiful.

She had read from the novels that if you want to train the most effectively, then a person needs to start around the age of four. She was already three at that moment so she started searching the library everyday for anything that could help her figure out how to start the process. She had managed to find a few training manuals that depicted combat movements. She knew this was only half of the puzzle but she was still happy to see it. She knew she couldn't do it in her own yard. Although the maids were lazy, they were still cautious of being found out. So they kept an eye out for the surroundings. However, Chaos knew there were many uninhabited yards further down from hers, so she decided she'd use one of them as her training grounds.

That year of training has let her find some problems with the movements. Although she had never fought another person, the moves were not very useful. She spent some time creating a practice dummy that was her height and found that these moves were indeed flawed. A revelation went through her mind. Her father was the best at doing superficial work. The library was only there as a decoration, so the books in it were probably just bought from where ever the servant could get them from. This would mean that these combat instructions were probably very poor. She felt a little angry knowing how much time she wasted learning them, but it wasn't a complete loss. She had a vague idea of some more efficient methods that these movements could be improved to become.

It was that knowledge which allowed her to be wary of the inner strength manual after she found it. She ran back to her training grounds and opened the manual. Looking at the diagrams inside it involved the knowledge of acupuncture points, the anatomy of both the outer and inner structures of the human body. She had spent some time reading the medical journals in the library, so she wasn't fooled by this seemingly complicated method.