The following month was both interesting and surprising. Very surprising. Rudra expected that he would be guided on the skills and techniques of Rahasya, Secrets and Stealth by an assassin, a master of shadows. His guide was a clown. Well, technically, Jamur had been a court-jester. He had been a wandering minstrel who caught the attention of increasing ranks of nobility till he started serving in the court of a minor royal. He was accompanying his employer on a trip between galaxies when he got mixed up with the Void Reapers. Rudra had come back to Pehalwanalaya.

He was unsure about his new guide until he heard a few anecdotes. Jamur had not been caught and made to join the Void Reapers. He had just pretended to be one, and no one caught on… for an entire year. Even then, there were some who thought he’d been with them for years. When Sara made the Reapers join her mercenary force, she had taken Jamur as her consultant when dealing with royals and nobles. Sara and her people had taken on a mission with the Cholanash Temples, an empire spanning 1000 systems in another galaxy. Jamur would accompany Sara when she would report on progress. On one such occasion, they’d had to wait for the Army Maharishi. Jamur eventually got bored and wandered off. Sara didn’t notice till after her meeting, 6 hours later. She found him another hour later, playing cards with a group of extremely high-powered soldiers. Soldiers who were stronger than her. The difference between them and Jamur was that of a dinosaur and a microbe. Yet, they all thought Jamur was stronger and were deferring to him. At another time, Jamur had infiltrated an enemy camp and joined a junior squad. In that army, they always made all squads of six soldiers, including the squad leader. Jamur was the seventh and no one on the squad thought it was wrong. Neither did anyone in any of the other squads. For the whole 3 days, he spent there gathering the information needed. In all his escapades, Jamur never lied or used a weapon.

“Vanishing into the shadows, merging into walls, slipping into cracks, mental camouflage. All of that is fine and easily done through Skills, Techniques and Yantras. And we can also break them with levels, Skills, Techniques and Yantras. True stealth is merging so well with your environment that people justify away your presence and differences themselves. So that even if they see you, they ignore you. There is no Skill or Technique or Yantra for this. It is an Ability and a rare one in that it can be learned.”

Jamur clearly hated being a guide, though you would never think it from his words. He call Rudra “Young Prince” and professed to teach all the measly arts he knew, without reserve and hesitation. And then within minutes he’d be gone. Jamur’s ability to vanish from plain sight put ninjas to shame. Rudra’s task was simple - stick with Jamur. His quarry, however, was so slippery that in comparison, oil appeared to be as sticky and thick as molasses.

Rudra tried to get Vilas to continue her lessons, but she turned him away. She would answer and clear questions he had - at night, during dinner. The rest of the time, he was supposed to chase after Jamur. He still got to play with the other children in the evening, but it was a brief respite. He could not sleep unless it was near Jamur. In three days Rudra was exhausted, with exasperation instead of effort. Sara then told him that this was one lesson she never expected her students to complete. It was just something she wanted them to try. She told him that standard stealth Skills and Techniques were already recorded in the cookbook. He could choose to drop his pursuit of Jamur and focus on those. When ready, he could move on to the next stop. Rudra refused. Frustrating as it was, this was a challenge, and he refused to give in. He just had to change his tactics.

Rudra missed Sara’s smile and her murmuring, “None of you gave up.”

It took time and a lot of effort, integrating lessons from Sara on expanding and utilising his senses, lessons on splitting his mind and using each part for a separate task, the lessons from Dia, Faney, Siyeon on awareness of himself and his environment and lessons from his past… parts he thought he could leave behind. Success came slowly but steadily. Satisfaction came when, a month from the start of his entanglement with Jamur, he stuck to Jamur as he slunk away. Pride came when during lunch, Jamur jumped in surprise at finding Rudra next to him, immediately pretending that he was pretending to be surprised.

Sara just had to be the party pooper. “You know that Jamur never lies, right?”

“But my Ability, Hidden in Plain Sight, came on at level Apprentice. Not Novice.”

In Arya Sector, Skills, Techniques, and Abilities had a simple measure for determining the level of expertise - Novice, Apprentice, Master, Expert and Sage. Someone rumoured that there was a sixth level - Sublime, which was more myth than reality, with no record of anyone having achieved it.

“If you were to use this Ability to turn away someone, how would you do it?”

“Make them think they had achieved what they wanted to, so that they would… No. I refuse to accept that he tricked me.”

“There are three masters in this valley who stay of their own volition. You’ve yet to meet the other two.”

[Phhhhrhhrhsshshhh]

Even now, months later, Rudra thought Sara was wrong. Deep down he knew she was right, but this thought was buried deep, in the depths of a mountain at the bottom of a cave of despair, piled over with rocks of anguish and filed with sands of anger.

It was like this that after six months in the valley, Rudra arrived at his next stop in a thrilled mood and incomparably excited.

Maya. Illusion. He had discussed this with Sara, about referring to the arts of shakti like this.

“The world is an illusion, a dream. From an era whose stars have since become dust on the shores of lost worlds, legend is that when people first discovered shakti they saw it as proof the world was not real.”

“That is … wild.”

“Is it? With enough shakti you can make dreams real, turn real into nightmare. With shakti the boundaries of reality and fantasy cease to exist. Except turn transience to permanence. It can delay the inevitable but in time everything fades.”, Sara paused for a moment, a faraway look in her eyes.

“Everything is maya, an illusion, a dream. To wake from this dream is to transcend, to gain moksha, to break free of kaal. Only then do you stand apart from the cycle of time that erodes all existence and gain complete mastery over this world, its past, present and future.”

“You become a god.”

Sara smiled, “Maybe more.”

“Ok, so to stand above all, I have to advance to the zenith, open all chakras.”

“And assimilate all affinities, master all tatvas, be perfect in body and mind… The Param Sutra. It was on a simple little stone tablet found before the Collectorate was formed and determined to be from the earliest times of the universe. Just a handful of lines, no shakti, no circuits, nothing else. But these lines speak of the path to supremacy over all that exists. A lot of the writing had faded to the extent that the bit at the end was missing, lost to time.”

“I am sure there are many such Sutras out there, offering a path to being supreme, except their creators never are. I know of some floating in the Arya Sector.”

“Never disregard them. And yes, there were a lot, many were dead ends, some led their followers to extreme power. Yet, even these all failed to even reach the soles of the few who achieved everything as per the Param Sutra, everything except the missing bit. And as per the records they left, they speculated they walked only two-thirds to four—fifths of the path to supremacy. That is why its called the Param Sutra, the Supreme Sutra, but the tablet named itself the Ek Siddhant, the One Principle.”

“Wow. I guess there is more to this than just ratcheting up one’s levels.”

“Lots more and everything has infinite variations. It is not for nothing that it is said that everyone walks their own path of advancement. Even if two people learn the same things and do the same things, their experiences alter their journeys. That is why when you come across any technique offering a path to the peak, don’t reject it out of hand. As long as they formed a technique from genuine insight, even if it is mediocre, parts of it may yet offer a glimpse of the truths you need.”

Rudra nodded as if convinced, the look on his face showing the complete opposite.

After such lofty discussions, Rudra had high expectations and anticipation. More drove him than Sara’s mystical musings on shakti. On Earth, he’d been many things, learned even more, most of them unsavoury and illegal. His lack of experience and the law caught up to him at a very young age. Justice meant he ended up in an orphanage, instead of prison… a rose by any other name. For him, it just meant additional struggles, till the day he discovered computers and the internet.

As Rudra learned how to break down shakti techniques, he could see a similar progression as going from a high level programming to machine code and the patterns in techniques and yantras gave a sense of fusion of logic and electric circuits, fractals and automata. He had run up against a wall when trying to investigate the theories underlying these patterns. Arya Sector was not lacking in these aspects. The problem was it was flooded with thousands of ideas seeking to explain how it all worked. The pixies had proven to be no help on this. They were just happy to document all knowledge and share it.

Rudra hoped that the master of shakti techniques and yantras would break this wall for him. He hoped against hope that somehow this would help him make a bridge connecting his past life to this one.