For her Westerner name, she picked Claudia – for clouds, so soft and elusive that not even the mountains can stop them. In China, for the same reason, she was named Yinyin.

The girl was born with not enough Yin, the soft energy of the universe, and too much Yang, the hardest of forces. Which made her a beast. Hence the nickname, Tigress, that she brought with her to America, right before her Shifu passed. He told her about how her imbalance would kill her someday.

Of course that same nature caused her not to listen. To her Shifu, to her doctor boyfriend, to her friends… Whenever she had a chance, she would jump into in the cage again. She would fight. Usually big men who had no idea what was coming.

One day, she’s invited to participate in a scientific experiment at a high tech lab full of nerd types she despises. She let them install weird little robots inside her head, so their minds could be linked and make a super brain. If the connection was good, they said, she would become the smartest fighter who ever lived, and they would be able to fight like her – which was all the proof they would need.

Claudia should have asked why they needed proof. All they told her was that the technology could save us from becoming slaves to the robots.

Their theory: Artificial Intelligence can scale its brain. We can’t, unless humans found a way to evolve and scale ours too. Sounded legit, except for the risk of tumors, which Claudia was okay with since they promised the experiment would also help with her condition: Suicidal Headaches, as people called it. Incurable, until that day.

Then, robots in and…headaches gone! What nobody expected was that these connections, this super brain of theirs, would also allow her to uncover an old family skill. One hidden in what she always thought to be a silly fable about a tigress, a beehive and a monkey. In China, they refer to it as The Shadow Leap. In the West, there was a much better name for it.