The Martial Unity

In the span of twenty-four hours, Rui experienced the training regimes of all six techniques. Once he finished training with Squire Dylon for the Tempestuous Ripple and Flow Flux training, he had immediately headed for the training sessions of the remaining four techniques.

He immediately headed to the mental technique training facility to begin training the Mind Palace technique. He was fascinated by the process.

“Your mind palace needs to be based on locations from your memories that you know quite intimately.” A squire instructor of the mind technique training facilities told him. “You need to be able to visualize them with extreme precision and accuracy consistently. That is why it is best to use locations you are most familiar with. The most common kinds of mind palaces involve using your home, the Academy, since you’ve spent years living here. Your hometown maybe, whatever works. The more mind palaces you have, the better.”

Rui nodded.

Thankfully, he wasn’t short on such locations. In this life alone, the Quarrier orphanage and the Academy could serve as viable mind palaces. In his previous life, he had his parents’ home, his home, the research institute he worked at, and even the hospital he spent a lot of time in, later in his life. Those were six locations that he could begin polishing his imagination of to serve as six mind palaces eventually.

What he discovered, however, was that the Mind Palace technique was more compatible with him than he had ever imagined. One’s visualization capabilities was the most important ability needed to master the Mind Palace technique. It was the one area where his mind, that had undergone two lifetimes of development, could shine the most, showing off its cognitive capabilities.

Rui had begun making frightening progress as he began dedicating himself to the technique. In merely the span of four hours, he accomplished what most Martial Apprentices accomplished in an entire month. He had never experienced such affinity with any Martial Art technique.

The Squire instructor who was guiding him even refused to believe this was the first he was learning the technique!

He merely shrugged, letting him believe what he wanted. Merely being smart would not explain his progress with the technique and he did not want to be asked sensitive questions that he did not want to answer.

Besides, he was genuinely elated at the results of his training of the Mind Palace technique and was far too distracted with the matter. Although he had initially been optimistic when he had the revelation that the technique could solve the problem of the VOID algorithm’s viability, he did not get ahead of himself and considered the possibility that it wasn’t sufficient.

However, his high affinity and his rate of mastery of the Mind Palace technique allowed him a greater degree of confidence and optimism than before. At this rate of mastery, the probability of atleast partially solving the VOID algorithm’s problems was not low.

They key was to ingrain the activation and usage into muscle memory and into his reflexes, only then would it become viable to use it mid-battle. He would need to restructure the way he stored data amidst battles, and that wouldn’t be possible until he ensured that using the Mind Palace in this manner became as easy and natural as breathing.

He had come out with an immense degree of satisfaction and elation once he exited the training session at the end of four hours. Although he would have loved nothing more than to continue with the Mind Palace technique forever, the other techniques were also quite important.

Just not quite as fun.

“Aargh!” Rui grimaced as he finished a rep of the Adamant Reforging training.

“Here.” The Squire instructor tossed him a low-grade healing potion. Rui immediately consumed the potion as an indescribably sense of relief filled his body as his body healed the wounds on his flesh, but only enough to ensure that the conditioning effects of the training would not disappear. High-grade potions would undo everything and return his flesh back to how it was before. Only after his conditioned flesh became the normal state of his flesh could he use high-grade potions.

The conditioning training began with his torso. It involved inflicting damage onto his torso with a combination of blunt force, piercing and heat. The healed skin after he consumed a healing potion would have greater and denser layers of epithelial tissue each time. At the end of the training regime for the technique, his flesh would be far harder to inflict damage on.

The training would be deemed complete only after the conditioning training was no longer able to inflict meaningful damage on him.

Rui left that training session having completely lost the enthusiasm he had from the Mind Palace technique training.

As much as he loved growing stronger. He had no masochistic tendencies, and that training was pure torture, even the Stinger technique’s training couldn’t compare to it.

The last two training regimes of the Flame Breathing and Wind Breathing techniques were fairly normal, they also overlapped with the training of the Tempestuous Ripple technique, so he was also making progress on that front. He was effectively going through the training regimes of five-and-a-half techniques instead of six thanks to a significant overlap in diaphragm training.

He was also certain that the first three techniques to be mastered would be those three due to this reason.

At the end of twenty-four hours, he returned back to the dorm. It had been a while since he had organically slept. He had been far too busy with missions prior.

“Hey, where’ve you been?” A familiar voice called out to him.

“Just began my training.” Rui replied. “What about you Kane?”

“I just came out of training.” He told Rui. “I’ve actually just completed the maturity condition of Squire Candidacy.”

Rui’s eyes lit up. “Congratulations! As expected.”

Kane had been working hard in training, filling up the holes in his Martial Art. The fact that he had elevated his Martial Art to that level this quickly was something Rui found amazing.