The Martial Unity

“Pain?” Squire Juvier looked at Rui with disbelief. “You want to make pain the trigger to extreme starvation? Have you lost your goddamn mind?!”

“Trust me.” Rui sighed. “I know what I’m doing.”

Squire Juvier facepalmed himself as he shook his head. “Well, you’re the one who’s going to be responsible for it, so go for it. It’s a crazy stupid idea that serves no purpose, but I’ve already warned you of that. My responsibility as a guide and aid ends there.”

“Then let us begin the moment I am beset by starvation.” Rui nodded. He went on to solidify details of the procedure with Squire Juvier. Matters such as the kinds of pain to be inflicted as well as the frequency of infliction of pain and the order.

Squire Juvier had never been asked to torture a Martial Apprentice in order to form a pain trigger. Therefore, he had absolutely no input to offer from his previous experience, he merely shrugged and accepted whatever Rui told him on the matter. He had long given up on trying to make sense of the strange and crazy Martial Apprentice.

It didn’t take long, he was already quite hungry after the continuous hypnotized hallucinations that he had undergone in order to be able to experience and identify the idea Martial body type that would become the template for his body as a Martial Squire.

They shifted to an isolated training room for the training technique.

“It’s time.” Rui nodded, as his stomach growled and he was beset by famished hunger.

Squire Juvier sighed, before suddenly clapping swiftly before Rui’s face, startling him.

Squire Juvier swiftly subjected Rui to a few quick whispers, before slowly edging back to speaking normally.

“You feel open, transparent, shapeable.” He told Rui softly.

Hypnosis was a verifiably real field even back on Earth. It was a form of indirect manipulation of the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind was normally to external information that the mind processed by virtue of the fact that it was subconscious, external influx of information could and did influence it, but only if it bypassed the conscious mind. The conscious mind served as a guard between the external influx of information and the subconscious mind, preventing the former from influencing the latter as much as possible, by processing the information itself.

That was why, back on Earth, hypnosis didn’t work if the subject didn’t allow the hypnosis to be effective by allowing it to influence the mind by immersing one’s self into the hypnotic treatment. It was impossible to forcefully hypnotize someone against their will back on Earth.

The same couldn’t be said for the hypnosis in Martial Art of Gaea.

Martial Artists weren’t limited to the same degree as ordinary people when it came to the application of hypnotists.

Martial Artists had developed techniques that allowed them to directly influence the subconscious mind by misdirecting the attention of the conscious mind before proceeding to hypnotize the subconscious mind swiftly in the moment of the misdirected attention of the conscious mind.

Or they would engage in highly stealthy and subtle manipulation that was sneaky enough to bypass the recognition of the conscious mind as an attempt to manipulate the subconscious mind.

Squire Juvier had applied a hypnosis technique that relied on the former principle. All he needed was the momentary misdirection that a gesture as simple as abrupt and loud clapping caused in order to exploit the momentary distraction to influence Rui’s subconscious mind to induce his subconscious mind into a state where he would more easily form associations between the trigger and the triggered.

As powerful as Rui’s mind was, he could not inherently resist and negate the mental techniques of a Martial Squire the way he did the mental techniques of a Martial Apprentice. He opened his eyes once Squire Juvier had finished. His eyes were different, they were blank than they normally were.

“We’ll begin soon then.” Squire Juvier told him.

Rui simply nodded wordlessly.

Squire Juvier sighed.

THWACK

His arm struck Rui’s skin, making a loud sound. Rui winced, silently grimacing. Squire Juvier had used just enough power to whip Rui to cause him significant pain, but not too intense to be overwhelming. Rui wanted the pain threshold for the trigger to be not too high. If he subjected himself to too much pain during the training session then he would not be able to necessarily trigger autophagy when he was wounded.

Thus, he needed to ensure the pain was just significant enough, and nothing too overwhelming.

That was why the pain caused by a simple whip with his arm was chosen as the preferred means to cause pain. It was easy enough to inflict enough pain using this method, and the need for healing potions was also minimal in comparison.

Squire Juvier could continue whipping Rui’s skin for a long time before the need for a healing potion emerged.

Rui gritted his teeth as he endured the suffering, while also focusing on his hunger. Focusing on the mental state/phenomenon that was to be triggered was necessary to ensure an associative bond formed between the trigger and the triggered phenomenon.

Otherwise, he would just needlessly suffer. There was no point in simply subjecting himself to torture if he didn’t ensure it was as effective as it could be. He would simply be increasing the amount of time he would be subjecting himself to torture.

The procedure continued for hours. Rui gritted his teeth as he bore the pain. The combined mental torment that came from both starvation, as well as the physical pain he felt, was overwhelming together. The fortitude and strength he had built after the torturous training regimes of the Stinger and the Adamant Forging were faltering as starvation drained him of his strength and his willpower.

Despite the pain not being worse than that of the training regimes of the Stinger and Adamant Forging, he still felt a greater amount of torment from the Mind Switch technique training.