The Martial Unity

The conditioning technique was a little different from the ones that he had seen in the Apprentice Realm.

As far as he could seem, the reason for this stemmed from the fact that the Martial Body was able to acclimatize to stimuli that were harmful to them far better than the normal human body could. This too was a trait that the human body lacked, but the Squire evolution breakthrough process was one of the few things that could grant the body this ability even if it didn’t have it before.

By subjecting certain parts of his body to the poison over and over again, using both healing potions and his own innate healing factor, he could eventually create a generation of cells in a localized area that possessed the ability to resist and contain the poison until the time he wanted it to.

As for the exact mechanics, he would have to work things out, but as long as he achieved a basic mechanism for releasing the substance into his flesh whenever he felt the need to amplify his healing or stamina, he would be fine.

Rui quickly got to work as he worked out the chinks of the technique.

Much to his surprise, there actually was quite some depth on how he ought to trigger the poison or where to store it and what the mechanics were.

This was not an uncommon problem, based on the degree of choice that he had in customizing this part of the training method.

Many poison-oriented Martial Artists stored their body in inactive pockets inside their body until it was time to use them.

This allowed them to deploy their poison if and when they felt like it.

People like Squire Herea did not necessarily employ that solution though. Given that she felt the need to bandage her arms, it was clear that her poison was active all the time.

Rui definitely did not want to go that route. He couldn’t afford to have the poison active all the time.

Even putting aside the fact that it would weaken his constitution too much all the time, something that he did not desire. He wanted to be in control of when it happened rather than simply allowing it to happen all the time.

The whole point of the Metabody project was to allow him to choose and control what his Martial Body would look like, he could not tolerate something that could not be controlled or directed.

That was his biggest issue.

Thankfully, it was something that could be avoided.

He began training immediately after he finished refining how he wanted the technique to look and function.

The poison was stored beneath most of his skin such that it couldn’t possibly be applied to his opponent upon contact. As for the trigger, he managed to find a way to set the trigger of deploying the poison with a simple electric shock, which would loosen up the pockets created by tissue, allowing the poison to escape.

It was effectively no different from a normal nerve impulse instructing muscles to move in a certain way.

Once he had established that, it was simply time to begin that process as soon as possible. He began the conditioning and acclimatization process of the training immediately. This involved subjecting targeted parts of his body to Reaper’s Dew. Specifically, he only wanted enough of a specific area of tissue to gain immunity towards Reaper’s Dew so that those areas could store and host the poison.

The process was actually more painful than he had imagined. It seemed like the initial big exposures of his body to Reaper’s Dew made it quite susceptible to pain and damage, as well as a lot of death.

It was one of the hurdles of the training process, it required the body to undergo an immense amount of pain and death in order to eventually be able to handle the introduction of poison substances into his body.

Rui had undergone a similar procedure when he was getting esoteric material substances inserted into his body, as well as that of Kane’s, in order for them to be able to wield their lightning techniques.

However, that substance was not anywhere nearly as toxic or poisonous as an actual poison, and thus neither of the two of them had had too much trouble eventually learning the mechanics of the technique very quickly after that.

He hoped it would be the same for poison techniques, but alas, it didn’t seem to be nearly as easy or quick as it was the last time.

(‘Oh boy, this is not going to be easy,’) Ruki mused one day when he began coughing blood up due to overexertions.

Poisons were not to be messed with. He realized that getting enough resistance to the poison such that it could be contained and ensured that it would not harm his performance while it was contained was not going to be easy.

Formulating the technique was actually easy for some of his caliber once he understood what could or couldn’t be controlled, but mastering a poison technique when it was clearly outside of his specialty meant that he was going to have a much harder time mastering these poisons compared to a poison specialist.

This was true even when he was a Martial Apprentice, poison-oriented Martial Artists had a far better time adapting to poison than non-poison-oriented Martial Artists did even at the Apprentice Realm even though their body was that of a normal human body.

Rui had suspected that the subconscious brain was the reason, those with a Martial Path centered around a field like poison, their bodies were prone to suffering to poison as well, but their brains exerted an influence on the body as far as the endocrine system went, regulating hormones and other things that would allow them to handle an external intruding substance that was highly toxic substance.

This meant that their bodies dealt with poison itself before the pain kicked in.