The Martial Unity

?Project Skyfall, Project Speed Prison, and Project Malevolent Kitchen. These were the three domain projects that he had decided to embark on.

One domain hampered power by dumping the weight of the sky on them and every movement they made.

Another domain hampered speed by having the heavens themselves oppose speed and agility by exponentially empowering drag force and the drag coefficient within the domain.

The final domain cooked his opponent inside and out, bypassing durability and putting them on a time limit before they would eventually die from having their brains boiled, something that not even Martial Seniors could survive.

In addition, this domain served as a decent counter to freezing Martial Art that were extraordinarily lethal, even for him. Perhaps he could create a domain for that specifically when he had the time.

Rui got up with renewed drive and purpose as he set out to expand his Martial Art to include not just himself and his opponent, but also the environment they were in. He instinctively felt that he had taken several more steps down his Martial Path just by endeavoring to add domains to his Martial Art.

Rather than simply adding more redundant techniques, it was better to add entirely new dimensions to his Martial Art. That was individuality.

While the new dimensions that he was adding were not born of him, he had certainly come up with domains that only he could have come up with with knowledge from another world.

That was as good as one could expect from its individuality.

He had one more technique slot he could fit in as long as he was willing to adjust his training timeframes.

In the past nine years, he had limited himself to three technique slots at a time for mainly one reason.

“I was on a time limit back then,” Rui heaved a sigh.

He couldn’t afford to take many years worth of time for each training phase. The time constraint that he had to deal with Chairman Deacon meant that he had to spend four years just getting to the Senior Realm, and nearly another five just training to reach a stage where he could kill the six high-grade Senior bodyguards that he had.

He couldn’t afford to breathe freely and take as much time as he wanted.

Just three mental techniques had taken him two years, and the time to master them would have increased by more than just thirty-three percent had he chosen to add another technique atop them; it was too scary when his due date was rapidly approaching.

Now, however, the perilous urgency he had felt back then was gone. There was no Chairman Deacon that was aiming to kill his life. His son Decker, instead, was actually doing his best to cozy with Rui.

On top of that, as the youngest Martial Senior with decades of youthful vibrance ahead of him, he was not in any hurry psychologically.

The only thing that did put pressure on him was the Kandrian Throne War, but that was not a direct threat to him. Furthermore, he had already done as much as he could at his current stage of power to alter its course. He was a practical man; he did not think about controlling things that were wholly out of his control.

He had already emptied his pocket of tricks and solutions to impact the war. From this point on, it was time to focus on getting stronger. So strong that no one below the Master Realm was enough to hurt him.

In addition, it was time to take another step to the Master Realm. He needed to harness the power of thought even more, for his threshold was much higher.

‘How well do these three domain techniques harness thought?’ He asked himself.

Project Skyfall did not require active thought all that much. Redirecting the vectors of pressure and weight were not active thought-requiring actions and would even become muscle memory as he used the technique more often; moving the target to scope to follow his target as they moved was also not thought intensive.

Project Speed Prison, too, was not a thoughtful domain. Once he mastered and committed the heaven bending, he needed to alter drag to muscle memory; it too would become a very thoughtless technique that did not require his conscious decision-making.

The same could be said of Project Malevolent Kitchen.

These three techniques would require an immense amount of thought while training and figuring them out, but once he mastered them, he would probably be able to do them subconsciously.

They certainly improved his adaptive evolution, but how much closer would they bring him to the Master Realm?

“Hm, for my final technique slot, I shall create a domain that harnesses the power of thought,” Rui declared.

There was one big problem though.

‘I’m running out of information to process.’ He heaved a sigh.

Thought was the processing of information. As far as he was aware, there were only two forms of conscious thought relevant to combat: deduction and decisioning.

Realm. He needed to harness the power of thought even Deduction was the processing of information, from senses and memories, to output deductions through logic. This could be as simple as figuring out the weakness of your opponent or as complex as Rui’s predictive models. ɴᴇᴡ ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀʀᴇ ᴘᴜʙʟɪsʜᴇᴅ ᴏɴ ɴovᴇl(ꜰ)ir(e).nᴇt

Decisioning was the processing of those deductions to result in a decision that your body would act out. This could be as simple as the decision to target his opponent’s weakness that he had earlier deduced or Rui perfectly countering a predicted move ahead of time with an accurate decision.

Rui’s problem was the former: the deduction aspect. Deduction required information to process as all thought did. However, he had already processed all the useful information he could about his opponent and environment.

He processed each and every movement and motion they made across the entire battle from start to finish. What else was left?

‘Maybe I can create a domain technique that gives me access to a greater pool of information?’ Rui considered the possibility, though he wasn’t very optimistic. Gaining new information was something he would create a sensory technique for, not a domain technique.

‘Maybe I can create a domain sensory technique to gather more information that can be used as fuel for more thought?’ Rui’s eyes lit up with interest as he happened upon a potentially interesting concept.

A domain technique that manipulated heaven and earth to serve as a sensory technique that could supply him with additional information that could fuel more deduction.

Rui excitedly thought about this concept, seduced by the possibilities.