The Martial Unity

And thus, they immediately began training.

Rui had Ieyasu begin imparting a diverse variety of principles to him, starting from the most fundamental and universal fields.

“Breathing is a fundamental foundation of nearly everything I copy.”

In a training chamber in the manifold meant for breathing, Ieyasu sat opposite Rui. The latter had a breathing training apparatus attached to his mouth and nose.

This was an apparatus that not only trained breathing strength but also breathing patterns.

Different patterns of breathing corresponded with different rates of oxygen supply to the body. It was this principle that was the basis of supplementary breathing techniques.

Additionally, breathing techniques were also at the foundation of heaven manipulation, which was another popular field in Martial Art.

Thus, as long as he gained a foundational mastery of his breathing, he would automatically gain a lot of potential variety and power.

“Breathing mastery is absolutely necessary,” Ieyasu calmly remarked as he watched Rui strengthen his breathing. “If I had weak lungs, it wouldn’t matter how good my copying was, I would not be able to copy anything that I wanted to.”

Rui rarely engaged in foundational training these days, thus he found it difficult to cope with the sheer amount of pressure the breathing apparatus put on his lungs and diaphragm. It also trained his breathing dexterity and precision, requiring him to breathe in extremely precise timing and force.

Yet, he knew that Ieyasu was on the mark when it came to the importance of breathing in general, but also the importance of breathing to Project Forge. Because most techniques had a breathing component, being able to generate that breathing component for his spontaneously created techniques was extremely important.

“Master these breathing patterns,” Ieyasu instructed before altering the frequency and amplitude of his breathing patterns. Rui frowned amidst his pants. “Why these specifically?”

“They are important.”

It was not a very good explanation, but Rui was able to understand the intent underlying his instructions with the SOUL System.

These were the patterns and their derivatives that Ieyasu ran into the most when copying other Martial Art. Being able to alter frequency and the depth of breath changed the distribution and timing of oxygen throughout the entire body, which altered output.

The greater the diversity of his output, the more techniques that Rui could create. In other words, the foundational mastery training itself was more complex than Rui had foreseen.

Even within the foundational mastery, principles and fields could be further distributed into a spectrum of universality.

Principles and fields like breathing, which were almost omnipresent within Martial Art, were universal foundations that each of Rui’s techniques would likely deploy to varying degrees. Thus, obtaining foundational mastery in the full length and breadth of breathing was high on the priority list.

Yet, that wasn’t the only thing that Ieyasu had Rui focus on in their first training session.

“Why are you having me do dynamic progressive overload?” Rui groaned as struggled to lift a massive amount of weight through the full range of motion of his entire body.

“It’s important,” Ieyasu calmly replied. Again, Rui had to rely on the SOUL System to understand Ieyasu’s rationale.

And it was surprisingly sound.

In all the years that Ieyasu had copied and mimicked techniques, one of the biggest hurdles he had run into was that his body did not possess precisely the right kind of mobile strength to execute them.

Different sequences of actions required different muscles and different parts of the muscles in different positions. Different techniques differed in this matter differently. Thus, a body that sought to execute an ocean of different techniques needed to be strong, precise, and powerful with all muscle groups at all ranges of motions and at all positions.

This was the sort of niche insights that one gained only through experience. It was also why Rui valued Ieyasu’s insights in the foundational mastery department; his experience in copying and assimilating techniques was the closest thing to Project Forge.

If not for him, Rui would have most likely simply begun with training in a variety of many fields before realizing how especially important the fundamentals underlying the foundations were.

He could avoid wasting time by relying on Ieyasu’s experience in the matter to begin training and mastering.

Rui felt like he was in the Academy once again as he worked on his foundations in a rigorous manner that he simply hadn’t in a long, long time.

Of course, this was for good reason. As someone with a powerful background in sports and combat science, he knew that simply mindlessly training one’s body was stupid. This was not a body-building competition; the goal was to build a body that was optimal for combat, not weight-lifting.

Thus, excessive progressive muscle overload was not good for Martial Artists as too much muscle in combat was a liability. However, Project Forge was the first combat system that required him to broaden the very fundamentals of his Body and Martial Art, upon which he could master a variety of other fields.

He could rely on Ieyasu’s experience to navigate what were the most important foundations and fundamentals to have for this specific project, drastically cutting down the time in what would be an otherwise even more tedious trial-and-error process.

And thus, an extremely lengthy and tiring process of developing a foundational mastery adequate for the purpose of Project Forge had begun. All the building blocks for the techniques that Rui would create in the future would be created in what was shaping up to be the longest training session in his entire life. He knew with how intense and rigorous just the basics alone were going to be that this would take a long, long time.

On top of that, this was just half of the project.

He would have to also devote immense time to the creation of a powerful system of thought that could tell him exactly what was the most optimal technique he could create that could maximize the probability of victory.

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