The Martial Unity

The remaining time partly went into illusory training. Rui understood the consequences of not training or even exercising for a decade. His muscles would atrophy, and his muscle memory would erode.

The former could be averted with his Martial Soul’s control over his body, but the latter was more inevitable. This was exactly what had happened after his battle against the eldritch chimera.

When he woke up after his long, long nap, he had experienced the deprivation of his muscle memory impeding him.

“I can’t allow that to happen this time. Pursuing higher forms of adaptive evolution should not come at the cost of the foundation of Martial Art that I have built over years of enduring battles.”

Thankfully, it had not proven to be an insurmountable problem.

“Hypnotic Battleforger.”

It was a technique that he had created with his Forge of Creation. The technique relied on the Martial Soul to create a chokehold on his spinal cord to prevent any messages from his conscious mind from reaching his body. Simultaneously, it allowed him to control what his mind received from his senses, so he could simulate battles and even have his mind partake in it without needing his body to move.

He did this just enough to ensure that his muscle memory in his cerebellum remained reinforced frequently enough to ensure he didn’t suffer any loss in ability.

It certainly reduced how much time he could spend on his metamorphosis, lengthening the process by an extra year for a total of three years, but it was worth it, as far as Rui was concerned. Once he completed integrating evosapien physiology into his exterior flesh, he resisted the urge to try to control it to adaptively evolve.

After all, until he completed renovating his nervous system into a partial evosapien nervous system, he would not be able to control the genetic adaptive evolution ability of the evosapiens.

The rest of his time went into forming predictive models on each of his neurons, a process he automated in his subconscious mind with the Martial Soul. It was merely tedious, time-consuming, and energy-draining. He had created so many predictive models in his life that there was nothing novel or interesting about the process. he would much rather direct his conscious mind to something as brand new as the metamorphosis project.

He immediately moved on to the next phase of the project, which was the second least risky organ to metamorphosize.

“Let’s go with a kidney.”

That didn’t mean that kidneys were the second least important organ in general, certainly not. But the reason he had chosen to go with a kidney was that there was no threat to his life even if one ruptured, for he had another one. There were plenty of people who could survive and even be healthy with only one kidney.

That was why he immediately moved to his kidney.

“This time, it should be a bit smoother since I have ironed out some of the universal problems with the metamorphosis process in the first three years,” Rui mused. “Still, I’m sure that each organ comes with its own set of unique challenges.”

He transformed an evosapien skin cell into an evosapien stem cell, like before, except this time he had made sure that it was adaptively evolved to have protein compatibility and other solutions he had prepared.

He immediately dived into the process with the Eye of Prophecy active, ensuring that he could foresee solutions for any problems that arose.

And problems did arise, without a doubt.

Rui firmly kept his composure, diving into the kidney to fix all of them one by one over days, weeks, and months, all while ensuring he never lost any muscle memory.

It was a tough, grinding process, but it was one that Rui grew increasingly better at the more he did.

“I’m learning biology in the most experiential manner possible.”

Experiential learning was the most effective form of learning, especially compared to more theoretical knowledge that was limited to books. Rui’s knowledge of biochemistry, microbiology, physiology, and general biology grew by enormous strides as he started internalizing a profoundly deep understanding of the human body.

It vastly surpassed what anybody would learn from several degrees. Its depth increasingly surpassed even PhDs as he understood biology on a level and depth that no non-pathwalker could ever even begin to fathom.

He increasingly understood the causality of it by just the fifth year of it when he completed the kidney, rapidly moving on to the other kidney, which he completed in a much shorter timeframe, having already finished all the problems for that particular organ.

He then shifted to the spleen and the pancreas, another set of low-priority organs that were less risky compared to several other organs, completing both of those in less than two years.

He shifted to the skeletomuscular system of his body. Perhaps the system that was most directly important and relevant to his Martial Art, serving as the basis of almost all Martial Art techniques.

With each muscle and bone he metamorphosized, his understanding deepened.

With each organ he metamorphosized, his intuition of biology deepened.

This was different from the academic knowledge that he had accrued over his previous life.

It was more Martial in nature.

Martial Artists understood high principles differently from academics, who could write down equations and mathematical models describing reality.

They understood reality intuitively, instinctually, and subconsciously.

For the first time, Rui truly had partaken in a Martial understanding of reality rather than an academic one. The more he metamorphosized his body over the span of many years, the more he gained a subconscious understanding of biology.

And the patterns that underlay biology.

These were the patterns of life itself.

Every cell was an individual life. They came together in large systems that gave birth to even higher forms of emergent life. But at the very root of it all was merely cold, unliving organic chemistry.

Life appeared to be an emergent phenomenon.

Ordinary compounds like water or even the extensive organic chemistry centered around carbon were surely not alive. Yet, when they came together, they could form life.

Not all chemistry that came together formed life, however, certainly not. There were plenty of extremely complicated chemical systems that were not alive.

He was naturally aware that there surely existed some unfathomable line in chemistry that separated life from non-life, but he had never thought too deeply about it because it was not relevant to his interests and certainly far beyond his fathoming.

But now that it stared him right in the face as he gained a profound understanding of biology, the question couldn’t help but present itself.

“What is life?”