The Martial Unity

Because Rui had inherited his memories from Anthea, he had also inherited the technique for creating a soul genome. With the additional tools at his disposal, he could even improve it. It could partly help him create not just a vessel for his memories.

But a perfect clone as well.

A new him.

“Then let us commence the creation of the soul cell,” the Divine Doctor declared with a solemn voice as he pressed a button, opening the chamber to the pod for Rui to enter.

The chamber closed behind him once he took his position in front of the pod, before spewing gases on him to disinfect him. Rui closed his eyes as he activated his Realms of power.

RUMBLE

The world quivered under their weight.

He activated Megamind while also genetically enhancing his Anthean neurons to be much faster than they were, sacrificing stamina for processing power. It allowed him to reach an extraordinary realm of cognition. Then, he began the creation of a soul genome.

He reached deep into his own mind.

Deep into the oldest of memories, he had.

From Earth.

His earliest memories as a child on Earth were of being bullied at school and suffering from horrible asthma, making it impossible for him to even jog, let alone run. Each breath he had taken was labored, only temporarily stayed by inhalers. It made him weak and scrawny, which made him the prime target for bullies.

“The fuck is this bitch-ass punk looking at?” Muffled memories of his high school bullies throwing, shoving him around, and pushing him to the ground, even as he coughed, gasping for air, returned to his mind.

They were not pleasant memories by any means, but they had shaped him more than anything else to be who he was later in his life and to be who Rui had been once he inherited John’s memories.

If not for his asthma, he would likely not have been as bullied as he used to. If not for the rampant bullying, he would not have come to develop a desperately intense adoration to Bruce Lee and his philosophy of strength and life.

“Be Water, my friend.” If not for his asthma, he would likely not have been as bullied as he used to. If not for the rampant bullying, he would not have come to develop a desperately intense adoration to Bruce Lee and his philosophy of strength and life.

“Be Water, my friend.” A smile emerged on Rui’s face at the thought of just how much that one remark had shaped his entire life. His lives. It was a singularity of a moment in his life. He recalled trying to pursue martial arts in middle school, but the very first session at his local karate club made it clear that there was no future for him in karate or combat sports.

He might have truly accepted that, or would have been made to accept that by his mother, if not for her death shortly after he entered college. It had left him untethered, allowing him to truly pursue whatever he had wanted in his life. He had chosen to stay close to martial arts.

Not the most prudent of career choices. Certainly something that his mother would not have allowed, and something that his councilor tried to convince him otherwise of. To choose a more conventional and safer career path.

He defied all the well-meaning advice, choosing to go with his heart. It was an act that made him feel in control of his life.

It gave him more agency than he had felt in the first eighteen years of his life.

He had spent the rest of his academic life pursuing the various fields that he would need to become the best sports scientist, the best combat scientist, in the entire world, publishing groundbreaking research on combat methods, and eventually the magnum opus that would become the epicenter of his second life.

Project Water.

The VOID algorithm.

All the years he had spent on it.

All the effort, the blood, sweat, and tears he had poured into the project, sacrificing his personal life.

All in vain.

At the age of fifty-nine, he had no family or friends, only colleagues and an ambition that had consumed him even to the detriment of his health. Then he died.

It was not the worst life ever, by any means. His mother had gotten plenty of money from the divorce, and he had inherited it after her death, so he had never been financially crippled. One could even say he was relatively privileged if one ignored his horrific health. But he was still consumed with the one regret of failing to achieve his biggest dream when he died. Rui relived the life, swimming through the fifty-nine years of memories, before converting all those memories into information. And then stored in the atoms and molecules of a cell, creating the corresponding DNA.

The method of information storage was rather simple. In chemistry, atoms and molecules had what wete were known as degrees of freedom. The soul compression method that Anthea had developed relied on treating each degree of freedom as a fundamental element of storage.

Rather than binary memory, which was composed of zeros and ones, this form of memory was trinary, quadrinary, or even quintnary. It had more than two possible values, allowing for vastly greater dimensions of storage.

It was astronomically superior to the binary system, allowing for extremely dense storage of information. That was the secret to how a lifetime of memories was stored in biochemistry. Even as he zoomed through his life and lives as John and Rui, converting every single memory of every single sensory organ and the associated emotions and thoughts into pure biochemical memory, he entered a profound state of mind.

It was magical.

As if he was experiencing Enlightenment of Self for the very first time in his entire life.

The sum totality of his consciousness sublimated as he relived his entire life.

He found himself reliving the one and only moment he had ever seen his biological mother.

Right after he was born.

She had been exhausted, her skin unhealthily pale, while dark bags had hung beneath her eyes, filled with boundless love.

And boundless reverence.

The woman who had named him ‘reincarnated.’

Reliving that memory as he converted it into biochemical information caused a single realization to dawn on him.

An epiphany that shook his entire being.

A truth of absolute certainty.

“This method was how I was reincarnated.”

He had no proof.

Not even the slightest shred of evidence.

And yet, he knew in the depths of his heart.

Someone or something had taken the memories of John Falken and had converted them into biochemical information that was then somehow passed on to Rui when he was still merely a zygote.