The Martial Unity

Chapter 2488: Foundational Mastery

The idea to spontaneously create techniques on the fly was not something he abruptly came up with then and there. No.

He had come up with it in the middle of battle against Tokugawa Ieyasu when he had felt that his existing techniques were not adequate enough to deal with his opponent. Ieyasu was one of the only people who was able to push him to discover new dimensions of adaptive evolution. Thanks to him, Rui knew exactly how he wanted to take another step towards accomplishing Project Water.

”I need to create a system of thought that allows me to create new techniques on the fly.”

It was an extremely tall ambition.

Techniques took individuality, time, and effort to create. Unless one was an era-defining genius like Ieyasu, it was not something that one could master very easily.

”Still, it is not absolutely impossible.” He recalled how he had created Heavenly Divergence in the battle.

This was a technique that was extremely similar to Heavenly Convergence with a single difference in it—the direction of the force vectors in the atmosphere. Otherwise, the technique made use of an existing technique entirely.

This taught him an important lesson.

”I can create techniques on the fly if most of the process of creating the technique is already complete.”

This was the insight that he had gleaned from the battle.

As long as ninety-nine percent of the technique was already complete beforehand, then he could spontaneously create techniques in the middle of a battle by completing the final one-percent of the technique then and there. That meant that he needed to have ninety-nine percent of countless techniques already completed ahead of time.

”Thatʼs not going to be easy,” he mused with a wince. ”Creating the foundation for so many techniques ahead of time is going to be very difficult and time-consuming.”

For one, techniques involved a lot of muscle memory. That was one of the things that separated them from ordinary movements.

There was a tremendous amount of training that went into burning the movements into the brain such that it could be completed without being slowed down by the unwieldy coordination of the brain. Training also gave techniques higher amounts of precision and accuracy compared to ordinary movements and actions.

Techniques also deployed principles of the world to be more effective in battle. Thus, he would need to have mastered these principles ahead of time if he wanted to create techniques that deployed said principles.

Thus, in order to create a technique on the fly, he would need to have, ahead of time, the underlying muscle memory and mastery of the sequence of actions that comprised a technique.

Each technique could be broken down into a sequence of actions.

As long as one mastered the sequence of actions, one could execute the technique. Thus, if Rui could master a large number of building block actions that corresponded to different principles and mechanisms, then he could design a technique that involved pre-mastered actions and spontaneously execute it. ”Thus, creating new techniques on the fly requires two elements,” Rui realized. ”The technique blueprint and the foundational mastery.”

The former was to be spontaneously designed in the middle of battle to be antithetical to his opponent, while the latter needed to be obtained well ahead of the battle.

In other words, he needed to train a lot.

He needed to go all-out with extreme training over a long period of time so that he could obtain a deep mastery in them so that they could be used to create techniques spontaneously.

”Not unlike what Ieyasu did in order to copy techniques easily,” Rui mused. ”How ironic that Iʼm copying that strategy.”

The difference was that Ieyasu was able to master techniques extremely well due to his extraordinary talent. Rui would need to grind out and train extremely hard if he wanted to be able to develop a large and diverse dataset of foundational mastery that could serve as the building blocks of new techniques.

”Of course, my existing foundational mastery is also solid, but it isnʼt as diverse as Iʼd like it to be.”

It was better to spend quite some time diversifying and broadening his foundational mastery with extensive training so that he had more options at his disposal on the battlefield. ”I know just the person to help me with that.” A smirk appeared on his face. ”The foundational mastery will be time-consuming and intense, but it is simple. I will need to spend years working hard to master many principles extremely deeply such as heaven and earth bending, temperature manipulation principles, collision principles, sound, electromagnetic radiation, electricity, hypnotic, anatomy, physiology, cellular biology, and potentially a few other higher principles that allow me to harness a brand new frontier of foundational mastery that can serve as the building blocks of new techniques.”

It would be very difficult to master all of it. And yet, it was only half of the work that he needed to do. ”How am I going to create a system of thought that allows me to design technique blueprints mid-fight that are antithetical to my opponent?”

This was more a complicated issue than the foundational mastery.

The foundational mastery was extremely difficult and time-consuming, but it was simple and elementary at a conceptual level.

Train hard and master a lot of stuff.

That was all he needed to do.

However, the system of thought that could design a technique blueprint antithetical to his opponent was an extremely complicated and complex matter. He needed to define, objectively and scientifically, what it meant for a technique to be antithetical to his opponent.

Once those conditions were established, he could take multiple approaches to creating a technique that could satisfy the conditions needed to adaptively evolve to his opponent. He could identify certain principles that were most suited to fulfilling those conditions and create a technique centered around said principle.

Or he could come up with a vision for the technique output first and then scramble to find principles that could create that technique.

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