The Martial Unity

The Shionel Confederation exposed Rui to the powerhouses of the Squire Realm across the east side of the Panam Continent. He had thoroughly memorized the sensation of Martial Artists of various grades.

That was he could tell that Squire Veelioen was a grade-nine Martial Squire, and a particularly formidable one. He probably wasn’t that far from being considered grade-ten, and the difference between genuine grade-ten Martial Squires wasn’t large enough to allow them to dominate him in a fight.

He exuded a calm sense of power and security in his mannerisms, Rui was quite curious to see him fight, heck, he’d like to fight him as well.

Given that he was the guardian of the thirty-sixth chamber, it meant that there were thirty-five Martial Squires that were stronger than him. With such a number, Rui had no doubt that the top Martial Squires undoubtedly were grade-ten Martial Squires.

Rui had already decided to start off with the lower end of the spectrum before moving up to higher chambers in his time in the Floating Sect.

With that aside, he quickly skimmed through the additional information provided in the book.

“Oh…? Duels will occur under standard gravitational and atmospheric standards, it seems” Rui raised an eyebrow. “That’s interesting.”

Rui was surprised, he had thought that the battles would occur under normal circumstances, but apparently, he was wrong.

In hindsight though, it made sense. The entire world experienced normal air pressure and gravitation, it made no sense to train to battle in an environment that simply did not exist almost anywhere else in the world.

It reminded all the guardians to constantly keep in touch with normal environmental conditions in order to make sure they never grew to become unaccustomed to the normal world.

Rui heaved a sigh of relief. He was a little worried about the terrain advantage that guardians would undoubtedly have if a battle ensued under the extreme conditions of Ajanta Island.

The guardians, having spent a lot of time under these conditions, would undoubtedly be very familiar with it. He would definitely have an incredibly hard time against them under such circumstances.

However, if the battles occurred under normal circumstances, he would be a lot more confident.

“Guardians are not allowed to refuse a challenge if they haven’t accepted a challenge in the prior ten days…” Rui murmured as he read through the rules with interest. “So they can’t just get away with not accepting. They’ll have to fight once every ten days if they’re inundated with challenges.”

The ten-day rule was to ensure that guardians couldn’t just hang on to their chamber by refusing all challenges. However, it also ensured that they weren’t bombarded with challenges, being forced to fight once every ten days was just the right frequency to keep guardians on their toes without taking away much time from their training.

Ultimately, Martial Artists came to the floating Ajanta Island to train, if that purpose could not be accomplished then there was no point in entering the Floating Sect.

Rui could easily imagine that the lowest class of guardians received the most challenges for the same reason that Rui chose to go with the lower classes. If they were not allowed to ever refuse a challenge, they would never be able to train.

“Interesting that the guardians themselves don’t have to die if they lose a match in a challenge against other guardians,” Rui murmured.

He could already figure out why this wasn’t the case with the guardians. It was to ensure that they were never too scared to challenge and risk death against stronger opponents perhaps when they already had access to a good training avenue.

Removing the necessity of death in duels between guardians at this stage incentivized them to challenge higher-class guardians for their chamber, ensuring that no guardians grew too comfortable in their chambers since they were all too afraid of each other.

With such conditions, there was most likely a constant reshuffling and updating of the ranks of guardians through the thousand chambers.

It meant that the current ranking was most likely extremely meritocratic and an updated ranking of all one thousand Martial Squires.

“Oh?” Rui’s eyes lit up in interest. “It seems as though all challenges are publically viewable. That does benefit the challengers more than the guardians.”

However, he supposed it could be beneficial for guardians as well when he considered the fact that guardians could observe each other’s progress and capabilities.

“So they’re incentivizing gauging your opponents before challenging them,” Rui murmured.

He wasn’t sure that he wanted to do that, because while others could make minute preparations, he did a lot more. He elevated his effective power by several grades depending on how intimately he was aware of his opponents.

He had already resolved not to rely on the pattern recognition systems to build robust predictive models ahead of time in order to gain a level of strength he didn’t have due to how dangerous it was.

He didn’t want to end up with a level of power that he could not muster when someone he didn’t know challenged him.

(‘No rigorous pattern recognition, then,’) Rui resolved.

There were more rules and guidelines, but they were more detailed stuff such as some regulations to make sure that the duel was completely fair, etc.

“Nake,” Rui said after knocking on his door, remembering to use his lazy fake alias.

“What is it, Falken?” Kane emphasized Rui’s alias in turn.

“Let’s go check out the schedule for upcoming challenges,” Rui mentioned. “I want to see what kind of caliber of Martial Squires we’re going to have to pit ourselves against.”

Kane opened the door. “That actually sounds like a fun idea. I was getting bored of the rulebook.”

“I hope you read through it all.”

“Lazy skimming is what I did, but I did lazily skim through all of it, but the retention was rather low, so I’m going to have to rely on your big brain to make things make sense,” Kane yawned.