The Martial Unity

Time passed as Rui immersed himself in the projects relating to the Water Sect in the manifold. Simultaneously, he kept Charles Diviliers in the loop and ensured that the training resources that he had begun the design process on were in line with his intentions.

He had used his authority over the manifold to arrange a suitable working space for the design teams that Charles decided to personally lead. Diviliers Industries, under the authorization of the Minister of Commerce and Industry, shifted a large number of design terminal artifacts into the manifold, creating a makeshift lab where they could work in peace.

Rui grew rather fascinated by how these design teams used two-dimensional projections on a flat surface that could track their motion and their actions and respond to them. The technology resembled computer-aided design from Earth in many ways.

The team had immediately begun working on a preliminary iteration of the projects after Rui had given them a more fleshed out framework of training regimes that his sect needed to provide.

Much to Rui’s surprise, Charles himself led the projects after he heard Rui’s descriptions and began rapidly conjuring draft after draft for different kinds of training resources.

“This is not going to be easy,” Charles admitted. “Creating training resources that can measure the amount of adaptive evolution in things like hypnosis and domain bending is… tricky, to say the least.”

Rui winced, nodding. “I think the easiest way to create training resources will be for physical adaptive evolution, so let’s start with that. My idea is rather simple: I want to create a training environment that will continuously and alternatingly pressure the user in a variety of different ways, challenging different physical parameters. The user will have to endure and resist being knocked out without using any active techniques and will only be able to rely on physical adaptive evolution to adaptively evolve to their environments at that given moment time. The kind of pressure will keep changing, requiring them to correctly recognize what is the best way to alter their body and do so in time.”

Charles fell into thought. “When you say pressures, you mean artificial circumstances that are best solved by either strength, speed, or durability, correct?”

Rui nodded. “For example, you can have them chased by fast beasts or monsters that have great speed and agility and exceed their ability to endure. Therefore, the best option is speed. Or perhaps cause changes in the atmosphere that require them to use more force to survive. Alternatively, you can increase the amount of atmospheric pressure pushing down on them, thereby requiring them to enhance their durability. You can even have circumstances that require a combination of these at higher levels.”

In other words, Martial Artists of the Water Sect who mastered the Gatekeeper’s blood flow manipulation technique could train their Adaptive Evolution with it through raw experience. By learning how to best alter their Body under different circumstances, they would be able to inculcate a powerful intuition that would allow them to make the correct choices under different circumstances.

“Hm…” Charles Diviliers whipped up his first preliminary draft on the matter. “Something like this?”

He showed Rui a large colosseum-like structure that was completely closed off, with vast amounts of empty sections marked for broad esoteric technological systems. At the center of the colosseum-like structure was a figure representing a Martial Artist training.

Below the designs were several graphs that outlined varying speed, strength, and durability challenges over time. The constant change in the most optimal parameters would serve as a great challenge for Martial Artists training in the Gatekeeper’s techniques.

On top of that, Charles highlighted the different sub-categories within the challenges. It wasn’t enough to have just one way to pressure different parameters of any given Martial Artist; if there wasn’t diversity in the challenges that the training environment threw at the Martial Artist, then they would get used to the simplicity of the task very early.

Thus, the end outcome needed to be a massive, highly complex, and sophisticated training environment that would be able to deliver an enormous amount of pressure and diversity for it to truly serve as a way of training physical Adaptive Evolution. And from the looks of the vast amount of empty space in the preliminary design drafts, it was clearly shaping up to be a monster of a project.

It was a deeply ambitious undertaking.

“It’s perfect…!” Rui grinned. “This is exactly the kind of training resource that I envisioned when I came up with this technique project.”

It essentially functioned as an enormous training domain that was the technological equivalent of his own Yggdrasil System in some ways. Yet, unlike Rui’s mastery of the Yggdrasil System, which cost no capital whatsoever, this training resource was going to cost him billions of gold coins.

It also reminded him of the enormous advantages that Martial Arts had over esoteric technology. What the latter required immense resources to do, the former could do with negligible expenses.

Yet, in this case, Rui would still most certainly opt for the technological solution since he couldn’t afford to waste time serving as a training tool in the Water Sect forever. He needed the members of the sect to be able to train while he was away fighting the war for allies in different countries.

“Let’s move on to the other drafts,” Rui suggested. “We need to get past the design phase of the projects as soon as possible.”

One by one, Rui and Charles explored the different types of training that Rui sought to inculcate in his Water Sect. The latter deftly produced preliminary drafts that manifested Rui’s visions for the training resources he sought.

It wasn’t long before many different projects had been put in place, targeted to be completed in the span of fourteen months, which was one month in the real world outside the manifold.

Rui did not want to delay his departure from the Kandrian Empire for too much longer than that. –