The Martial Unity

When Rui finally found a training chamber to seclude himself, he sat down on the floor cross-legged, falling into deep thought. His eyes wandered, narrowing as he grew immersed in the project of tapping into higher dimensions.

”The biggest problem is that I can’t sense the Calabi-Yau manifolds of reality even with my senses,” he frowned, focusing his senses into the quantum world. He could sense atoms and subatomic particles. He could sense the force-carrying particles as well as the nature of these particles as excitations of quantum fields or something of the sort rather than discrete point-like particles.

With the information dimensions, he could observe without collapsing, which was the greatest advantage that he had. However, he still couldn’t detect anything that resembled the Calabi-Yau Manifold.

”It’s because my senses are not attuned for a clinical exploration of the quantum depths of reality,” he correctly realized. ”Dwight was able to sense it because dwarves are specialized for being sensitive to phenomena at that scale.”

Ordinarily, that would be the end. A Martial Artist was very different from a craftsman. Their very nature, the essence of who they were, the way they leveraged their potentials, and the paths they walked were all radically different from each other. Just as a craftsman couldn’t shatter mountains with a fist, a Martial Artist couldn’t tinker with reality at the depth of the craftsman.

However, Rui was not an ordinary Martial Artist.

”If my existence is not attuned to behold the barrier between dimensions, then I simply have to adaptively evolve my very existence.” His ethereal eyes flickered with a profound excitement. ”I am Water. I can adaptively evolve to anything.”

He closed his eyes, activating the Gene Realm. The genetic gap between his Anthean half and his Antithesis half had reduced in the past eighteen years, causing him to become more corporeally uniform at the cellular level. He could adaptively evolve his genome to change the essence of his existence.

”I can borrow some traits from dwarven physiology.”

His sensory organs needed to change, first and foremost. His senses were optimized for combat, which he didn’t want to entirely get rid of since the whole point of mastering higher dimensions was to leverage them in combat.

So that meant he couldn’t go the full dwarven route. He needed to preserve the Martial nature of his body and simply attune it to the quantum. He immediately began altering the genome of his cells, causing rapid changes in them.

Changing his sensory organs to become more sensitive to the quantum was not easy, but he had an idea on how to go about it. Conventionally, the sensory receptors of his sensory organs were individual cells. These receptor cells received stimuli from the outside world and sent signals through the nervous system to the brain. They were the smallest unit of the sensory organ.

However, because cells were so large compared to the quantum world, their sensitivity towards quantum phenomena was structurally limited. Martial Artists had extremely sensitive cells, but even that had a limit.

If he wanted to be able to sense more, he could do so by making his cells smaller, which he certainly was capable of doing, but it was a very difficult and non-combat practical route. He could use his Martialverse to help with that, of course, but he was more interested in solutions that relied less on his Martialverse.

The Martialverse was a limited resource, unlike the other Realms which were much more bountiful. He would rather opt for non-Transcendent solutions if possible.

Another solution was to use multiple cells to hone in on the quantum scale with high resolution. Each cell would capture a blurry image of things happening at the quantum scale, but by integrating a thousand different blurry images, he could combine them to compute a single high-resolution image. Essentially, he would rely on integrated imaging techniques to improve his perception of the quantum scale.

This was a less physiologically taxing solution, and it didn’t require the Martialverse.

With the Sage Realm, the Gene Realm, and the Corporeal Realm all combined, his mastery over his body was absolutely absolute. He could control every single individual cell in his body with perfect accuracy and precision, so this solution was not beyond his ability to implement.

It would be neurologically taxing, though; that was the only downside. He was increasing the sensory burden on his brain by an order of magnitude. Thankfully, he had upgraded his neurocognitive hardware when he converted electrical signals in his brain into light signals, so he could handle it.

”This is the way.”

But the sensory organs alone weren’t enough. The nervous system needed to be equipped to be able to handle a higher throughput of information. For that, he would have to expand the number of nerves in each bundle and make it significantly more like that of the dwarves.

The downside to this was that it would slow down his reaction speed and reflexes a little. Currently, his nerves were like streamlined fiber optic cables that shot light between brain and body, maximizing speed, but now the ’queue’ for signals would increase, causing there to be a slight delay.

This was the nature of adaptive evolution. To change to adapt meant to cease being something and to become something else. That meant that the traits of what one used to be could no longer be retained after the change. However, the change was still highly desirable because the destination was more suited for whatever situation one was in.

But that was still not the extent of the transformation he would have to undergo.

”I would have to change my brain as well.”

After all, his brain was attuned for combat. Where the finer details mattered less than the bottom line of threat recognition.

If a fist was flying towards one’s face, there was no point in trying to accurately map out the surface of the fist at a quantum level. What was important was to process the attack and formulate a defense based on which option would lead to the best outcome. That would need to change a little if he was going to tap into higher dimensions continuously.