The Martial Unity

[Flame Breathing]

A less potent and less difficult version of Fire Breathing.

Rui raised his eyebrows in interest as he stepped in closer for a better look. To his pleasant surprise, he found that the difficulty was grade-seven, which was far more manageable and achievably. In fact, he found similar techniques for Lightning Breathing and Earth Breathing.

[Wind Breathing]

[Rock Breathing]

All of the names were tacky, they were each downgraded versions of the grade-nine breathing techniques.

Rui immediately picked the Flame Breathing and Wind Breathing techniques. However, just as he reached for the Rock Breathing technique, he hesitated.

The Rock Breathing technique was a form of active defense. Which meant defense that required active initiative and activation of the defenses from the user. It was different from passive defense which existed regardless of what the user did, like body conditioning.

The reason Rui was reluctant to choose this technique was because he already had three active defense techniques; Acute Edge, Elastic Shift and Inner Divergence. He didn't have a single passive defensive technique.

This was a problem because he had learnt the usefulness and even the necessity of passive defensive techniques. Passive defense would not reduce if he made a mistake in timing because they were perennial. It gave him greater leeway than active defenses did.

Of course, this didn't mean passive defenses were better than active defenses, not at all. There were just as many scenarios where active defenses did much better than passive defenses. Arjun Erigaisi had lost in the very first round because he did not have any active defenses to counter Servil's vibrations, while Rui defeated Servil with active measures.

It all depended on the circumstances, and Rui wanted eliminate circumstances where his Martial Art was entirely inadequate.

He shook his head, breaking his gaze from the Rock Breathing scroll. ('Maybe next time.')

As for passive defenses, he already knew what he wanted.

He quickly headed for the defensive section and began looking for an appropriate defensive conditioning training technique. There were plenty, each for different purposes. He, however, was looking for something more general.

And he found it soon enough.

[Adamant reforging]

A conditioning technique that generally increased the durability and toughness of flesh for a variety of all kinds of damage, including blunt force, piercing, heat and elastic strain.

It was a grade-seven technique as far as potency and difficulty of the techniques went.

He nodded; this did indeed suit his purposes. With this, his combat prowess would reach the upper echelons of the Apprentice Realm without his trump cards at all.

This left him with three or four more techniques, depending on their difficulty, that he was willing to purchase. He did not want to push himself too far nor stay immersed in training for too long, after all. The next thing he wanted to verify was whether mental techniques could alleviate the difficulty of using the VOID algorithm.

Yet, he was disappointed, surprisingly.

The mental techniques were not as powerful or game changing as he hoped. Furthermore, most of them were related to the manipulation of other minds, rather than his own. It was rather unfortunate. There were some self-hypnosis techniques that increased his focus and allowed him to manipulate his mindset, but they weren't nearly enough. He needed something ground-breaking.

('Is there no technique that can increase brainpower by a factor of three or four or something?') Rui cursed.

Yet he realized how unreasonable that demand was, that would be absolutely revolutionary, and even if a technique such as that did exist, Rui highly doubted its difficulty would be below grade-ten. Such a boost to the brain was not too far from the neural enhancements that the breakthrough to the Apprentice Realm provided to the brain, it was simply too overpowered.

At the end of the day, the more powerful systems within the VOID algorithm required immense amount of nigh-instantaneous pattern identification and recognition. His mind was incredible, but it was not a computer. It could not engage in such a level of data storage and processing.

Rui sighed in frustration.

He was just about to leave, when a familiar technique caught his eyes.

[Mind Palace]

A technique that allowed the user to memorize the mission bills of missions perfectly so that Martial Apprentices could complete missions without any problem. It did this by arranging pieces of information inside an imagined location inside the mind that the user was extremely familiar with in real life. The user merely needed to imagine the mind palace and access information that they had previously placed in certain places inside that location, and they would gain perfect recall if the technique was mastered. It was a foundational technique and was entirely free.

Rui chuckled; he had always found this particular technique amusing. The fact that the Martial union went out of its way to develop this technique because there were Martial Apprentices who couldn't memorize basic information was funny to him. He could imagine the Martial Councilors of the Martial Union passing a budget bill draft that specifically allocated a significant budget to a technique that improved memory.

There was no way he needed such a technique.

Just as he turned around, he froze, as a realization thundered across his mind.

The Mind Palace technique was indeed meant to allow the user to store and memorize mission data... But what if he used it to store and memorize other data?

What if instead of mission bill data, he used the Mind Palace technique to memorize the immense amount of pattern identification data that was needed to use the higher-levels of the VOID algorithm that he was unable to use before?

After all, the biggest reason he could not use it was because he was not able to store such a large amount of information perfectly in the middle of combat at all.

Rui turned slowly as he gazed at the scroll of the technique with eyes filled with wonder and greed. To think that the one technique he denigrated the most would end up being perhaps the only technique that could save him from his predicament!