The Martial Unity

"Purpose of visit?" The guard at the main gate of the Martial Union asked, inspecting his learner's Martial license.

"Purchase of technique," Rui replied, before proceeding to fill in a bit of paperwork needed to enter the building.

Once he was in, he immediately headed for the symbiotic facility.

The Martial Union was even larger than the Martial Academy as it catered to not just far more missions, but also far more Martial Artists. Furthermore, the needs of Martial Artists were often greater than that of Martial Apprentices, thus a greater amount of space was inevitably required.

It took him a while until he reached the facility he was looking for.

"Ah, Apprentice Quarrier." A staff member nodded. "You do have an appointment scheduled for a symbiotic procedure. Please make your way to operating room fifty-one."

She handed him a receipt for the purchase of the Mindmirror Symbiote as well as its procedure. It was much more expensive than Rui had expected, but thankfully he had earned a heft amount in the last month as well as the months prior. He was able to afford it.

"Apprentice Quarrier." A medical staff approached him after a bit of waiting in the designated room. "The procedure is ready. Please come this way, sir."

There were a few nurses and as well as a doctor, who welcomed him with a smile. "I am doctor Heela, I will be leading and overseeing the procedure. I believe you have been briefed on the procedure you will undergoing today?"

"I have." Rui nodded. He had taken the liberty to completely familiarize himself with the process.

The implantation of the Mindmirror Symbiote was not a simple quick procedure, much to Rui's chagrin. Most Symbiotes normally took an extended period of time to fully grow and develop to maturity from the time of the implantation into the host. That process was normally highly accelerated with esoteric biotechnology such as potions made from esoteric substances and compounds that accelerated the growth of the symbiote as well as rejuvenating and nutritional potions that quickly supplied the symbiotes with a large amount of sustenance needed to sustain the accelerated growth of the symbiote.

However, that unfortunately could only be done to a highly limited degree with the Mindmirror Symbiote as an extremely accelerated process was too harsh on the brain of the host, and would likely cause brain damage. Furthermore, the development of the Mindmirror Symbiote was not simple inherently, and thus prolonging it more than normal to a certain degree was a cautious measure.

The symbiote larva would first be injected into the bloodstream at a particular point in the circulatory system and would enter the brain. This part was the first procedure that required thorough medical supervision and potential intervention during the bonding between the symbiote larva and the brain.

Once the symbiote successfully formed the initial bond with the brain, it would latch onto the occipitotemporal artery and vein to gain access to fresh blood in order to obtain the oxygen and other nutrients it needed to survive while also extracting the genetic information of the host. It would then undergo the growth phase, slowly expanding in volume, forming a small mass of interconnected human neurons underneath the brain and above the internal skull plates.

It would take a few days for the symbiotic brain mass to fully grow. The symbiote would need to slowly siphon energy nutrients and other compounds needed to reproduce more neurons.

When the secondary brain was developed was when the grade-ten difficulty of the technique would occur. The symbiote would begin the secondary bonding process between the secondary brain and the host's brain. Neurons of the secondary brain would branch out and latch onto open-ended neurons, forming connections with the host's brain.

And that was when the initial takeover process would begin while the bond was still in flux and not yet stabilized. It was akin to a virus; it was capable of corrupting the host's brain despite not being conscious or sentient. If the symbiote succeeded in taking over the brain, the host consciousness would be usurped. However, the host merely needed to resist until the secondary bond matured. Once that happened, the symbiote will have fully matured and its relationship with the host would be permanently unchangeable.

Only then would the implantation of the symbiote be considered a success. However, that was just the beginning as far as mastery of the symbiote went. The mental strain wouldn't begin immediately, it would begin once the secondary bond deepened and greater exchanges of information occurred that the brain was not supposed to deal with, putting an unnatural strain on it.

After that, it would take some time before the user obtained basic proficiency of the symbiote. The symbiote functioned like an extra-connected processor. It would not boost general cognitive phenomena and processes or massively boost his IQ, but it could process massive amounts of information in ways that he wanted to after a certain amount of training.

The secondary brain was like a high-speed processor hooked up to the brain. It was a blank slate that could be 'programmed' to process different kinds of information in different ways as per the user's wish via certain techniques. This allowed the user to pawn off time-consuming thought processes and calculations to the secondary brain which would process it much quicker than he would because it didn't have any other cognitive processes ongoing inside. It truly functioned more akin to a computer rather than a conscious organ.

Rui could program heightened reflexes, speedy calculations, and other neurological phenomena that his consciousness would be forced to do by itself. The secondary brain could process the information parallelly with his own consciousness once it had been trained to, allowing the speed at which he completed mental tasks to skyrocket significantly!

Rui wondered how much faster his processing of the VOID algorithm would grow. He was sure he would become so much superior with it that he would utterly crush anything he was currently capable of with it. He needed to contain his excitement; he didn't want to embarrass himself in front of the medical team that would be overseeing the procedure.