The Martial Unity

He activated Whirlpool and Elephant Breathing. His lungs expanded farther than they ever had, swifter than they ever had. The abrupt and powerful expansion created a great pressure difference between his surroundings and the contents of his lungs, and a powerful wind draft entered into his lungs momentarily creating an extremely dense breath that diffused into his blood.

SPLAT

He cut himself with a swift and sharp swing, cutting open a deep gash on his body. Having not defended against it made it easier for him to succeed.

His eyes widened as the wound began closing up at a speed that was visible to the eye. Within seconds, the wound had been closed!

"Nice!" Rui grinned.

This was definitely a great first step forward in realizing Project Metabody. He didn't have any complaints about the end outcome of the project.

Given the speed at which he recovered, he was matching Martial Artists whose bodies were entirely specialized to heal. The fact that he could do it with just a few techniques was rather impressive.

However, that did not mean that there were no shortcomings or downsides. In addition to burning through stamina much quicker, he could not always use his healing technique very easily.

The reason for that was simple, it required a breathing technique to be used while he was breathing.

This meant that he could not use Wind Breathing, or Gale Force Breathing while he was healing himself, because he could not breathe two different ways at the same time. It simply was not possible.

In the same vein, he could not use Final Breathing for all that long because it simply could not be used simultaneously with Whirlpool Breathing, and Elephant Breathing.

That meant that every time he wanted to heal, he could not use his speed as much. He also could not use long-range techniques, or at the very least, it would be too difficult to use his sound-based techniques rapidly.

He had expected this. The point of Project Metabody was to be able to distribute the resources of the body across the body to be able to best adapt to his opponent. That necessarily meant that he could not do everything at once.

Still, it meant that he would need to be careful about what he used when. This was something that was actually quite important to adapting his Martial body to his opponent.

Just like techniques, he needed to apply the right body at the right time. The VOID algorithm had been created with a system to know what motion to use based on the predictions of the predictive model, however, it did not include how he should adapt his body.

After all, bodies could not change to adapt to their opponent back on Earth. What Rui needed to do was create a new system that allowed him to pick the perfect body to adapt to his opponent each time.

This was not going to be easy.

He had put this off momentarily since he didn't see the point in trying to create such a system when he hadn't even succeeded in altering his spec configuration. The system for changing his body just right to adapt to his opponent was something that needed to cater to the results of Project Metabody.

If Project Metabody was a perfect success, then he could be more ambitious with the resulting system for choosing what kind of body change to make to adapt to his opponent. If it was a partial success, then the resulting system also needed to reflect that.

('I can actually begin building it now that I have taken the first step towards realizing Project Metabody.') Rui mused.

For the time being, he could focus on the progress that he had made thus far. He had already developed a 'healing mode' for his body where the spec configuration of his body leaned towards healing at the expense of stamina.

Thus, it would help him if he set up a system where he inputted variables about his opponent's Martial body and the predictive model, and it would output what kind of body Rui ought to change to. Given that he had only figured out the healing body option, he could begin with that.

('Under what circumstances would a body that heals very well at the cost of other parameters be the most optimal kind of body to have?') Rui wondered.

It would, almost by definition, need to be circumstances where strength, speed, durability, and, stamina weren't all that important while healing was.

Rui immediately arrived at the fundamental condition for such a circumstance. ('When your opponent's lethality exceeds your ability to prevent yourself from enduring damage.')

Hyper-offensive Martial Artists inflicted damage in ways or forms that were extremely difficult to prevent. If he ran across a Martial Artist with an extremely potent wide-range piercing offense that made it extremely difficult to evade, or defend, then he would rather spend his energy healing from the damage than defend against it.

In such a circumstance, his opponent's range would not matter. Furthermore, if his opponent was completely focused on offense, then Rui probably did not need much offense to crack the man's defense, or much maneuvering or speed to keep up with the Martial Artist who was not specialized in those fields.

This was the core condition, but that was only the first step.

At the end of the day, what he was hoping for was a rigorous system that would allow him to arrive at the perfect body adaptation with just simple inputs. He did not want to have to be distracted by too many thought processes on stuff that he could potentially automate.

Rui continued to sharpen his timing with the breathing and the healing and making sure that he timed it just right relative to enduring an injury.

He found that it was actually much better to begin the breathing technique before he even endured the wound at all, doing that made sure that the healing seamlessly began the moment he endured the wound.