He wasn’t entirely sure how strong he would become once he mastered these techniques but he genuinely couldn’t wait. He also didn’t know if his Martial Art would reach maturity once he finished this training stage. It was possible, but he couldn’t be sure, he could only hope.
He took his six scrolls to the payment registrar. He didn’t care about the cost; he had earned an immense number of Martial credits and could easily afford many more techniques. He appreciated the system that the Martial Academy had set up. He had even long understood the reason it as the way it was and why it was so good.
The Martial Academies were meant to pump out qualified Martial Artists, this was their top priority. He was relatively certain the Martial Academy didn’t give two hoots of the money it earned from the students of the Academy completing missions.
So why did it charge Martial credits that could only be earned from missions?
Wouldn’t just giving all the techniques to the students for free allow them to not waste time on missions and quickly master more techniques?
The answer was yes, but doing this would reduce the quality of Martial Artists produced in the long run. Being given everything they need on a silver platter without any cost would simply produce Martial Apprentices who were not worthy of the techniques they were given. Once these over-privileged Martial Artists left the Academy and suddenly run into a much harder system as far as purchasing technique and completing missions went, they would simply collapse under the difficulty because they had not developed the experience as well as the perseverance needed.
Yet at the same time, Martial Academies could not make the difficulty too high. It didn’t make sense to force Martial Apprentices to spend years grinding missions just to earn a handful of techniques. That was a waste of valuable time. The human mind and body’s ability to learn was at its highest until the age of twenty-five, this was also the age at which the brain would complete its development. After this age, the ability to learn and grow would slowly reduce, bit-by-bit.
Forcing these Martial Apprentices to work when it was best to learn and, afterwards, learn when it was best to work would be utterly inefficient.
Thus, the Martial Academy had aimed to sought the best balance. After a month of mission grinding, Martial Apprentices could generally buy a handful of techniques. This was a good balance because it just enough that it would force Martial Apprentices to go through several months of mission grinding across their time in the Martial Academy without hindering their training too much.
Once he bought the techniques, he sat down at a table in the library. He could only read the techniques in detail only after he bought them, after all. He soon began opening each scroll, taking his time as he went through all the data.
As always, the training regimes for the techniques were interesting.
Flame Breathing and Wind Breathing required the usage of a training breathing apparatus that aided in helping the user master the timing and degree of inhalation and exhalation. To Rui’s surprise, there was also a light amount of conditioning required for the master of the techniques.
It required the user to increase the flexibility and the strength of the diaphragm allowing for greater amount of inhalation at a much faster rate.
“Interesting stuff.” Rui muttered as he brought up the other scrolls.
Adamant Reforging had a rather straightforward training regime. It was a combination of torture of the skin combined with healing potions. Healing potions merely sped up the human body’s natural healing and regenerative properties. It only preponed the process in most cases, as long as a sufficiently low-enough graded potion was used during the process, the healing potion would not undo the effects of the conditioning training.
This had been the case for the Stinger technique’s conditioning training as well.
The Mind Palace technique was surprising, because it was surprisingly grounded the least fantastical out of all them. Part of the reason for this was because a similar technique existed on Earth, known as the memory palace.
Essentially, it was a technique that trained the user to be able to easily imagine a certain location, such as a building or a street perhaps, any location that the user was very familiar with. Once the user was consistently able to imagine said location with great accuracy and detail after practice, then they could begin to store information in different parts of that location. Such as storing certain facts inside a cupboard inside the house that the user chose as their memory palace.
The next time the user imagined the house and went to the location inside their imagination where they had previously stored information, they would be able to perfectly remember whatever information they stored their perfectly, as long as they had mastered and executed the information perfectly.
This was also how the Mind Palace Martial Art technique worked as well.
The reason this technique worked so well was because it stored memory via conscious association rather than subconscious associations.
Normal recollection worked by relying on the automatic subconscious associations created between thoughts and memories. If a student writing a physics exam was trying to memorize a simply equation of motion such as
V = u + at
Then they would repeat the equation over and over. The next time they would even think ‘v…’ the remaining part of the equation ‘= u + at’ would appear in their head because of the association created by saying the equation over and over again. This was due to the subconscious association mechanism that recollection worked on.
But this was flawed and limited. It often failed, which is why students failed exams, and had limitations to the amount of information that could be recollected. These two reasons were also part of why Rui was unable to master the higher-levels of the VOID algorithm.