The Martial Unity

While Kane broke into a cold sweat at the prospect of being a test subject in the R&D process of Rui's technique projects, Rui continued to flesh out the technique.

To read the subconscious mind, he would put his victim in a trance where the subconscious mind had greater primacy over the body, conveying greater amounts of information through non-verbal communication.

To put them in a trance, he would need to apply hypnosis, distracting his opponent's conscious mind and awareness to leave their subconscious mind exposed. And then, he had to implant the classic hypnotic suggestion of sleep. Of course, this would not cause them to actually sleep, but it would put them in a minor trance where their subconscious mind's influence and control were magnified.

This was normally impossible due to sensory stimuli keeping the conscious mind active, which, in turn, could be mitigated by using a domain to kill sensory stimuli, making it easier for the conscious mind to be dimmed in its primacy.

Thus, the technique would require a domain-hypnosis hybrid technique to put the mind into a trance, as well as an intent-pattern recognition system of thought to then create an intent-evaluation model allowing him to read the intent conveyed through non-verbal communication.

As such, the technique blueprint was divided into two parts: the trance-induction half and the intent-evaluation half.

The former required a domain-hypnosis technique. This was an extremely novel endeavor as far as Rui was concerned.

Domain manipulation was extremely rare. Even in the Kandrian Empire, with a whopping one hundred and fifty Martial Masters, there was merely a single domain-oriented Martial Artist.

Mind-oriented Martial Artists were not nearly as rare but were certainly far from frequent or common.

How many martial artists could walk down both paths?

Not only walk down already trodden paths, but forge their own paths down the two fields and even try to merge them?

He would be surprised if it'd been ever attempted, let alone in the Lower Realms. However, it made sense to Rui. Sensory input was the channel through which hypnosis functioned. Domains manipulated heaven and earth, the very environment around them, and their target. This allowed for spectacular manipulation of the mind.

"Damn," Rui cursed. "It was stupid of me to fail to make this realization earlier."

By his standards, at least. Most people would not have ever come up with the idea to mix fields that were so different from each other in such an incredibly synergistic manner. He added one more idea to his list of ideas to explore: the synergy between domains and hypnotic techniques.

This was a long-term agenda that was far from urgent. He would deal with it after the matter with his father came to a close, one way or another.

"I have enough on my plate at the moment," Rui heaved a sigh.

Yet it couldn't dampen his excitement. The prospect of enhancing his pattern recognition system with an intent evaluation system was too great.

Even conservative evaluations of how much this would improve his combat prowess were high. If this project panned out exactly how he hoped it would, then he would be able to claim the title of the strongest Martial Senior with much greater confidence than simply by virtue of narrowly edging out a victory against the Gatekeeper.

The totality of his system of thought with the VOID algorithm, the Angel of Laplace, and now this new project would elevate his nascent system of thought to unprecedented levels within the Senior Realm.

He was deeply skeptical of the existence of a Martial Senior who had harnessed thought better than him. The Martial Union would not have allocated thirty-one trillion Martial Credits to the dissemination of his Martial Path as a field of thought if what he had to offer was not truly worth the expenditure of the capital.

The sheer amount of information that he would be processing and decisioning based on was probably groundbreaking within the Senior Realm.

It was so overwhelming that, just for a brief moment, Rui wondered whether his capacity for thought was on par with a Martial Master.

"Pssht, no shot," he grumbled.

Martial Masters had extra parts of the brain aiding their thought. Rui was extremely smart, especially in his capacity to process information, but he could not beat such neurological capital.

The conscious mind of Martial Masters spanned a larger part of the brain than normal humans and Martial Artists of the Lower Realms. The additional volume that the consciousness spanned was significantly larger, but the boost in processing that it made was also disproportionately greater.

An X-percent boost in brain volume did not yield an X-percent boost in brain processing, it yielded an X^10-percent boost.

This disproportionately high exponential boost was due to the fact that cognition was not born from the number of neurons in the brain; it was born from the number of neuron pathways. Neuron pathways were simply chains or connections of neurons, and they were the basis of memory and processing. The more neuron pathways the conscious mind had, the greater the cognition.

The number of new possible connections gained simply by adding a single neuron to the brain was in the trillions. After all, a single neuron could form individual connections through each other neuron, resulting in countless permutations and combinations of neuron pathways.

What would happen if an entire chunk of a brain, containing billions of neurons, was added to the conscious mind?

The number of new permutations of possible neuron connections would reach a mind-bogglingly high number. All these countless neuron connections would boost cognition astronomically in regard to combat. That was why Martial Masters were leagues above Rui, even if he had a high-quality capacity to process information.

His mind had evolved deep into genius-level territory, having undergone prodigious cognitive growth from experiencing childhood a second time. It was reaching extreme intelligence. However, that spoke to his quality of thought. The number of neurons in his conscious mind was not greater than the average Martial Senior.

If his capacity for thought was ten times greater than it would be thanks to quality, Martial Masters would be more than a hundred times greater thanks to quantity.

It begged the question, though. What would happen when Rui broke through to the Realm and harnessed both the quality and quantity?

-