The Martial Unity

Rui recounted his time at the Academy. Describing the various training regimes and sessions he went through in the physical and Martial foundation stages that overall constituted the Foundational Stage. He went onto narrate his times in the Exploration Stage and ultimately went on to talk about his Martial Apprentice breakthrough and his Martial Path.

"To think you discovered your Martial Path in a dream." Julian commented, once the excitement died down a bit, leaving them alone. "Quite the fairy tale-like story, isn't it?"

"It was a magical moment." Rui affirmed.

"The discovery of a Martial Path... I'm not unfamiliar with it." Julian commented. "In fact, some of the research projects I'm involved in are actually about the phenomenon of discovering one's Martial Path."

"Oh?" Rui's interest immediately perked. "Are you allowed to tell me that?"

The Kandrian Institute of Sciences were royal institutes, meaning the research and development that occurred was property of the Kandrian Royal Family. He didn't think that such research was available in the public domain.

"The projects I'm involved have extremely low confidentiality grades. As long I don't blatantly sell the actual data collected, I'm not violating my agreement with the Institute. It's the kind of project that is purely an intellectual pursuit with no real-world applications you see. Talking about it in a general sense isn't prolematic."

"I see..." Rui pondered about the information that Julian provided. He certainly wasn't aware that the research and development department of the Kandrian Institute of Sciences graded research and development projects in regards to confidentiality. "What research have you worked on, generally speaking?"

"Part of it has to do with the psychological and neurological impacts of the Martial Apprentice breakthrough on the Martial Artist." Julian replied. "This was also the area of research of my thesis paper in my final year you see."

"Interesting." Rui commented. "So, what exactly did your research yield in so far as the changes and impacts of the discovery of the Martial Path?"

"We discovered that the discovery of one's Martial Path causes an increase in cognition, reaction speed, kinetic vision and reflexes, as well as body-eye coordination, to put it simply." Julian explained.

"Sounds about right." Rui nodded. When he broke through to Martial Apprentice having discovered his Martial Path, he experienced a great overall boost in several mental parameters and attributes. "I did grow much stronger once I became a Martial Apprentice."

"It's not as straightforward to that though." Julian replied. "We made some very odd discoveries about these enhancements, you see. For one, the data reveals that the degree of these enhancements is not static and unchanging, but rather variable. The superhuman boosts you gained are constantly changing."

"Huh?" Rui squinted in confusion when he heard that. The mental boosts he gained from becoming a Martial Apprentice were constantly changing? That sounded like an absurd proposition to Rui at first inspection.

"What do you mean?" He asked, waiting for further clarification.

"We discovered that the superhuman augments provided by the Martial Path are in flux, they're variables rather than constants." Julian sipped his tea, before proceeding. "In some situations, Martial Apprentices demonstrate superhuman mental attributes and parameters, but in others, they're perfectly normal human beings."

This made more sense to Rui, though he wasn't sure if he observed this in himself. These were complicated phenomena that were picked up through proper empirical research, it was impossible for him to discover these things by himself through introspection.

"Let us take three scenarios, and this is actually a simplified version of some of the experiments and surveys we conducted." Julian continued. "Let us take scenario A, where a Martial Apprentice is engaged in combat. Scenario B, where a Martial Apprentice is engaging in time-pressure manual labor tasks. Scenario C where a Martial Apprentice is participating in a time-pressure math exam. Do you think the superhuman reaction and processing time of the Martial Apprentice will be the same in all three scenarios and activities?"

"Hmmm..." Rui pondered. "Shouldn't it?"

It seemed intuitively obvious to him that this should be the case. Why would these mental and neurological parameters change? But given what Julian said earlier, he was probably wrong.

"It does change, that is what our research revealed." Julian answered, meeting Rui's expectations.

"Interesting." Rui commented.

"The mental processing speed of the Martial Apprentice is Scenario A; combat, was quite superhuman.

The mental processing speed in Scenario B; time-pressure manual labour tasks, was also superhuman but less than scenario A, much lesser, in fact." Julian continued. "As for Scenario C... The time-pressure math exam... We found something quite surprising."

"Oh?"

"The mental processing time of a Martial Apprentice in scenario C was not superhuman at all. It was perfectly normal and average. As though these were normal humans and not Martial Apprentices."

Rui understood the implications of the data immediately, having been an empirical researcher himself. "So basically, the activity that a Martial Apprentice is engaging is the influencing factor of how well a Martial Apprentice performs. Furthermore, it seems that the closer to actual combat that activity is, the more superhuman a Martial Apprentice is. So the mental performance parameters increase the closer to combat the activity is, forming a sort of spectrum, am I right?"

Julian smiled. "You understood immediately, as expected of my little brother."

Rui grew absorbed as he pondered about the implications of the data. It was truly fascinating. Martial Apprentices performed best, as far as mental performance parameters went, when they engaged in combat, sub-optimally when they engaged in physical tasks, and least optimally when they performed tasks that had nothing to do with combat.

"Scenario B was a time-pressure physical scenario. Although it was not combat, it was not too far from combat and probably shared some similarities. Which is why the Martial Apprentice showed sub-optimal results, but not zero results." Rui murmured. "But a math test is too far from combat, hence the Martial Apprentice performed least optimally. This shows a causation between the closeness of the activity to combat, and a Martial Apprentice's performance parameters, assuming all other feasible variables were controlled for."

"They were." Julian assured. "I'm impressed by your insights into this, even though you have no experience with empirical research, quite remarkable." He threw Rui an odd look.

Rui was too absorbed by the prior revelations to try and justify this. The information Julian revealed implied that the neurological phenomenon caused by the discovery of the Martial Path were dormant when Martial Apprentices did things that were further away from combat.

As for exactly why and how, Rui was able to come up with a few bare-bones hypotheses and theories based on his scientific background!