The Martial Unity

Rui had only intended to break the ice with each of the four techniques on the first day, before returning back to his room and figuring out how he’s going to divide his time and energy. He didn’t intend to extend beyond what was necessary.

But he had completely forgotten about that as he immersed himself into the training regime. He loved the sheer progress as he grew better and better at timing blink maneuvers. In the end, he lost track of time completely all the way until his stamina was drained.

“Twelve hours?” Rui couldn’t believe it, it passed so quickly he wouldn’t have been surprised if Squire Helen was pulling his leg.

She nodded in response. “You just kept going on and on, I thought you were aware of the time.” She shrugged. “Apprentice training schedules are largely self-regulated, after all.”

Rui nodded, still dazed in disbelief.

“How did you do it?” She asked out of curiosity. “How did you get so good at the technique so quickly? Your rate of growth is unheard of!”

Rui scratched his head awkwardly, unsure of what to say.

“Dunno” He shrugged. “Glad it’s working out this well though.”

He quickly bade her goodbye before she could inquire any further, and left the stealth-training facility as he headed back to the Apprentice dorms.

He nonchalantly strolled back as he grew absorbed in thought at the training sessions that he had undergone in the past twenty-four hours.

Just based off of the training sessions alone, he had come to realize that the priced techniques were not overpriced in any way. Each of the techniques he purchased were qualitatively superior to the techniques he procured out of the foundational reserve that the Academy offered to Martial Apprentices.

He knew that he wouldn’t really be able to go back to learning foundational techniques from this point on. In fact, he planned to replace some of the Foundation techniques with either successors or superior techniques operating on the same principle in the future to strengthen the quality of his Martial Foundation.

Still, that was for a distant future.

His mind delved onto the four techniques he had picked up and the difficulty of their training.

“The hardest technique was definitely Seismic Mapping.” He murmured to himself, sighing. It was quite the unpleasant training session, but he really wanted to master the Seismic Mapping technique, its sheer practical utility was too alluring.

He decided to maximize the amount of time he dedicated to training the technique. He didn’t want to be held back from completing missions because he took forever to master Seismic Mapping. Other Apprentices might be used to it but Rui did not want to endure that.

Furthermore, he felt it was probably to have longer training sessions in one go. The mind retained experience the longer it experienced a particular phenomenon or process, after all.

Rui even seriously considered dedicating entire days of continuous training to purely Seismic Mapping training. He could simply make every alternate day a Seismic Mapping training day while leaving the other days for the remaining three techniques.

The easiest technique to train for was Blink. Just the very thought of the training put Rui in a good mood. This was the first technique whose training was so enjoyable that Rui almost wished it never ended.

“Maybe I can continue to train Blink to refine proficiency above just ordinary mastery.” He thought aloud. He even thought he could make it a hobby! Just to feel better whenever he was down or maybe bored.

He shook his head, trying to focus. With how well his Blink training proceeded, he didn’t need to spend too much time to it. Thus, he decided to allot it the least amount of training timing. He suspected that Blink might end up being the first technique he fully mastered despite this allocation.

That left two techniques.

Outer Convergence and Inner Divergence.

“Of the two, Inner Divergence was definitely harder.” He noted. “So, it gets more training timing allocated to it.”

That concluded the initial planning session in a nutshell. Of course, he would have to chink out the details and be more thorough to be as efficient as possible, but the overall trend had been set.

He was quite grateful that he had chosen to pick only four techniques this time. Had he tried to pick five he would have quickly realized that it was probably too much. Premium techniques were not as light of a burden as the foundational techniques were.

He didn’t think he would be able to complete five premium techniques as quickly as he would have liked.

“In fact, from here on out, I might have to purchase fewer and fewer techniques as times goes by and the quality and grade of my techniques grow higher.” he realized.

He recalled thinking about many of the higher-grade techniques he saw in the Apprentice library, many of them had such high grades and difficulty grades that he didn’t think he could learn more than one technique at a time!

He sighed with a sullen look as he realized his rate of technique learning would probably significantly reduce from here on out.

Still, quality was worth the sacrifice in quantity.

He began further thinking about how he could quicken his mastery of these techniques. He couldn’t always hang out with the Squire instructors, they were not exclusive to him and there were many Apprentices they had to mentor, from his batch and batches below.

In order to train optimally, he thought about sparring with Fae with both of them using only Outer Convergence after he got past the initial training. She’d mastered it a while ago and she was a good enough mentor too.

Maybe he could gather Apprentices who had already mastered the other three techniques he had learnt.

(‘But that wouldn’t work for Seismic Mapping.’) He realized. Just his luck that the hardest technique to learn would also be one he couldn’t train together with others.

He sighed.