It was a good fight, Rui took a moment to appreciate the power that his opponent demonstrated.
('He had a mature Martial Art,') Rui mused.
He could feel that his opponent had spent quite some time refining his Martial Art. He had a strong foundation and expanded the effectiveness of his redirection against all kinds of attacks across multiple ranges.
That alone probably took the man about a decade of creating or modifying techniques to possess the necessary individuality needed. That was the estimate that Rui had in mind when he considered how slow the rate of growth of the average Martial Artist was.
Regardless, Rui got the impression that this man was closer to reaching the Senior Realm despite being weaker than Rui.
Rui had not forgotten that the path to the higher Realms was not simply one of power, although power had a correlation.
He had failed to get an opportunity to learn of the exact conditions of the path to the Senior Realm, but as he grew stronger, it was almost as though he could intuitively sense what it could be.
The Senior Realm was a natural phenomenon. This he knew because Senior Ceeran had carelessly let slip in a conversation long ago that he had broken through to the Senior Realm in the middle of combat.
It was rather strange, the breakthrough to the Apprentice Realm was natural, however, the breakthrough to the Squire Realm was artificial and man-made. Then the breakthrough to the Senior Realm was natural once again.
('Does that mean the breakthrough to the Master Realm is also artificial?') Rui wondered, before shaking his head. He didn't feel like that was the case, although he certainly couldn't know at this point in time.
He glanced back at the corpse before him grabbing by the arm before he headed back in the direction of Crexeet Town.
He had already completed his end of the deal and had killed a Martial Squire, thus he had quite some time free of defense duties, as per their agreement. Martial Squires were special in Squire-level nations, after all, as well as in general.
One of the things that he had come to learn during his travels thus far was that the Kandrian Empire was truly an outlier. Based on his experience, half of all nations were only at the Apprentice level as far as Martial prowess went. The remaining half were nations that possessed Martial Squires, and even above, of course.
It put things into perspective for Rui, and showed him that in most places, Martial Squires like himself were quite precious. He could straight up negotiate with smaller and weaker Apprentice-level nations all by himself as a Martial Squire. It was unfortunate that these nations were simply too weak to provide him with anything that he wanted.
However, even when it came to Squire-level nations, he was quite precious and valued. He was experiencing that with Crexeet town at the moment.
Just by virtue of Kane and him being Martial Squires, the mayor had been quite motivated to retain their services no matter what.
He glanced around the battlefield as he spotted Kane. The man was evading attacks from what seemed like a piercing specialist. It wasn't a bad match-up to Kane as the greatest capability of his opponent's Martial Art could only be shown if an attack landed. If it didn't then his opponent would not be able to show his true power.
Rui nodded approvingly as he continued back to Crexeet Town.
He had no intention of helping Kane out, it wasn't good to stifle his combat with overprotectiveness. It was best if Kane overcame this by himself.
Besides, in the worst-case scenario, Rui was confident that he would be able to use Void Step to momentarily get away. Although they had agreed not to use it in combat, that didn't apply when he didn't have any chance and was on the verge of death or something like that.
THUD
Rui dropped the corpse before the defense personnel who let him back into the town. "Inform the mayor of this, will you?"
He nonchalantly made his way straight back to the scientific libraries of the Crexeet research institute.
His deal unfortunately did not include Kane in it, meaning Kane would need to kill a Martial Squire for himself if he wanted a good chunk of time himself. This wasn't entirely a bad thing as it would keep Kane busy and allow him to hone his skills in actual combat.
After all, at least as far as the pure research part went, he would need to rely on Rui a lot, there was nothing that he could do beyond that at the moment.
Rui immediately dug back into his research as he skimmed through several more esoteric substances, studying their properties. The search for appropriate substances showed him just how vast the field of esoteric material science was. It was also an excellent reason why conventional physics and theoretical physics were woefully underdeveloped. He couldn't even blame them.
After witnessing what esoteric substances were capable of, he too would have been more inclined to spend all his research capital on esoteric material science. There were simply far too many things that one could do with them.
In comparison, conventional physics centered around more normal and better-understood phenomena were rather boring. Furthermore, he could see that there was a good argument that esoteric material science and technology were superior to the conventional technology of Earth. The things that were possible in a variety of fields such as medicine and warcraft were greater than what conventional technology was capable of.
The only field that the latter exceed the former was in communication, information transmission, and processing sector. The internet far surpassed anything that the Panama Continent had ever accomplished as far as communication and information transmission went.
Still, for what he had in mind at hand, conventional technology wasn't really able to help him, he needed to find a solution buried in the myriad of esoteric phenomena of this world.
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