This was the first time he had come across a Martial Path that seemed to have as much depth as his own, it was astonishing.
Every Martial Squire he fought, he fought on their own turf. It wasn't too long after the initial clash that he would be replicating their stance, their form, their techniques, and eventually their entire Martial Art!
It was unfortunate that Rui could not focus on the man, after all, he had a war to participate in himself. He could only catch glances at the man, and that was why he only had a few details about how the man fought. However, based on the few glances here and there, Rui saw his fighting style continued to become closer and closer to that of his opponent. And sure enough, he went on to surpass him.
Rui didn't quite understand how the mechanics worked due to now being able to observe him in detail.
Regardless, whatever he was doing, worked.
Martial Squires fell left and right, so much so that he singlehandedly was causing the attacking army to incur unsustainable losses.
Rui had to admire his stamina as well, for being able to maintain such a potent Martial Art for that long. One thing that Rui was quite curious about was the mechanics of how he not only copied a Martial Art but also somehow made it stronger.
However, in order to be able to mimic any Martial Art, there were several conditions that he needed to be able to fulfill.
('For one, he needs to have the building blocks to be able to recreate Martial Art of any kind,')
This made sense. A Martial Art was made up of techniques, training, and principles; systems of movements, and processes that embody the Martial Path of the Martial Artist. He could not replicate the Martial Path without them.
It was like copying a Lego building by building an identical building of the same fundamental building blocks. Tokugawa even went as far as to improve the building by making it bigger while still maintaining the same core philosophy, style, and principles of the building.
('Which means he must have mastered an enormous number of techniques in all fields!') Rui realized.
Of course, he realized that it was probably impossible for the man to mimic all fields. Martial Paths related to poison, weapons, and symbiotes would be extremely difficult to accomplish.
Still, being able to copy most other Martial Art, was quite incredible.
('Though just having mastered all these techniques is not enough,') Rui knew that.
Just because a Martial Squire spent their entire life mastering all these techniques did not mean that Martial Squire would be able to suddenly copy techniques.
The man possessed the ability to peer into the depth of a Martial Art to an extreme degree.
That was what surprised Rui. This was the first time ever that he had come across someone who possessed as much insight into one's Martial Art as Rui did.
It was actually hard to believe for him. Rui gained the ability to acquire such insight into the depth of Martial Art after a lifetime of research, and then a second life undergoing neurological growth a second time.
Furthermore, it took him mastering the Mind Palace technique to be able to store and organize all the data for swift processing, something that he wasn't able to do without it.
('I don't think he creates predictive models, but he definitely looks at the patterns of his opponent and mimics them,')
It made sense, they both had access to the same information but used that information very differently. Rui adapted to patterns, and from what he could see, Ieyasu improved them, getting rid of flaws, weaknesses, and inefficiencies.
In a way, he showed Martial Artists their future self.
Rui could copy patterns to a small extent like he did when training Max and Mana. This was why he was confident that Ieyasu did much more than that. He wondered how Ieyasu went about gathering information on his opponents, and whether it was the exact same way that Rui did.
Rui learned more about the man the more he came up in conversations about his contributions to defending the Floating Sect.
The man had been in the Floating Sect for nearly ten years. That was longer than Rui had been a Martial Artist. Yet, against all expectations, he did not rise up in the Floating Sect slowly and step by step.
It was said that he became the lowest guardian of the Floating Sect, and remained there for quite some time, enduring challenge after challenge, and winning them all. He didn't challenge another guardian for a higher-ranked chamber for years, until one fine day, he challenged the former number one guardian.
He won, and it wasn't even close.
He shocked the entire Sect with his feat. So much so that for the next year he got bombarded with challenges from all guardians, fighting one nearly every day, sometimes multiple times a day until he defeated all one thousand guardians of the Floating Sect at the time.
That was when even the greatest of skeptics had to concede that he was the strongest. It was undeniable, and yet shocking.
No one had ever seen such a growth trajectory, though it had also appeared that he was cultivating his strength, and only challenged the guardian ranked number one when he felt that he had obtained the fruits from his training that he wanted.
That was quite fascinating to Rui, and to a certain degree what Rui intended to do.
He did not intend to challenge a guardian before he made at least some progress on Project Metabody, he didn't feel the greatest need to chase after higher-ranked chambers. He would be able to make more progress in the long run if he grew stronger, before aiming for a spot that was much higher than he would have been able to obtain on his own, that was for sure.
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