The Martial Unity

He gestured to the assistants that had been assigned to him to roll over the board with his little slide show prepared for him, before glancing back at the audience.

"I must inform all of you of several things before we get started," Rui remarked. "The first is that the complete and whole explanation right down to every detail, is frankly, extremely complicated too much for non-scholars. Thus I will divide my segment into two sections. One where I offer an elementary breakdown and the other where I go more in-depth into the nitty gritty for the various scholars in the room. I don't know if I'll be able to satisfy their questions and doubts, but I will do my best."

He paused for a moment, before continuing. "If there are any questions and doubts, please save for the specific intervals for questions that I will continuously have. It is best that the lecture is over as soon as possible."

He didn't want to be continuously interrupted by skeptical scholars. "Another thing," Rui informed them. "I will come out and directly inform all of you that I am unable to provide you with empirical data that would serve as proof for the explanations that I am about to provide. I will take this opportunity to remind all of you that I am most definitively not a researcher. I am a Martial Artist. If your doubt or comment pertains to the lack of evidence or proof of any statement I make during this little lecture, then it will probably be for everyone's best that you don't bring it up."

He paused for a moment, letting them mull over it. "Now then, let us begin with a simple overview. The Hungry Pain technique. It is a technique based on the modification technique of mental conditioning technique associates a physical trigger with a mental state. I modified it to make the trigger pain, and the mental state; the mental processes associated with overwhelming hunger. The resultant outcome is a surplus of stamina and energy that is far beyond what is normally possible. When this is combined with the Martial Body, the evolution of stamina during the breakthrough process can be minimized, allowing for those resources to be used to evolve other parts of the body. Ultimately resulting in a significantly stronger Martial Body, by about fifty percent on average."

This was common knowledge to everyone.

"The core principle of this technique is what I like to call autophagy," Rui informed them straightforwardly.

The word sounded foreign to everybody, alien even. It certainly did not trace its etymology to other words of the Kandrian dialect.

His audience appeared to be intrigued at where he was going with this.

"When the body undergoes extreme starvation, there are many measures it takes to prolong its survival," Rui informed them. "Chief among them is autophagy. What is autophagy?' is a question I'm sure you're all wondering. The answer is quite simple."

He turned to the board, activating a breathing technique to flip the first slide page over, revealing different sections each featuring a lattice of a dozen cells.

These were different phases of the autophagy process, showing just how cells were consumed dying or dead cells, and converted them into amino acids, among other organic compounds.

"Autophagy, simply put, is the body's ability to consume itself," Rui declared.

This provoked a reaction among many of the members of the audience. "This is an oversimplification, of course," Rui continued. "But it is true. The body, when faced with starvation and deprivation of nutrition, engages in a systematic breakdown of cells and cell components into useful sources of nutrition and energy for the body. It generally targets damaged, dying, and dead cells. It is constantly undergoing, but under normal circumstances, it is extremely minimal and slow. It accelerates significantly when the body is faced with starvation."

He paused for a moment, allowing his audience to digest his news. "The Hungry Pain technique, which triggers the mental processes associated with hunger, inadvertently triggers the extreme acceleration of the body, supplying the body with a surplus of organic compounds while also decreasing the required nutritional and energy load."

Turning back to the board before him. "It is thanks to autophagy that the human body survives incredible amounts of time without any food. If not for this process, the human body would collapse after a fraction of the time it takes to finally die of starvation. It goes to show just how powerful of an emergency supplier of nutrition and energy the human body is. This is even more true for the Martial Body that is evolved to have much higher survivability than the human body."

He turned back to his audience. "One can imagine how powerful it would be if harnessed in combat. It is the equivalent of consuming physical rejuvenation potions across the entire battle. It is almost like having a physical rejuvenation potion factory inside your own body. That is why the Hungry Pain technique is so potent. It breaks the known paradigms of stamina, energy reserves, and energy consumption that all Martial Artists have adhered to."

He eyed each member carefully. His words clearly had an impact. While none of the audience members did something as undignified as making awed sounds, there was a slight ripple of energy across the small crowd. Martial Masters grew deep in thought at the words he espoused.

It was true, that while there were some rare and truly strange techniques that could siphon energy, there was almost no way to supply nutrition to the body in the middle of combat. No competent Martial Artist would allow their opponent to get away with something as time-consuming and vulnerable as consuming a potion in the middle of combat.

Any fool who dared to do that would either die to a lethal attack or would be severely injured at the bare minimum.

Yet the Hungry Pain technique was different, the Martial Union had already confirmed without any shred of a doubt that it could magically empower stamina. It was fascinating for everyone to learn about the principle of the technique.