The Martial Unity

It wasn't long before Rui exited the business convention. He frankly had nothing to do, and he wasn't interested in acting chummy with Decker. He had more important agendas to tend to.

He needed to get started on his training of bending heaven and earth. That was far more important than hanging around some conglomerates and business tycoons. He also needed to start working on the three adaptive evolution techniques that he was preparing for the fiscal meeting that was due to appear in a little less than a year as well.

Those were his priorities for the moment. His plan to win over Master Gurren panned out very well, meaning he succeeded in his attempt to go down domain techniques for his next path forward for adaptive evolution.

Those were the two primary objectives that he was going to be spending time on.

Outside of Martial Art priorities that ranked at the top of the list, he also awaited Prince Raijun's response to his proposed offer. In addition, he was also to attend Princess Ranea's unveiling of the first functioning submarine of the Kandrian Empire's navy in an attempt to build up support for the new form of naval technology.

Out of all the seven prime princes and princesses he knew, he was more intrigued to meet Princess Ranea. She certainly seemed to be one of the less extreme of the seven. Princess Raemina and Rafia were both batshit crazy as far as Rui was concerned. Prince Raijun was sane but was quite the extremist.

Prince Randal, the military prince, did not sound very normal. He seemed highly militaristic and warmongering based on how Master Krakule spoke about his ambitions to lead the Kandrian Empire into war with the rest of East Panama.

That left Prince Rajak, the Underworld Prince. Rui had already clashed with the Kandrian Underworld before, and he had the worst impression of them. They were willing to destroy lives just to have a better chance at winning the Kandrian Throne War.

He disdained them.

He hoped that Princess Ranea would not give him a reason to regret the deal he made with Prince Raijun. But alas, there was a limit to how much even he could control. If she turned out to be a psycho, he could only throw his hands up in resignation.

Thankfully, the unveiling of the submarine wasn't due any time soon, perhaps because it wasn't ready yet. He was given enough time to train and focus on himself for the time being.

He began his days training in bending heaven and earth with Master Gurren. To his discovery, Master Gurren was not a lenient teacher.

"Your power needs to come from your core."

"Your hands exist to bend breath, not generate it. Your movements need to be precise, accurate, and firm."

"Your balance needs to be perfect to manipulate earth."

He trained Rui in the art of bending heaven and earth rigorously, building up his foundations.

Much to Rui's joy, these foundations got him further along the path of creating domains than he had expected. Unlike with most fields where the foundation was merely the first step, it was much more than that with domains, and it was the core of domain techniques.

But because of that, it meant that even mastering that foundation took Rui much longer than he had expected.

One good thing was that he had an affinity for both heaven-bending and earth-bending.

His many years of expertise with using his breathing for long-

range techniques certainly helped with heaven bending.

Of course, heaven bending was much more mentally consuming than his long-range technique because it required an amount of active mental engagement to manipulate heaven through by bending his breath.

He didn't have as much experience with subterranean manipulation, but he did have Seismic Mapping that had increased his intuition for seismic radiation, allowing him to better understand it.

On top of that, his prime defense, the Flux Earther technique, had also given him a good affinity for the earth bending. He was able to make remarkable progress by employing vibrations and force to manipulate the earth.

He discovered that Master Gurren had formed a remarkably accurate intuition for the physics of solids and the physics of seismic radiation. This had come about from many years of manipulating earth, no doubt. Of course, it was a subconscious understanding born from experience rather than a conscious understanding born of scientific inquiry. He was not able to apply it any other way, but Rui was different.

His conscious scholarly understanding of the environment was extremely high, in addition to a powerful intuition that had come from his years of developing and using sophisticated techniques centered around complex principles. He no longer needed to think all that much when using Transverse Resonance because his subconscious intuition had grown quite proficient at it.

Master Gurren was shocked at the speed at which Rui absorbed the foundations of heaven and earth bending.

"Huff…" Rui exhaled deeply with immense force. The Roaring Dragon Blood Potion had empowered his breathing to the point of being able to generate tremendous force.

His hands and fingers swayed gently, curving and shaping the breath he exhaled, redirecting and distributing it across his environment.

WHOOSH!

Several powerful wind currents converged in a circle around Rui, overlapping each other, forming a spiral.

A tornado was born.

Yet he wasn't done.

His feet pressed into the ground, vibrating with Reverberating Lance, causing longitudinal waves of seismic radiation to constructively superimpose, causing a spike of pressure at the point of superimposition.

RUMBLE!

A wave of earth erupted, spiraling into the powerful tornado that had formed around Rui. A spiral of heaven and earth spun around him with immense force, enough to grind anything that dared step near it into confetti.

He opened his eyes.

WHOOSH!

The heaven and earth bending ceased, causing the technique to fall apart.

"In just three months, you have mastered the foundations of heaven and earth!" Master Gurren stared at him with shock. "What an absurd speed of growth. No wonder you have broken through to the Senior Realm at such a tender age."