Chapter 1732: Path Forward

Rui meditated in the Great Jrava Mountain Range.

Some distance away in a little hut was Master Gurren.

He had yet again been thrown under a pile of homework, cursing incessantly as he persevered through the assignments on the Parallax Method that Rui had supplied to him.

Rui ignored him.

He was focused on something more important.

Inside his mind, an ocean of information blasted through the mindscape of his Mind Palace.

"Rgh!" Rui struggled as he processed every packet of information, each containing a vector, magnitude, and direction.

Each packet was like a drop of water.

Yet there were so many that nothing short of a sea of information had been drowning him in his Mind Palace!

It was only more than an hour later when he managed to extricate himself from the sea.

He opened his eyes as he put the final piece of the puzzle together.

The puzzle of the past.

Time reversed as he bore witness to the past.

It was overwhelming.

"Huff...Huff..." he broke out of his stupor, gasping for air like a fish, glancing at a timer.

"Damn, eighty-nine minutes," Rui cursed.

It was better than his first attempt, which took several hours, but it was still a long way from being combat-viable.

An expression of frustration flashed across his face.

"Can I not employ this technique without the power of the Master Realm?" Rui gritted his teeth.

That was what he had initially concluded.

Yet, now...

A glint of greed flashed in Rui's eyes.

"I want this power."

Perhaps it had been because he had experienced how game-changing the technique was when he used it to essentially bypass Master-level stealth.

"This technique definitely has the power to erase my weakness."

"It has the power to elevate the quality of my thought."

His eyes widened as a higher realization dawned on him.

"The Master Realm cannot help me harness the Angel of Laplace, no...it is the Angel of Laplace that will help me harness the Master Realm."

This realization was euphoric.

He had almost chosen not to try and overcome the hurdle that was the Angel of Laplace, placing his trust in a higher Realm of power that came after the hurdle.

Yet how could a power that would only be gained after overcoming the hurdle help him in overcoming said hurdle?

"Stupid." Rui shook his head.

He had let the sheer difficulty shock him into believing that only the power of the Master Realm could help him overcome the Angel of Laplace.

It was cowardice.

His eyes sharpened with determination.

"I will overcome the Angel of Laplace."

A commitment had been made.

"I will harness the past."

"I will harness the past to harness the future."

His powerful mind shot to work as it swiftly processed dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of broad solutions.

He could look toward optimizing processing.

He could potentially increase the tolerable margin of error, reducing the burden on him for accuracy.

He could reduce the scope.

All of these solutions handled the problem of excess information, but they each were either difficult to even conceive or sacrificed too much.

The ones that were difficult to conceive were extremely information-heavy and would likely be even more difficult than actually creating the Angel of Laplace. This was the most difficult technique project he had ever worked on, second only to the original VOID algorithm that he had created in his previous life.

"I'm not opposed to such solutions, but..." He shook his head. "I would rather go for something that has more certainty of success."

Uncertainty was a dreadful thing.

Throughout all of Project Reverse Prophet, he had felt deep uncertainty about its success, he did not want to subject himself to that once more if he could avoid it.

It meant that he was favoring the options that made a bit of a sacrifice with more guaranteed returns for those sacrifices.

"If I'm going to sacrifice something, then I would rather it be something that does not hurt me as much," Rui thoughtfully considered. "Ideally, it would be something that I don't need in the context of combat."

His eyes narrowed as he caught onto a promising line of thought. "Sacrificing something I don't need for something I don't. Hmmm..."

In order to know what he didn't need, he needed to establish what he did need.

"Information on my opponent, everything else other than that..." His eyes widened with realization. "I don't need anything else."

While it was nice that he could roughly rewind time of the entire world around him in his head based on the analyzed information...how much did he really need information of the past of the entire world in combat?

"The input is high...but the output does not need to be high," Rui realized. "The only output I really need is the past of my opponent. I don't need to see the past of the rest of my environment in combat..."

What good did knowing the past of a rock, or a tree, or a bird do him?

Especially in combat, he did not need to know the past of a squirrel on a tree near the fight.

The system of thought for the Angel of Lplace simply derived the past first and then focused on the relevant information, but what if he knew to only derive the past relevant to combat?

"If I could get rid of having to process the past of every rock, tree, grain of sand...then I could massively reduce the burden of the Angel of Laplace!" Rui exclaimed, excited.

The only trick was knowing exactly which vectors to process and which ones to not, but even that was theoretically and logically possible. He just needed to add a scoping system that would allow him to only process the past that he needed to process.

A path forward had been found.

It was not going to be easy.

"Nothing worth it ever is," Rui said, feeling a surge of motivation and energy as he immediately began working on this auxiliary technique project.