Chapter 2090: Experience

"Huff..." Rui sat on the ground after the final battle against Master Moirin of the Poison Sect. The other five Martial Masters arrived at the two of them.

"Congratulations on your spectacular performance, Your Highness," Master Vertol wished him. "With this track record, there is no doubt that you are a high-grade Martial Master. It is truly unprecedented for a Martial Master to reach this level of power so quickly after reaching the Master Realm."

"Thank you, Master Vertol." Rui smiled. "Still..."

He gazed at his hands, "...I'm not satisfied with my current level of power. I look forward to training and growing stronger."

One of the Masters shook her head in mild disapproval. "You need more experience, Your Highness. You have less than twenty-five years of experience as a Martial Artist. That is extremely low for a Martial Artist. It isn't as obvious how much you're lacking it, but you would not have lost your battle against me or Master Vertol if you had had, say, twice the amount of experience than you do now."

Rui gazed at her deeply. She was Master Dorin of the Sword Sect. She had managed to emerge victorious against him in a pyrrhic battle.

Her victory against him gave her words more weight.

"Had you had more experience, you would not have fallen for Master Vertol's trap," another Martial Master explained. "You lack the intuition that comes with fighting as many battles as we have."

Rui knew the importance of experience better than anyone else. Ever since he had begun walking the path of a Martial Artist, the Adaptive Evolution model of Earth had grown entirely incompatible with this new world. This model allowed him to know what counter-move was the most optimal response to his opponent's predicted move.

Yet, in this world that allowed for supernatural Martial Art by Earth's standards, the inherited Adaptive Evolution Model had grown more obsolete.

Rui had instead been compensating with intuition and instinct, which were ultimately bolstered by experience, to know what the most optimal counter-moves were.

That was why experience was so important in general, but also to him specifically.

The mind as a whole had immense pattern recognition capabilities that allowed it to soak experience over time and turn it into intuition and instinct that often moved much faster than thought.

Rui had felt just as they did when he had sparred with Mana and Max.

They had been simply transparent to him without even the slightest hesitation.

He imagined it was a much lesser version of what happened between him and the Martial Masters due to the fact that he was very deviant in many ways.

'That was the reason that the two of them could not allow one more of me.'

Rui had simply fallen behind in that regard. Even then, the difference wasn't the most evident due to the fact that he had powerful thoughts, and the experience gap was never that large in the Squire Realm and, to a greater extent, the Senior Realm.

But, the difference was jarringly larger in the Master Realm.

He was dealing with veterans who had centuries of experience as Martial Artists through some of the most violent phases in the Age of Martial Art.

On top of that, they had gained significant proficiency with thought as well. Thus, the thought advantage that Rui had was no longer as unchallenged as it was in the lower Realms while the experience gap only grew wider.

Thus, immediately in his first few battles, his peers were able to point out his shortcomings.

Not all of them were of the opinion that he ought to prioritize it above training.

"It is true that your experience is lacking," another Martial Master added. "However, that is not something that can be strengthened artificially. It is not as though you can fight a hundred battles in a single day. In that case, it would be better to direct your efforts where they make the most impact."

Rui nodded in agreement.

Those were his thoughts as well.

He couldn't accelerate his experience too much under normal circumstances at the present. Thus, he was more inclined to continue on the path that he had set for himself.

He thanked the Martial Masters for their time, services, and advice before taking his leave.

He already knew what he had to do.

"Tsk, still some stuff to do before I can jump into training," he tutted with irritation.

Unfortunately, he had promised his father he would cooperate with the transfer of power. As much as he wanted to just dive into training, he still had some final obligations to engage in. It was the final step, and he was done with ever taking center stage in politics again.

Once this was done, he could leave everything to his father, as it should have been in the first place. He had already begun planning his next training.

In his prior conversations with Masters and Sages, he knew that there were a few primary avenues that he could consider.

The first was his lack of offense, of course, but he also intended to kill two birds with one stone by making it hyper-synergetic with his system of thought. These were the two primary steps that he intended to take as a Martial Master. It might very well be one of the most powerful techniques that he would ever create if he could satisfy the latter condition. His Martial Mind being as powerful as it was meant that anything that synergized with it extremely well would become a formidable force unto itself. Flux Earther and the Phantom Step had not been created by Rui to synergize with his systems of thought, yet preparation and foreknowledge allowed for a far superior execution of both techniques.

He couldn't even imagine how powerful a technique that was designed to synergize with his Martial Mind would be. The synergy would most likely reach a level of power that far exceeded anything he had ever created in his life.

Just the very thought of it excited him deeply.