***

The Way of The Unknown Ancestor.

This style came from the kooks of The Mangavian Reunification Front. They were a weird political faction in a section of West Togavi annexed by neighbouring Manger who held the ahistorical belief that the two cultures were siblings descended from recent ancestors. Grieved by this fictional splintering, they’d made it their mission to ‘reunify’ their divided realms.

This movement had begun as a parody. A couple of jokester Togavians at a pub had been taking the mickey out of their Mangerish overlords, who over-analysed everything according to two-sided, ‘dialectical’ relationships. In turn, some Mangerish academics overhearing them took the idea back to their pals as an interesting thought exercise.

You see, for a Mangerish Dialectical Cyclicist, the false sibling dichotomy presented a novel branch of World-Reading never imagined. How, hypothetically, would you reconstruct such a parent from two unrelated cultures? First, perhaps, you would take any shared characteristics of coincidence, treating them as a common heritage. But how to reconcile the differences? One cultural trait could be a mutation out of the other...or it could be an intrusion or borrowing from a third-party nation met post-split. The parent could have occupied both differences simultaneously due to a larger trait-capacity than either child...or the parent could have been in the exact middle ground between them.

Just wonder, who would precede the scholarly Mangerish and the comedic Tovagian? Their Mangavian parent could have been a scholar versed in comedy OR a comedian mocking scholars OR a part-time scholar, part-time comedian OR someone who inhabited the median between the Dialectical Cyclicist Positions of Scholar and Jokester, the Moderate Everyman.

Fascinating!

A few centuries later, this joke-turned-thought-exercise had evolved into The Mangavian Reunification Front: a 100% serious group who pursued reunification through militant terrorism. (The faction's members were aware of the fake origin story. However, they considered this no flaw. From an unrelated dialectical argument, between Truth and Non-Truth, the MRF had settled on the World-Reading-Sub-Mode of True Non-Truth(Partial), in which specific Non-Truths were accepted due to their World-Reading-Utility exceeding the sacrificed World-Reading-Utility of the Truth.)

Anyway, The Unknown Ancestor’s Way was the martial sub-branch of this research/faction. It attempted to ‘re’produce a parental fighting technique that’d birthed those of Togavi and Manger.

Of most interest to Henry, in their effort to cram the arts of both regions together, the MRF’s scholar-fighters had identified multiple oppositions between their countries’ martial arts that normal people would never recognise. It'd been oddly insightful.

Some of their discovered characteristics were fairly conventional. The Mangerish, as highly-organised, highly-drilled invaders, preferred taking the Initiative in a fight and crumbled if their opening gambit failed. The Togavians, meanwhile, invaded and living as remote hill clans post-collapse, were more Responsive by nature, adapted to negating openers and improvising afterwards.

Other characterisations were bizarre. Their regional combat preferences differed in terms of Combat Honesty vs Combat Irony, Quick Pragmatic Finishers vs Dragged-Out Honour Executions, or the perplexing Martial Dialectical Cyclicism vs Martial Non-Dialectical Cyclicism.

Overall, the ‘re’constructed art that resulted from this, The Unknown Ancestor’s Way, sucked huge turds. An impractical abomination created by out-of-touch nerds, it performed worse in a fight than any of its constituent styles, mixing elements that were clashing and self-hampering. Nevertheless, Henry thought this fake parentage exercise had at least been an interesting method of investigation. Hence, he studied the garbage style and its unique creation process.

Then, he sorted through the dozens of arts he’d learned, paired them one by one, and generated fictional parents for all of them. Unlike normal attempts at hybridisation that were grounded by considerations of practicality, he went to the Mangavian intellectual extreme. He forced the reunion to pluck out every single opposition in the quest for the parental middle.

Take, for example, No’Are Code of Vigilance, the non-combative art emphasising situational awareness to escape assassination, and Hardmen Handaxe, the suicidal berserker style. These siblings were born from ‘No-Softman Vigilaxe’, an ultra-aggressive awareness art in which one axe-attacked any stranger invoking the slightest suspicion. Or One Touch One, with its all-inning on a single sword stroke, plus Twenty Tools - their parent was ‘10.5 tools’, which used several but not too many weapons.

Henry created thousands of these atrocities, most of them pure nonsense.

Finally, he went beyond the limited imaginings of the Mangavian dialecticians. He found parents for triplet arts, quadruplets, pentuplets. And he tracked down the rest of the missing family tree - the grandparents, the uncles, the adopted great-grand-aunts…

Despite how ludicrous such exercises might sound, the intensive cross-pairings led to substantial improvements to all of his arts by extracting their deepest minutiae.

***

Swamptail's Courage.

Swamptail had been a vagrant God in Saana II. A lonely lizardman, he'd travelled from zone to zone, battling rivals with his trusty polearm. Henry’d signed up for a brief apprenticeship with the dude before deciding the art wasn’t suited to him and moving on to Twenty Tools. Later—after global conquest numero first with Flattening Mountains—he’d adventured with the God again and helped to complete a quest for his Cosmic Ascension.

Swamptail had survived to Saana II’s conclusion, but, by now, he'd almost certainly died. The fellow had been somewhat anti-social, and Henry could envision no end for him except aggravating the wrong galactic lord and getting squished back into the puddle from which he’d spawned.

As for his art, The Courage, it'd been nothing special: a boring, bog-standard polearm style. The then-thirteen Henry had just shadowed Swamptail because of the dude’s scummy aesthetic. A lizard of mysterious origins, possessing a hidden story hinted at by a sick face scar, wandering around challenging punks, never bathing, consuming raw rat meat - in this, a young boy had sensed the fundamental spirit of the 1v1. Every duellist was, in heart and often hygiene, a type of rodent-eating swampdweller.

So, the now mature Henry brushed up on his lost pal’s art as a minor homage, a mini-version of this bigger project of A Thousand Tools for Heavy-Fingers. Combining his previous learnings, plus an expanded survey of every polearm tradition in existence, he dug deep into the muddy weeds of The Courage. He plucked out some old parts, planted new ones, and created a marshall art able to compeat in this future era.

***

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Silk-Pillow Hardship.

The Silk Pillow sprang from the wealthy sons of Danji's Biu Valley. This region was famous for its bountiful soils, its fine-tasting teas and wines, and its livestock fed on fruit.

The sons of the region’s ruling elite had devised a style matching the luxury of their valley’s harvests. Silk-Pillow Hardship – this martial art focused on the ultra-pragmatic maximisation of one’s resources, and it solved the many philosophical difficulties known only to those who’d experienced the greater struggle in and for abundance.

Firstly, examining most other styles, one would identify an almost universal ideology of narcissism. Conventional practitioners ignored the external world to focus on self-reliance, on the development of the individual. My strength, my skills - these martial thugs were always jabbering about me, me, me, me.

Those schooled in The Silk shunned such egotism. They dared to break convention and ponder the questions forbidden to lesser intellects. What if this wasn't about me? What if I hold only a minor placement in the scale of this martial universe? What if there were masters of importance beyond myself and this small body being tortured by these daily drills?

It was to the masters eventually revealed by such profound meditations that the Silk-Pillow boys submitted themselves. They put aside the old obsession with the self and bowed to the higher gods of combat: the gods of armour, the gods of weapons, the gods of consumables. Really, one could learn any crazy fighting technique, but the most likely victor after every battle was just whoever began with the better equipment. 'Get gear or die trying’ - in this maxim lay a practitioner's main strength and obligation. The rest—all the training and discipline of other schools—were mere illusions distracting from the core task.

And how exactly, then, with the goal of combat clarified and set, did one acquire the best items? A hard work ethic? A fearlessness to explore dungeons for rare artefacts? A financial acumen to dominate the item market? A mind ever on the pulse of the latest technological innovations?

No, these, too, were the distractions of an ideology-polluted mind. A more pragmatic method than all of them would occur to anyone whose cheeks had been calloused by rubbing long enough against the silk. The most enlightened Way was so: find a dude wealthier than you, seduce his daughter, knock her up, and force a shotgun marriage to become—instantly—his rich son-in-law.

Martial art gold-digging, this is the path of a true combat genius.

Do not cower, young men of Biu, before the ugly face of reality. This is the path. From rags to a glistening suit of Tier-6 armour in a matter of months, what school could ever compete with this? None. None! This is the path, and all that's asked of you who dares to walk it is a little bit of humility, a willingness to concede to another man's financial superiority and hook up with his possibly unattractive daughter.

And so the humble sons of Biu Valley, after much philosophical deliberation, channelled their fighting energy into this hardest mission. They strained their muscles enough to fill them out aesthetically but not much more. They sharpened their tongues with romantic poetry. They braved torturous alchemical experiments in search of the most alluring perfume. They drilled one sweaty move after another in the gymnasium of the brothel. They crammed into their stomachs the finest dishes at exclusive salon banquets. They sat monk-silent through weeks and months of live theatre, waiting diligently for that isolated daughter to manifest.

Henry’d himself once delved into the realm of item-maximisation via The Strategy of The Resourceful Komodo. Now, he returned to this topic from a second luxury angle. Others might have been too prejudiced to study such an avant-garde technique, but not him, a defender and champion of gold-digging in all its ruthlessly-pragmatic beauty.

Thus, he lay down his head and toughed out a few years on the strenuous pillow.

During this idle period, he would go on to perform not even one, single combat drill. The Silk Pillow did have an accompanying martial art. Henry, however, gazing deeper through the illusion than the Biu boys ever had, tossed their useless style into the trash.

Instead, he exploited the Overdream's creative functions to sample Saana's manifold opulences, lounging on pillows in a variety of castle gardens and manors. Meanwhile, he advanced the neglected field of duelling aesthetics, unhappy as he'd been with its poor state. A duellist may be a swamp creature inside, but they didn't have to look the part. One could fight in style.

His critical contributions to that field would produce several new genres of duelling fashion, duelling perfumery, duelling floral arrangement, etc.

Then, he went beyond both The Strategy and The Silk. He’d collected arts from across the whole spectrum of disadvantage to advantage, from the hamstrung Tactics of Rangbit’s Cursed Ex-Slaves, to The Five Stars half-dragons ruling over galactic fortunes. Combining it all, he invented optimised resource-utilisation regimes at every conceivable price range. Whether dressed in gold or dirt, every lord and every pauper could have their duel – although, clearly, owning nicer equipment continued to be a massive plus.

***

The Final School of Flame.

Henry, after screwing around these many years, settled down to some proper business. His next art would be the first of two meta-studies dedicated to the total synthesis of his vast learnings – in addition to Twenty Tools, another style of this complicated genre.

Synthesis, this awaited as the very last task in his research (well, for the real version of A Thousand Tools, not the public trash rush-released because of the spoiled timeline). He couldn’t simply hand over the raw mass of data he’d accumulated and tell people to figure it out themselves. Doing that would waste years or decades. No, a finishing touch would be needed by him to polish off his findings. He'd have to select only the valuable pieces of each art. The rest—the majority—would have to be removed, anything redundant or negative or incompatible. He'd have to refine and reshape the remainder, and then hammer it all together into a form robust and practical enough to withstand the arena’s unforgiving beatings. The thing that survived to the end, the derivative of an impossible multitude collected over years (or centuries), the One that stands alone after all else is said and done, that would be his 'Thousand Tools’: his sum, his son, his synthesis.

Joining dozens of martial arts (or, at this point, truly, thousands) would be quite an undertaking. However, each art itself had been a step preparing him for the finale, and so would be this next minor one.

And what to say of The Final School of Flame?

It'd been the brainchild of Showaxarca The Learned. A Fire Shaman from the Volefan kingdom of Caineal, he’d ventured to formulate a better style after finding the predecessors inadequate for his specialisation's unique hybridisation of magic and melee. Like many martial artists with similar aspirations, he’d wandered the lands and weathered many violent storms. He’d apprenticed himself under dozens of esoteric gurus. And so on.

Then he put it all together.

His sum, The Final School, walked the precarious tightrope between spell and sword. Masterfully designed, it was gorgeous in its rigour, its depth, its shape and weight, its contours and convolutions. Most of all, unlike the majority of such complicated enterprises, The School of Flame worked. Those who chose it lived long enough to teach others, and the style had thus continued to spread after its founder’s demise, branches of the art still flourishing throughout Saana’s central continent and Heimland to the north.

As the first of Henry’s two arts on synthesis, The School was the simpler of them.

He’d picked it for a preliminary test because it ranked as the most outstanding in this area produced by an individual who was not a God. Showaxarca, on the cusp of reaching that level, would get assassinated by a deity enraged at their protégé defecting to his tutelage. While a tragedy for the scholarly Shaman, for Henry’s duelling research, the early death was fortuitous. It’d paused the art’s development right at the end of human syncretic ability. Many Gods blessed with augmented cognition had synthesised broader learnings from a much larger style-set, but these were impossible for a player to either perform or create. In this regard, then, The Final School of Flame, crafted by a mere person, established the upper limit for Henry. It showed him the maximum complexity that he could push A Thousand Tools to before it lost feasibility (for a non-cyborg). It also showed him a completed complexity, unlike Heavy-Finger’s unfinished failure.

And so, Henry, the latest in the endless lineage of synthesisers, used Showaxarca’s Final School for a model and a starting point, supporting this syncretic base with a few other preceding studies – like The Unknown Ancestor experiments from some years ago, those demonstrating thousands of ways to botch this process.

He spread before himself every style stuffed so far into his mutant brain. He examined them in their totality. He broke them apart. And he recombined their fragments into something better than all of them, the supreme martial art: A Thousand Tools.

(Obviously, the steps involved in that were far more detailed, but attempting to summarise them would be a futile bore. One would have to somehow recapitulate dozens of studies before pointing out the common threads. Even then, words convey too little. The only art and proof can be in the final action.)

As for the second, harder, God-level art on this topic, that would have to come a bit later, Henry’s own concluding school.

Just two more brief Overdream sleeps, and he'd be done with this monumental duelling survey. He was, honestly, looking forward to being finished with it. Although it'd been a decent waste of time for a retiree, it'd diverted his attention from the more exciting literary cli—