The Floating Sect had a dedicated library for Martial Art and Martial Artist, and he wasn't surprised to see that the quality of the institution was high.
After all, the Floating Sect existed for Martial Artists. That meant that all things related to Martial Art were done with care. That included creating databases of Squire-level techniques, among other things.
Of course, it still wasn't impressive by the standards of the Kandrian Martial Union. However, it was respectable. The number of techniques was broad enough, and the organization system was not as good as the highly sophisticated as that of the Martial Union, but it worked for what he had in mind.
Although he immediately wanted to dive into the symbiotic techniques, he restrained himself. Symbiotic techniques were one of the few classes of techniques where the risks and dangers were high.
He was not calling the Floating Sect incompetent, but if he was going to trust an organization's information and skill with medical procedures and symbiotes with his life and potentially even his Martial Path, it needed to be an organization of the caliber of the Martial Union. He simply did not trust anybody else to not mess up, either by action or through information.
The esoteric material science solution did not have that drawback, so he put it on the list of the things that he ought to consider.
However, it was not at the top of the list. Esoteric material science was also an option that required a lot of access to high-level knowledge, this meant that it wasn't the best environment for him to study something that was unrelated to Martial Art at its essence.
Although he was applying them to a Martial Art context, this wasn't a particularly common or popular field of material science applications as far as he knew.
The Martial Union had not batted an eye when he purchased its medical services to insert esoteric substances into his body when he was working on Riemannian Echo.
Furthermore, he had come across paradigms from other Marital Artists that focused on applying esoteric substances to the body when he was studying and researching at Crexeet Town. Thus it wasn't something he had pioneered, that was for sure.
But it also wasn't a super popular field, which meant that there was a chance that he himself would need to do a lot of the original legwork and research for Project Metabody. If not, there was no chance that there would be new things that could possibly be done about the matter.
It was better to begin with the easiest avenues for solutions which, in this case, was the Hungry Pain technique.
('I need a technique that can allow me to manipulate the energy and nutrients that my body gains from autophagy, and channel it to different physical parameters as per my wish.')
He already knew that even if he chose the easiest avenue for research, it was still quite challenging at a bare minimum.
What he sought was a level of bodily control that he had never achieved before, nor had he ever seen before.
Autophagy was the process of the body eating up dead organic matter, and recycling the energy and nutrients gained from that to sustain the body in times of great hunger. It was an extremely good resource because it was estimated that approximately one million cells died in the human body every second, nearly one point two kilograms of cells died every day!
Yet, most of these cells were simply discarded without their resources being used for anything. It was an extremely inefficient process, but alas, the body would not budge under any circumstances.
Unless, of course, the body was starving and autophagy was activated. It was why Rui was able to heal light wounds in a short period of time, something that was certainly unusual for someone of his kind of Martial body to have a developed healing factor.
It was also why his Martial body came out of the womb starting out at grade-two from the very get-go. That was because he was able to tap into a resource that existed within the body that was routinely discarded by the human body.
If he could gain the power to control how his body applied that autophagy, then he would be able to dictate where that power was spent, allowing him to control his spec configuration to a certain degree. content.
One shortcoming was the fact that while this was a lot more optimistic, it was also a lot less perfect.
The mass of the body did not change when autophagy was applied, which meant that he could not really alter his specs to become that of a speed-oriented Martial body the way Godspeed did. He could not amplify strength either, since simply supplying more energy straightforwardly would not change anything by itself. He would also need to increase the muscle's energy consumption of the increased energy to output greater results.
In the same vein, it could not amplify the toughness of the body.
However, it could massively improve stamina if he wanted. This meant that he could potentially match stamina and endurance-oriented Martial Artists if he succeeded. He could last an incredibly long time to last without sustenance.
That wasn't the only thing he could do if he succeeded in gaining full control of the Hungry Pain technique.
If he was severely injured, he could assimilate and redirect the millions of cells that died every second to the wound, rapidly healing it up in real time as his evolved healing factor massively benefitted from the influx of building blocks and energy for new cells to quickly cover up the wound.
He could obtain a healing factor that was on par with the Wolverine!
It was true that it could not do anything about the primary fields of combat such as strength, speed, and durability. But that was fine, he had already gone into this matter knowing that it was unlikely that he would get what he was looking for from a single solution.