Now that Rui had decided to partake in the Virodhabhasa Martial Contest, he needed to make sure that he was properly equipped for it. Otherwise, he would not only not achieve what he needed to, but he would embarrass himself too.

Given that he had decided that Project Metabody needed to be completed before the contest began, he had a lot of work to do. One year was not a luxurious amount of time given the magnitude of the difficulty of the task that he had assigned himself.

He had developed the conceptual basis of the Hypertrophic Surge technique, the technique he developed to serve as his offense-oriented Martial Art.

Now he needed to develop a practical training technique for it, which was its own challenge. Injecting the Herenal's Virus into his body was not the hard part. That was actually the easiest part, the hardest part was training his body to normally release enough of the myostatin protein to ensure that there was little to no way that the Herenal Virus could cause his muscles to undergo rapid hypertrophy unless Rui allowed for it to happen.

He wanted to be able to trigger the ceasing of the production of myostatin so that the virus could quickly gobble the protein up and accelerate the growth of his muscles very rapidly due to that.

Normally, this would be quite challenging to do, after all, how could he possibly control the production of myostatin when it was or wasn't convenient?

It was only then that he came up with a solution to his dilemma. A technique that he had used in the past a long time ago. The same mental imprint technique that he had used to create the Hungry Pain technique.

The Hungry Pain technique was a technique that triggered autophagy every time the user felt pain, regardless of the will of the user of the technique after the training was complete every time they experienced hunger.

This was because the technique was a self-hypnosis technique that hypnotized the user into associating a sensory stimulus as the trigger for whatever metabolic or neurological phenomenon was to be triggered.

In the case of Hungry Pain, it was triggering autophagy with pain. In the case of Hypertrophic Surge, he would need to develop a unique trigger to cease the production of myostatin which in turn would make all the myostatin in his body disappear due to the virus consuming the protein, which would remove the limiter on muscles, causing them to inflate significantly.

In order to sustain the massive consumption of energy that would follow, he would need to use the Reaper's Dew poison to cause cell death to provide enough energy for the inflated muscles.

Thus he would be sacrificing defense, and stamina for power as a result. He would also be sacrificing speed since his mass would grow faster than his power output making his body less agile and average and peak speeds much lower than normal.

All in exchange for offensive power. Rui predicted that once he got the Hypertrophic Surge technique to function properly, he would become so powerful that every attack of his would be incredibly heavy and devastating.

He predicted that his normal sonic bullets would become on par with his Transverse Resonance attacks each. That would mean that he would be capable of unleashing an onslaught that was multiple times more powerful and potent compared to what he would be capable of on his own.

He definitely couldn't wait to start working on the training. He would begin by employing the mental imprint training technique to associate some action or the other as a trigger for the complete ceasing of myostatin production while training his body to produce far more myostatin on average to counter the virus that he would be introducing inside his body.

('It's definitely going to be a tough training regime,') Rui winced.

Conditioning his body to produce more myostatin than normal was normally horrible for his development. Myostatin inhibited muscle growth, adding more to one's body would destroy one's gains. Not only was Rui going to add more of it, but he was also going to force his body to be the one adding more of it, which would only be balanced out by the virus after he added it to his body.

('It's ironic how the virus will be the cure as opposed to the disease by the time it is added to my body.') Rui mused.

That was one of the reasons that he was sure that this would work out. He was only going to add the virus into his body by the time the training was completely finished, and by then his body would have changed to need the virus, making sure that none of the things that happen with virus infections would happen this time.

He could not afford to get a permanent fever due to Herenal's Disease, and the only way to do that was to ensure that the virus was merely a piece of a puzzle by the time he introduced it into his body. Copyright by Nôv/elDrama.Org.

He also needed to consider the fact that he needed to purchase a sample of the virus, and he also needed to purchase training resources to ensure that he had everything that he needed to make his Hypertrophic Surge, which would certainly not come for free.

('…Missions…') Rui considered the prospect of doing missions to fuel his training.

Unfortunately, he recalled his days in the Kandrian Empire where he would phase between missions and training, training was expensive enough that it required many weeks' worth of missions to fund months of training in the Martial Union.

If the cost of training was similar here, then it probably meant that it would take months' worth of missions before he could begin training for the rest of the remaining year before the Martial Contest commenced.

('That's too much,') He shook his head.

Fortunately, he had a much better idea. ('Selling my lesser techniques is the better solution this time. They cannot purchase the absurdly expensive potion, but they can purchase me a year of training.')