Now that the first session with the mental imprint had ended, he immediately shifted to the next step of the training. Which was ensuring that his body learned to accept the virus without making too much of a fuss, the kind of fuss that the human body normally made when it was infected by a virus.

He had already begun to experience it now that the virus was injected in his body. What he needed to do was make sure that his body did not kill the virus through its immune system. The Squire evolution process evolved all of the aspects of the body, including the immune system of the Martial Body.

What Rui needed to was make sure that the body adapted to the presence of the virus instead of fighting back.

Unfortunately, this would take quite some time. Until then, he was going to suffer. The biggest issue was getting the body to normalize the virus in it. Fortunately, such a thing was not unheard of.

In reality, this would not be the only instance where the human body cooperates with microscopic organisms. In reality, the human body greatly depended on a variety of bacteria that inhabited the body. A variety of metabolic processes would not occur, or would not occur as well as if these good bacteria were not present in the body.

The body had essentially evolved to engage in a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria inside it. Rui was merely trying to expand that to the Herenal Virus.

This meant purposefully not letting the virus be suppressed by the immune system. He needed to subject himself to some medication that would lower his immune system just enough to make sure that the virus was not wiped out by the body.

After that, it was just a matter of waiting for the body to naturally adapt to the effects of the virus and counter it with heightened myostatin production returning the muscle mass of the body from its hypertrophied state back to how it was naturally.

Once he completed both halves of the training, his body would be returned to normal because it would naturally counter the virus, until Rui executed the trigger, causing the body to stop negating the virus, allowing the virus to increase the muscle mass of his body.

Once that was done, the technique would effectively be complete. Content is property © .

Now that he had begun the training procedure for his offensive technique, he also needed to consider his defensive Martial Body. That was the final Martial Body technique in the Metabody project.

Unfortunately, he had yet to come up with even a concept for the technique. He intended to, soon. The issue was that he didn't have an idea in mind that he could work towards yet. That was the starting point for all technique projects.

For now, all he could do as scour the library of the church for techniques that were suitable for him. He didn't have too much time left, less than a year before he needed to be prepared with Metabody.

The issue was that he could not afford to finish the technique at the twelve-month mark. The fact of the matter was that he needed some experience practicing with the technique. He also needed to become proficient with partial execution of the techniques that he was developing.

The reason for this was that not every opponent will be most aptly countered by one of the Metabody techniques perfectly. That was simply not the case whatsoever. The fact of the matter was that most opponents required a combination of parameters to be adapted to. It was possible that some Martial Artists were more optimally countered by a combination of strength and speed than they were by even greater strength alone or even greater speed alone.

Rui needed to be able to use more than one technique to a lesser degree. He could not afford to use two Metabody techniques at once. He had already recently experienced the consequences of that. They were not pretty. If he tried pulling something like that off under normal circumstances, he probably would die on the spot.

Thus, mastering partial activations were also on the agenda as far as he was concerned. All of this needed to happen before the Martial Contest arrived.

('This is going to be a rough schedule.') Rui grimaced.

Aside from that, he had looked into the Martial Contest format, hoping to gain an understanding of its structure and rules. If there were any especially aberrant rules, he needed to make sure that he looked into that as well. One of the things that he was not the most inclined for was how long it was, but given the sheer size and scale of the contest, he was not surprised.

He was competing against nearly a million Martial Squires!

Each town had many hundreds of Martial Squires, and there were nearly a thousand church towns of the Virodhabhasa Faith across the entirety of the continent. That meant that whichever Martial Squire came out on top of this contest would have effectively beaten all of the other Martial Squires that competed.

It meant that whoever won this contest would have the capital to claim to be the strongest Martial Squire in the entire continent. Although this was not the only contest of this magnitude, and it still certainly did not include all Martial Squires in existence, it was still an extremely prestigious contest. Many people from across the continent would come to see it.

('Ah, I should follow through with Master Deivon about the mask that I commissioned as a part of my condition.') Rui mused.

Rui had asked for a mask with extremely high-grade anti-sensory properties. One that was armed with the most potent esoteric substances to ensure that it never fell off his face, or broke, and concealed his appearance to make sure that no one recognized him.

The Virodhabhasa Faith understood that drawing attention at this level was something that many Martial Squires were not comfortable with, and permitted the usage of masks and aliases.