With a bit of thought, he gained a lot of clarity and conviction on his path forward from that point on. Prior to returning home, one of his drives was returning home. Now that that had been fulfilled, he had managed to relax for a bit.
But alas, it seemed that life was not willing to cut him some slack. Before he even realized it, he had already been dragged into several troublesome matters.
But it also helped him get back a bit of the urge for power he had back when Chairman Deacon was still alive.
When it came to his core long-term double-life ambition of Project Water, as well as his side and temporary drives for power for the Kandrian Throne War, he had several paths forward.
Naturally, he could make good use of the rewards that he had gotten from the Hungry Pain contribution.
He still had hundreds of millions of Martial Credits even after the expenses of the operation that he had undertaken to create an information blackout around Master Uma for Rui Quarrier.
He had the potions to empower his body.
He also had a hundred hours of dedicated tutelage from Martial Masters who had sold their time to the Martial Union. He knew from being trained under Master Reina and Master Zeamer that Martial Masters were quite insightful, there were only gains to be made from their tutelage.
However, more importantly, he needed to focus on the direction that he was going to go down.
There were multiple paths forward to expanding his ability to adaptively evolve.
There was, of course, the primordial seed substance. He had run into this magical substance in the Virodhabhasa Theocracy. It constituted the body of the abyssfeeders and was the reason that the creature's body could adapt and evolve to its environments and targets.
He dreamed of harnessing that ability one day, allowing him to replicate those feats.
The next path forward simply strengthening his foundation. In his assault against the Gereign base of the Carnil Mafia, he found that he was always far behind his opponents in terms of raw physical parameters. Of course, he had won every single one of his fights, but that was after using the various systems of his upgraded VOID algorithm like the pattern recognition system, the Metabody System, and the Hypnomatrix to close the massive gaps between him and his opponent. This belongs to : ©.
He would love it if he did not have to play the 'bridge the gap' game that he constantly found himself playing against other high-grade Martial Seniors. Of course, it was expected that he would find himself in such a situation when considering the fact that they were usually centuries, at bare minimum decades, older than him having honed their Martial Bodies for far, far longer than Rui had.
This gave them an enormous edge over him that was not easy to close.
One more path of pursuit that he was most interested in considering was domain techniques.
He had run into a fascinating new field of Martial Art. A niche field centered around broader and extensive manipulation of the environment. This was a technique that manipulated the environment to such a degree that it essentially created a field within which the user could conjure up a variety of strange effects through their manipulation of the sky and land.
Now Rui was no stranger to harnessing the power of the atmosphere through wind and sound, but this was different. He didn't gain dominion over the atmosphere or over sound and wind.
But the Martial Senior that he fought could literally command the land beneath their feet to attack him!
It was a fascinating technique that resembled magic, rather than Martial Art.
But it opened his eyes to what was possible.
On top of that, it opened new paths for adaptive evolution.
What if he could use a domain technique to adaptively evolve his environment to counter his opponent?
'It could potentially be a game-changer,' Rui realized.
He could think of a variety of applications that would be highly useful in adaptively evolving against his opponent. That was the reason that he was very keen on examining the potential of this new field.
These three were his broader options forward in getting closer to accomplishing Project Water while also gaining the power he needed to be more strategically impactful on the throne war for the sake of the people he cared.
Of the three of them, the hardest was undoubtedly the primordial seed. In the first place, it was not a field of Martial Art, it was just a substance capable of crazy things. He would need to create a new field of Martial Art that employs primordial seed and draws out its full potential.
It was easily the most tedious and time-consuming with the highest chance of failure out of the three.
'In that case, it is best to pick all the low-hanging fruit rather than aim for the highest ones right off that bat,' Rui mused. He could ask the Minister of Martial Art for research information on primordial seed among other things in exchange for fulfilling his request to Rui to spread his Martial Art.
That left strengthening his foundation which he most certainly was willing to do, the potions of the Martial Union were a good way to start, but indulging in more foundational training to build his core.
He was sure there were more extreme training techniques that could help him develop his body even more. He simply needed to find them and empower his body to an even higher degree than he already had, potentially closing some of the distance between himself and his high-grade peers on the physical level.
The domain field would require a much more sophisticated approach since this was much more nuanced and required thought in order to empower adaptive evolution. He was sure that the Martial Union had much to offer, it was definitely worth it to check it out when he had the time.