"Huff…" Rui heaved a sigh, exhaling mist, looking around.

The Jrava Mountain Range had become buried with snow. The skies had been blurred with an endless dark grey and the white winds of the blizzard that had consumed it and more.

Winter had already come and was well underway, and it was shaping up to be quite bad. Snow had already begun piling up across the entire nation in great amounts. Snow fell generously most of the day, most days, inconveniencing the local people.

Some days yielded as much as several feet of snow, paralyzing a lot of sectors of the nation. Of course, the Kandrian Empire had already taken measures. Martial Apprentices across the entire nation were mobilized by the Ministry of Domestic Affairs and the Martial Union. Despite the enormous snowfall, streets were rapidly cleared, as were clogged residences and homes. The more-than-hundred thousand Martial Apprentices in the Kandrian Empire were easily up to the task of ensuring that the snow didn't get in people's way.

The cold war slowed down in the face of the face of a blizzard that was shaping up to be a generational nightmare. Rui wasn't particularly worried, of course, not for the Quarrier Orphanage nor for himself. With Max and Mana alone, the snow wasn't a problem. With Rui, even if it snowed a hundred meters every day, they would be unharmed.

Still, Rui found that he didn't even need to lift a finger this time. Soon before winter began, the orphanage and various other settlements across the Kandrian Empire were approached by groups of young people offering various necessities and supplies to the impoverished. Food, cooking oil, firewood, clothing. Everything they could ever need.

It was free of cost. When inquired, they proudly revealed that they were the Kandrian Ruffians.

It appeared that Prince Raul had succeeded in his procurement of the necessary supplies for the Kandrian people.

Yet, Rui had gotten no word from the Beggar's Sect about the prince's return. Did it take nine months to simply sign some supply contracts? And if the supplies had been procured, why hadn't he returned to the Kandrian Empire? owns this.

Rui wasn't sure, but he hadn't let it stop bothering him for long. In the past nine months, he had been very busy. For one, he had been working on his four domain projects that had been proceeding smoothly.

He had gained a greater intuitive understanding of what the fruits of his effort would be like when completed. He had worked on many original technique projects in his life as a Martial Artist, and most of them had been successes. Yet those past experiences had allowed him to gain a sense of how fruitful a project was.

For these four domain projects, he was quite hopeful and enthusiastic for most of them. He had already created proof-of-concept prototypes for three out of the four projects. This was a great sign that each of the three was quite viable.

He was less enthusiastic about Project Reverse Prophet. He was starting to realize how immense of an undertaking it was.

'I may not be able to complete it along with the other projects,' Rui realized.

As far as he could tell, he had barely made two percent of progress. Even when he took into account the fact that he was working on other stuff, it was still extremely slow. He couldn't even imagine how much time it would take to complete the entire project.

Yet out of all the three projects, the one that had the most promise to him was clearly Project Reverse Prophet.

The project hid an immense amount of potential. More so than perhaps any other technique project he had come across in the past. The prospect of extracting the information of the past to empower his ability to extract the future was too alluring for him.

Yet it was difficult because the difficulty was proportionally high; the sheer amount of data that he needed to process was something else entirely. He wasn't entirely sure if this was viable.

For now, he had decided to work on it. There was no point in wondering about the viability of the project this early on; he would just have to give it a fair shot.

He was glad that the other three domain technique projects were not nearly as hard to progress in as this one.

As expected, the one that was slated to be completed first was Project Malevolent Kitchen. It definitely progressed smoothly compared to the rest and did not require anything particularly revolutionarily new. The only challenge he was having was mastering canceling out the vectors of all the converging sounds. In other words, he needed to go for the opposite of what he did with Transverse Resonance. He needed to engage in destructive superposition to ensure that the waves canceled each other, becoming non-directional and unordered.

Only then would it become heat. The great part of this technique was that it bypassed conventional durability significantly. Simply having tough flesh, hard bones, and strong muscles was not enough to avoid being inflicted with damage.

He thought back to Senior Janeau, the defensive Martial Senior that he had killed in the Great Forest of Hypnonarak. That Martial Senior had withstood all of Rui's attacks without so much as a scratch. Rui needed to use his greatest assassination tool, Sympathetic Death Lance, to kill the man.

Now, Rui would be able to do with the domain technique alone. He wouldn't need to wait all that time, striking his head countless times with trial and error, hoping to reach the right resonance frequency.

He could just use his domain technique to literally cook his opponent inside out. The longer the fight went, the more damage they would be. It would be especially damning when Rui reached passive mastery of domains, using domains while fighting normally. They would be passively incurring damage from his domains as well as his close-quarters combat.

The other two projects, on the other hand, had some interesting progress.