The Martial Unity

Why tier 2 priv will be cheaper

Hey guys, important announcement here.

The privilege scheme will be changing. The current tier 2 privilege costs 100 coins with no discount for privilege chapters.

The new tier 2 privilege scheme from December will cost 900 coins with a 99% discount for all privilege chapters, costing only 1 coin per chapter.

The current tier 2 privilege net monthly cost is:

100 coins (tier 2 privilege) + 10 coins per chapter x 3 chapters a day x 30 days a month = 1000 coins.

The new tier 2 privilege monthly net cost is:

900 coins (tier 2 privilege) + 1 coin per chapter(99% discount) x 3 chapter a day x 30 days a month = 990 coins.

As you can see, the new tier 2 privilege from the month of December is cheaper by 10 coins. This will be the new tier 2 privilege scheme for the foreseeable future.

Now, why make this change at all? The reason is simple.

Being paid 900 coins upfront at the start of the month will cause the novel to shoot up in the trending rankings. It will also lead to a higher win-win ranking. This will result in far greater exposure of the novel to new readers, because is higher up the rankings. Furthermore, the novel will also get a lot of features from Webnovel if it is ranked high. This will also lead to lot of exposure of the novel to new readers.

Greater exposure of the novel leads to greater growth. That is the reason for the change in the privilege tier 2 scheme. Ultimately, it is a change that benefits all of you as well as me. I hope you will support the novel by participating in this scheme.

Regardless, I'm always grateful to each and every single one of you for your sustained support. It is only thanks to you that the novel is where it is today, and only thanks to you that the novel has a future.

Thank you for all your support :)

Rebirth

The doctor moved his stethoscope away from the child's chest while glancing at the test reports before him. The data was very clear.

"Unfortunately, it's a Non-Type-2 Inflammation type of severe asthma."

"What does that mean for him?" The child's mother asked, as she gripped the child's hand harder.

"It's a chronic type of Asthma that doesn't respond well to drugs or steroids. Unfortunately, it seems to be particularly severe in his case. His lungs are crippled and he'll need to take regular nebulizations just to lead a semblence of a normal life."

She shook when she heard that. As for the boy, he didn't understand a word of what was being said, but his mother's somber anxiety had trickled into him. He felt his throat choking up, as tears welled up , threatening to spill despite his furious endurance. His breathing grew more agitated and laboured as the conversation progressed, and his mother's despair grew more palpable, he felt like he was trekking a mountain. He felt like he was being snuffed by a pillow. He felt as though the air was growing thinner.

"Mom.." He desperately gasped as he began crying.

"John!" She held his face in her hands. He could feel her fear through her quivering palms.

"I need five milligrams of albuterol stat." The doctor immediately paged.

"Calm down, son." The doctor calmly coaxed, immediately after. "Take a deep breath, everything is ok."

He was lying. The boy didn't know how he knew, but he knew in his heart that the man was lying. His vision grew red as he felt his mind blurring

"M..om.." He whispered as he struggled to hold onto her.

The last thing he heard before he lost consciousness was his mother screaming his name.

* * * * * * * * * *

John woke up with a jerk, breathing heavily and coursely, drenched in sweat. It took him only a moment to remember.

"…Tsk, the same nightmare flashback.." The worst kind of nightmares were the realest ones. He'd rather have the stereotypical free-falling off a building nightmare, but nope! He would relive the worst day of his life. The day he was diagnosed with severe chronic asthama, a curse that crippled his dreams and passions, shackling his body.

"The things I would have accomplished if it wasn't for this goddamn disease…" He managed to choke out, while still gasping for air. Sports, exercise, travel, treks and of course, what he yearned for most;

Martial arts.

John Falken was a lover of martial arts. Ever since he laid his eyes on Enter the Dragon, the first martial arts movie he had ever watched, he could never get over how amazing they were, how could he? The way they moved enraptured him, their stances, their checks, their footwork, grapples and of course, their strikes. He'd spent his entire life dedicated to them, albeit not in a way that one would expect a lover of martial arts would.

He was born with severe asthma, preventing him from ever engaging in any physically intensive activities, martial arts included. So instead of practicing them, he'd decided to dedicate his life to learning about them. If he could not study martial arts as a practitioner, he would do so as a scientist.

By the age of twenty-five, he had obtained a bachelor's degree in Physics and a diploma in human anatomy, and a minor degree in statistics and probability. Armed with the knowledge of these three fields as his foundation, he spent all his time performing research on martial arts and combat sports. He would perform surveys, studies and experiments on different martial arts and gather data on several variables and attributes on them and draw conclusions as well as hypotheses based on them before publishing them in respected peer-reviewed journals.

As the advent of MMA and UFC truly arose as a major industry with a large market for combat sports entertainment at the birth of the twenty-first century, his work became the foundation for modern MMA. The sudden rise in the significance of martial arts in the twenty-first century was a dream come true to John. He built upon to publish research that would become the bread and butter of combat sports.

And then, he died. At the age of fifty-nine, his already-compromised lungs collapsed, and he passed away a peaceful death. He'd spent his entire life dedicating his heart and soul to the one thing he loved, and died loving it, while still cursing the shackles that prevented him from truly embodying it.

Yet, this was not the end.

('Hm?') John stirred as he felt a strange sensation enveloping him.

('Didn't I... die?')

John wasn't sure what was happening, but he was relatively certain he was to die when he last felt his consciousness slipping in the hospital, his last sight being that of hastened doctors injecting him with something or the other.

('I guess not? But what the fuck did they wrap me in? A jelly coated condom?')

He could barely move, yet could feel that he was in a fetal position though.

('I'm going to sue these motherfuckers so hard, there is no way this falls within ethical practice. Can't they just let me chill in peace for fuck's sake?') He cursed.

Just then, he felt a force pushing onto him, it seemingly pushed down on his butt attempting to push him through what seemed to be an opening of some sorts. At this point he was positive that something was definitely off, he was just far too bewildered and frightened to even attempt making heads or tails of this situation. A few seconds later, he felt his body being forced out of an opening, and that's when he panicked, calling for help.

"waaaaaaaaaa!" Was what actually escaped his mouth.

('Eh...? Did I just... cry?')

He opened his eyes, only to behold a giant woman holding him.

('No, she's not giant... I'm the one who's small!') He barely managed to glance with his stubbornly half-closed eyes, at his clenched folded tiny arms, horrified.

"Quick, treat her! Her breathing is dangerously shallow and pupils are dilated."

What ensued was a long session of attempting to stabilize his biological mother's condition. The presumed-doctors and nurses all diligently performed variety of actions with great determination, but alas, to no avail. Slowly but surely, her eyes lost their light, yet they never once turned away from John.

"Time of death, 17:42."

John didn't understand the language they spoke, but he understood what had happened. Although he still half-believed this was some hallucination, he felt a pang of grief even as his consciousness drifted away.

('Fuck me... Please let this be a drea...')

Alas, fate deigned to ignore his wish, yet again.

* * * * * * * * * *

He woke up later that evening in a daze, yet he needed only one moment to know that that was no hallucination. He really was reborn as a baby, despite how absurd the notion seemed to him. He was in a rather small medical room, waddled in a thick towel in a wooden cradle, the room had windows on opposite sides of the room, one leading outside and the other to the corridor where he could see nurses and doctors walking through occasionally through the gaps in cradle. He glanced around only to realize he was not alone, there were several other babies just like him in their own cradles.

('An incubation room.')

He sighed. He hadn't the faintest idea where he was, but judging from the foreign language they spoke in, as well as the difference in clothing and even architecture, he was far, far away from the US.

('It's not just that, the technological level of this place is really low. Incubation rooms like this are filled with devices that monitor babies' vitals, furthermore, there was no electronic technology when they delivered me either. Even this room doesn't have any lights, just lamps.')

That being said, the lamps were strange, the source of light was not fire, which flickered whereas the the lamp's light did not waver, it most certainly wasn't electricity. In fact, as far as he could tell there was no electricity in the room at all. It really was a bewildering notion to someone from the 21st century, was there really a nation with such primitive technology? John wasn't sure.

('This is insane, this shouldn't be fucking possible. What the fuck is happening?')

Assuming he was reborn, he didn't know if he was even reborn in the 21st century. What if he was reborn in a dystopian future? Or the past?

('No wait... Is this even Earth?')

He didn't know yet, but he would find out sooner or later, assuming he had anything resembling a life he used to have. These experiences had shattered his subjective worldview of reality, only time would tell what his new one would end up looking like. He braced himself, in fear and partially with a tinge of excitement, for his future to unfold.

Exploration

It had been nearly a month since John had been reborn, and not much had changed since then. His days were spent mostly in his cradle, which drove him mad with boredom, the novelty of being reborn had long passed. Hospital personnel would feed him, bathe and change his diaper, the latter of which was humiliating for a grown old man. Still, he enjoyed this feeling of youth. The feeling of inhaling massive amounts of air, envigorating every single cell in his body was truly addictive.

He felt as if he was overflowing with limitless energy that he urged to expend, his mind felt fresh, and his body felt comfortable. He would often spend his days trying to move around as much as he could within his cradle, but his body was far too weak to do much at this stage. He would often spend time contemplating his future and gathering as much information about anything he could.

He'd even learnt his own name in the process, the nurse always addressed him with 'Rui'. A strange name, but one he was beginning to get used to. As for his surroundings, he'd already noted several oddities about this place. For starters, the race of the humans he'd come across was unclear, there was no skin color that seemed to be the norm, both men and women ranged from light skinned to dark. But this wasn't the strange part, the strange part was their hair.

('Are they coloring it? Does this country have a fad or something?')

He had seen hair of almost every primary and even secondary color. Red, blue, yellow, green, purple, blonde, silver, pink etc. This was a rather shocking sight to a man from a world of mostly black, blonde and little red hair. In fact, he had come across only one person with black hair, himself, he was accustomed to this since he had black hair in his previous life as well, yet it seems black hair was not only not the norm, but also exceedingly rare. Of all the countless people that had walked past the corridor in the past month, he hadn't seen a single person with black hair.

The second equally strange thing he had noticed were the eyes. People's eyes' color was all over the place. Just like with hair, he found a spectrum of every single color except, yet again, his own eye color: black. Both his eyes, and hair were pitch black, something that was strange too, as if they sucked the light out of the world. He suspected that these traits were rare, perhaps even ominous based on the fearful, perhaps even disdainful glances that some people would throw at him.

('I hope that isn't the case.') He sighed.

('In any case, this world definitely isn't Earth, there were no races with such hair and eyes.')

Just then, the door opened and he glanced at the nurse who was assigned to him. She was accompanied by a blonde-haired woman who looked to be in her late thirties wearing something that resembled a fusion between a gown and a traditional yukata. The nurse lifted and passed him to her as they conversed, though he wasn't sure he understood what they were conversing about. The blonde-haired woman played with and smiled at him while occasionally asking the nurse questions. Ten minutes later, after she seemed to sign some paperwork, she left the hospital with him.

('Figured this day would come, one month in a hospital is way too much.') He mused to himself, but he welcomed the change. Finally, he could learn more about this world. He glanced around and took in the environment. The first thing he noticed was that technology was most strange, it was primitive compared to the twenty-first century on Earth, but it was esoteric and didn't seem to match the historical technological progression of humanity on Earth.

Their lighting sources were still a mystery to him, their medicine was also strange, they used strange concoctions, and apparatuses while tending to him. He had no frame of reference for them because he couldn't recall any such equivalent in Earth's history.

('There's something very different about this world, that's for sure.')

A minority of people carried belongings in makeshift bags made from cloth, it seemed only a larger majority used handbags, or other carrying articles. The sense of fashion was strange, it was a mix of middle age western and eastern clothing, it seemed both men and women wore clothing that generally enveloped their entire body. This was generally a trend that existed prior to the Industrial Revolution that allowed for the production of clothing articles with a more sophisticated and difficult production process.

This would suggest that their technology was low, but the architecture of buildings was rather pristine considering most of them were residences or small-time shops, not something he would expect from medieval Earth. These oddities threw him off, he wasn't sure what how to evaluate their technological prowess.

The weather was beautiful, the sun shone bright, yet the presence of an adequate number of clouds shielded the surface from much of its wrath.

Cool winds blew, rustling the leaves and cherry blossoms of trees and grass that populated the sidewalks, it was truly a picturesque sight to Rui, a sight that could seldom be found on modern Earth.

The stone roads were populated with bustling citizens buzzing between what seemed to be a flea market of domestic goods and services set up in small stalls or shops.

Just as he was admiring and absorbing his surroundings, the blonde-haired woman waved her hand and called out to a man pulling a rickshaw. She quickly got on with Rui after exchanging a few words with the rickshaw puller, before he started pulling them away at a brisk walking pace.

('Hm, an economical occupation with a low barrier of entry.') He noted, there were plenty of travelling rickshaws he spotted as they crisscrossed through the town. They travelled further and further away from the bustling populated markets, before soon, they reached a house with a huge fence, before they got off. Rui noticed that the blonde-haired woman paid him off with what looked to be a bronze coin.

('The coins are remarkably intricate; how can their most common and universal currency be so sophisticated without electricity? maybe I really have underestimated this place.')

The house was a little worn down. The paint had significantly worn off and the building was chipped and cracked at multiple areas, albeit small enough to not be dangerous. Still, the garden was surrounding the house seemed well maintained and all in all it painted a homely image. The blonde-haired woman carried Rui to the entrance before knocking.

"Yes?" A young red-haired woman opened the door slightly, only to beam in joy, as her eyes fell on the woman holding him.

"Mother Lashara!"

('Lashara is her name?') Rui wondered.

"Alice." Lashara smiled back.

"Welcome back." Alice replied before turning to Rui with a curious expression. "So this is him? The black-haired, black-eyed baby that no orphanage accepted for a whole month?"

"Yes, the poor child has been alone during the most tender moments of his life, I couldn't help myself after seeing how cute he was."

Alice cooed and cuddled at him before taking him in and showing him off to the others.

('So this is where I'll be living from now on eh?') Rui pondered.

('This... I can get used to this.')

Shocking Revelation

"Say 'aaaaan'." Alice smiled at Rui holding a spoon of porridge near his mouth. It had been eleven months since Rui had been born. He had grown accustomed to the mundane albeit pleasant life that he had come to be living for the past ten months. Still, although he had very few tribulations as an eleven-month-old, he would notice that the state of the orphanage was not what his comfortable life would lead him to think it was.

Life was hard. the 21st century had the highest quality of life in the history of Earth and only got better and better every year due to growth in technology. But this was a world in its Middle Ages, even basic necessities that he took for granted on Earth such as easy access to food, shelter and security were difficult to obtain, and even harder to maintain for the lowest of the middle class and lower, the risks and consequences of failing were much harsher too.

He could tell that the financial state of the orphanage was poor, the condition of the orphanage left some to be desired. He wasn't sure where the orphanage managed to scrape the necessary money to sustain itself, but he was sure it was far from easy, orphanages were a non-profit organization, they usually made their ends meet by donations or in rare cases subsidies.

Though clearly this orphanage struggled with those. The sisters would often forgo eating meals so that the children of the orphanage could eat fully, he could sense the anxiety hidden behind their smiling facades when they fed the hungry children.

('Sigh, to feed a helpless worthless baby like me, they sacrifice much, they endure much.') He couldn't help but feel guilty.

('When I'm older, maybe I can use my knowledge to earn a large amount of money. I'll support them myself. They already think I'm a genius after all.')

As an adult mentally, Rui was able to learn languages much quicker through active learning. He quickly remembered everybody's names first, followed by basic greetings, words he came across most, such as 'food' and 'eat', before making his way across a large portion of the common language. He could form basic coherent sentences by ten months, and had grown more comfortable and fluent with them by eleven months. The orphanage considered him a genius, after all, what baby could speak so well before it even turned one year old?

The rate of growth of his speech was more than thrice of than that of the average child. Of course, as an adult, Rui didn't feel very smart, ten months of non-stop practice only to be able to speak as well as a four-year-old was actually rather embarrassing, even, but of course that was without any active help or learning resources, and purely from observation and deduction. But he could use this rate of growth to get a well-paying occupation to support his new family in the future.

For now, he indulged himself in the food his body needed to grow up strong.

"How's the porridge Rui? Is it tasty? I added extra pepper just as you wanted." Alice smiled as she fed him another spoon.

"It's really tasty sister." Rui replied with as much sincerity as he could fake. In truth, he hated porridge, as someone from the middle class of a first-world country, he was accustomed to much better food than porridge, but this was something Alice had personally made for him, with a lot of love and care, he did not dare hurt her feelings out of his privileged lifestyle.

Besides, he did need to eat, nutrition was most important for a child his age and malnutrition could screw him forever in the worst-case scenario. This was not something he could tolerate, as someone who suffered from poor health for a lifetime. As a former chronic asthma patient, the feeling of air gushing into his lungs and invigorating every cell in his body was addictively satisfying.

('That also means I can practice martial arts in this world!') He reminded himself excitedly. Ever since he was reborn, he realized that the fact that his body did not seem to be hindered by any health ailments meant he could do all sorts of things he never could before, with the number one activity on his list being martial arts.

('I could also complete the incomplete research project from my previous life!')

('Fuck YES! This is by far the most exciting part of being reborn!') He couldn't wait until he was old enough to start practicing martial arts.

"Alice, the Squire you called to clear the fallen tree trunk blocking the back exit is here." Karin, another caretaker of the orphanage, informed,

"...Squire?" Rui inquisitively inquired, he'd never heard anyone mention that phrase so far.

"Ah, you don't know yet. Well, would you like to come and see?" Alice put down the bowl of porridge and gestured at him to follow, which he did out of curiosity.

The man waiting outside the house was extremely tall, and ridiculously buff. He wore a what looked to be a Gi, something that resembled training uniforms, but his muscles could not be hidden despite his loose baggy clothing. His head was partially clean shaved, while his remaining hair was neatly braided in a single long pony tail.

('Wait a second.') Rui's eyes lit up.

('Is this a martial artis-')

"Ah, it's over there." Alice guided him to the back where a huge tree trunk had fallen and blocked the gate.

"I see, then please take several steps away." The man nodded at the sight, before taking a martial arts stance. He'd stood before the fallen tree before putting his left foot forward, and his right leg back. He folded and brought his left arm forward, with his forearm perpendicular to the ground and his fist pointing to the sky. It was a common stance for launching a straight right in most martial arts. Yet it seemed as though the man intended to use it to... clear the tree?

Rui's eyes flew wide open at this sight.

"What is he tryi-"

"Floating Tiger Fist style: Roaring Impact." The man whispered.

What followed next shocked Rui from head to toe. Every cell in his body froze as if they each wished to witness the miracle that had followed. He didn't think anything could surprise him anymore, but he was wrong. This was merely the beginning.

The man's body disappeared, Rui could only see a haze as he began his movements, and it completely vanished in his vision as the man twisted his core to generate enough torque while driving all that momentum into his fist.

The next thing Rui heard was a huge shockwave that hit him with a mild force even at a distance of more than ten meters away, and a large thud followed by the sound of crumbling wood. The shockwave had lifted up dust and sawdust, that prevented him from seeing the immediate consequences of the strike. Yet once it settled, his shock escalated.

The tree trunk was reduced to bits! The man damn near pulverized that huge tree trunk with a single punch!

The man turned and glanced at Rui and Alice, unperturbed.

"Anything else?"

Orphanage

Lashara sighed as she finished working on the accounts of the Quarrier Orphanage, money was tough this month. An orphanage had many expenditures, the most taxing of them being food. It wasn't easy to obtain enough money to feed sixteen children and six adults. Although five of the six adults earned money, they barely made enough for everybody, this was despite the tax waivers that orphanages received from the government, and the few donations that the orphanage occasionally received from benevolent rich patrons.

Their monthly expenditure included food, clothes as children were constantly growing and with sixteen of them something or the other was always outgrown every month, sanitation supplies, the discounted tax, maintenance and several other individually small needs and indulgences that culminated in a daunting monthly expenditure.

The Quarrier orphanage had been founded by her twenty-three years ago, back then she was the only caretaker, and she had taken in five children back then. Generally, families looking to adopt went to larger and more famous orphanages rather than smaller ones like her own, so the five children she took in had never been adopted, she raised them like her own children.

Those five children Alice, Karin, Depp, Myra and Kenta grew up and decided to support the orphanage and their mother, together they constituted the six adult caretakers that ran the Quarrier Orphanage.

Lashara spent all her time at the orphanage, whereas the five caretakers had part-times that allowed them to sustain the orphanage. Usually they had anywhere between fourteen-sixteen children, this was their utmost limit given the orphanage's accommodation and financial capacity, as well as the caretaker to child ratio. Though, families preferred to adopt younger children, below the age of one normally, so most of the older kids remained in the orphanage.

They would be home-tutored in their early years by Lashara mainly, she would teach them basic law, geography, history, mathematics and the absolute bare basics of economics and politics. She did her best to instill the foundational knowledge that all were expected to have as well as the things all adults ought to know. Although she was no learned academic, over the span of twenty-three years she had become a master of teaching the basics.

The ladies Alice, Myra and Karin worked part time in kitchens, restaurants, at wealthier residences as cooks, waitresses, maids, baby-sitters and jobs of those sorts. The men Depp and Kenta worked in manual labor jobs, rickshaw pullers most of the time, albeit in winter they preferred to get into mining. Together the five earned a majority of the monthly income the orphanage received.

Lashara loved each one of them from the bottom of her heart, without them, she would have to shut down the orphanage, the mere thought of which made her heart ache. Things were hard, but because she had such loving children, she could overcome these tribulations.

Things had gotten even harder since the orphanage took Rui in, a newborn infant required constant attention and supervision, this put an even greater burden on them, but Lashara did not regret her decision. She felt a great amount of heartbroken pity when her sister, who worked as a nurse in the hospital, informed her of a black-haired, black-eyes orphaned baby who had not been accepted by even a single orphanage.

Black hair and eyes were exceedingly rare and were ominous and it is said that those born with these traits could bring great ruin or fortune to the entire world, thankfully Lashara never bought into that nonsense, and neither did most people, but the superstitious fear of bad omens still remained. To Lashara it was just a bunch of made-up nonsense that had no doubt made the otherwise perfectly normal and ordinary children born with these traits go through a harder life.

Of course, Lashara was not blind to the fact that Rui was far from a normal child. In her eyes, he was a prodigious genius beyond fathoming. He spoke his first word at the age of two months, shocking all the adults around him, and his vocabulary and speech increased dramatically until he could speak like a four-year-old even before he hit the age of one. Furthermore, his temperament was truly unbelievable, he very rarely cried, and even then, only shedding a few tears reluctantly when he got hurt badly. He was calm and patient, something Lashara thought to be impossible in an infant.

It would be quite intimidating to her if it wasn't for the fact that Rui was a truly wonderful baby, he was kind, affectionate and above all else truly adorable, she was sure he would be a heartbreaker when he grew up.

She sighed as she shut the accounts book and put aside her abacus when-

BOOM!

A sudden loud noise startled her. She walked down the corridor towards the back of the orphanage where the noise had come from.

"Ah the squire, I see." She peered through a window at the crumbled wood and sawdust rubble.

('Yet another expense, but we didn't have much of a choice. Chopping it down ourselves would take too much time and energy and the back exit is regularly used for receiving supplies because the storage room is closest to it.')

A storm had knocked down a brittle dead tree, leading to all these complications. Fortunately, Martial Squires were quick, making their services worth every bronze coin of their service. A Martial Squire was one of six realms, or ranks, of Martial Artists, who were part of a Union known as the Martial Union, which offered any and all services that employed Martial Art. The Orphanage had commissioned manual labour from a Martial Squire, through the Union, though only in rare occasions.

She noticed Rui by Alice's side as she paid the Squire the fees for his labor, particularly she noticed the gaping awe and admiration he expressed at the Squire. It was almost impossible to miss anyway, especially coming from a childlike Rui, who was generally quite reserved and passive in his emotional expression.

"Fu fu fu... I wonder if he'll strive to become a Martial Artist..."

Martial Art

Rui spent the rest of the day pestering each and every single adult about what he had just seen, after eight hours of incessant interrogation. He tucked himself into his bed for the night, yet he was far too excited to ever fall asleep. It had taken him a while to understand enough to just barely satisfy his foremost layer of burning curiosity, after all, his vocabulary was still quite imperfect.

He pestered the adults until he was able to comprehend their nuanced answers, it was quite tiring, but he managed to obtain answers for his most burning questions. After the rigorous interrogation, he'd spent time assimilating and organizing everything he'd learnt.

Martial arts, or Martial Art as they called it, was real. It was not only real, but it was extremely powerful too. Martial Artists were extremely powerful, capable of extremely superhuman feats, like the one he had witnessed. Across the country, and perhaps even the continent, Martial Artists were divided into six Realms, which were basically ranks:

Martial Apprentice, Martial Squire, Martial Senior, Martial Master, Martial Sage and finally; Martial Transcendent. Each realm was far more powerful than the last, but none of the adults knew anything more specific than that.

('If a Martial Squire, who was only the second strongest of six realms was this strong, then how much stronger were the higher ranks?') He wondered with giddy excitement. This revelation was truly by far the most soul staggering experience he had ever made. Even the shock of being reborn was tame and rather boring in comparison. He quickly dismissed these thoughts before revising the rest of what he learnt.

Martial Art could apparently be traced to a little over five hundred years ago. Martial Artists grew stronger and stronger in every country, furthermore their numbers increased as time passed, until the Martial Artist population grew large enough for associations known as Martial Unions formed in every country. Martial Unions were basically liaisons between customers of Martial Art services and the Martial Artists themselves.

It served as a connection between the demand in the consumer market for services like bodyguarding, assaults, manual labor as well as more covert operations like sabotage, infiltration, espionage, surveillance, assassinations etc. Even niche occupations like tutelage were within the purview of the Union according to Kenta who once was an aspiring Martial Artist.

The Martial Union was an organization with a vested interest in the propagation of Martial Artists, so it had taken measures to ensure there would be a healthy influx of fresh blood martial artists, such as the Martial Academy. The Martial Academies apparently were meritocratic institutions founded, managed and staffed by the Martial Union, not to mention these institutions trained aspiring Martial Artist till the Martial Squire stage primarily.

Furthermore, according to Depp, the Academies had a hefty yearly tuition fee, after all, tutelage from Martial Seniors was a privilege to aspiring Martial Artists that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. Yet the high tuition fees were not a barrier, thankfully the Martial Union was cognizant enough to recognize that a large majority of talents would simply be buried due to their low economic class.

Thus, the Martial Academies offered a scholarship program that allowed aspiring Martial Candidates to incur the fees as debt and repay the debt after they graduate from the Academy. The scholarship program was essentially an investment with no guaranteed returns, after all if a scholarship student failed to graduate, then the debt would never be repaid.

But ultimately this policy allowed the Martial Academies and by extension the Martial Union to maximize the number of Martial Artists, their highest interest and goal, the financial losses were rather trivial in comparison to the economic might of an international Union, furthermore the scholarships were given based on merit, so the losses were minimized.

The moment Rui learned about the Martial Academies he had already made up his mind about his future, his motivation for it was extremely high, he couldn't wait. He would get into an Academy, one way or another, scholarship or not. He had already formulated potential solutions, but he lacked far too much information to flesh them out.

"What are you thinking about?" A child's voice called out to him. Rui glanced in the direction it came from.

"Not much, Farion." Rui responded. Farion was one of the boys at the orphanage.

"Hehe, Rui is thinking about Martial Art, isn't he?" A girl beside himself smirked mischievously. "He spent the whole day asking all the adults about Martial Art."

This was Nina, one of the older girls at the orphanage. In the past 10 months, Rui had familiarized himself with all the children in the orphanage, although due to the age gap, both mental and physical, he had a harder time bonding with them as much as he would have liked to, but he did spend time with them nonetheless.

Children like Farion and Nina would take more time to spend time with Rui and babysit him whenever the adults were busy to make their lives easier.

"Do you want become a Martial Artist, Rui?" A thirteen-year-old boy reading a book asked him.

Rui's eyes sparkled.

"I'm going to become the best!" Rui declared.

"Then you'll have trained hard." The boy smiled, closing his book. "Martial Artists train very hard to get their hands on superhuman power. Are you willing to do what it takes?"

"I was born for it, Julian" Rui replied, without a shadow of doubt or hesitation. It wasn't literal though, for he had no idea why or even how he was reborn, but he suspected that there was some reason. If there was a reason, what other reason could there be?

"Then we'll support you to the best of our ability, Rui." Julian walked over and lifted Rui into a hug.

"Mmmm, thanks." Rui replied. Julian was a bright child, although he wasn't freakishly prodigious like Rui, he was a quiet and intelligent child who spent his time absorbed in books of all sorts, anything he could get his hands on. Rui was impressed by his maturity despite his age, among other things.

The children chatted more until Depp told them all to put out the lights and go to sleep. To Rui's surprise he fell asleep quickly, he was quite exhausted after a whole day of excitement.