Chapter 436: Project Ascension – Part 2
After waking up from the accident on his 9th birthday, this was the first complete memory Lucas was able to retrieve, and for good reason.
As far as he could tell, his benefactor from the other universe had practiced this set of exercises almost every day for over 20 years, so it was deeply engrained into his memories, memories Lucas had then inherited.
This was the Body Tempering Technique which had started everything for Lucas, and was also, quite possibly, the most valuable piece of knowledge currently in his possession.
With his successive breakthroughs, Lucas had unearthed more details about this set of exercises, including its original name, the ’Basic Adaptive Total Physical Mental and Spiritual Development Program’.
Honestly, it was a drier, duller, and more mind-numbing title than ’The True Unarmed Foundations Art’, which itself was already quite a boring name. It really made you wonder just which unimaginative sop came up with them...
In any case, Lucas decided to keep the new label, and was even thinking of re-naming it again once Project Ascension succeeded.
More importantly, though, Lucas had learned that there was much, much more to the Unarmed Foundations Art than he originally thought.
Lucas had always known that the Unarmed Foundations Art he was recalling wasn’t a fixed set of exercises and could be modified and adapted to suit specific training purposes. What he didn’t realize at first was that these modifications weren’t meant to be done by the individual themselves.
The Basic Adaptive Total Physical Mental and Spiritual Development Program was just that, a program.
It was the culmination of multiple thousands of years of study and development by all kinds of scientists, athletes, martial artists, sociologists, religious and spiritual leaders, and a whole host of others. An all-encompassing platform that could be used as the basis to build any kind of training program imaginable for the human body.
In a word, it was perfect.
And therein lay the problem; after all, humans weren’t perfect, nor were any two humans exactly the same.
In order for everyone to take advantage of this extraordinarily complex and comprehensive training platform, it was first necessary to create a ’generic’ version.
This ’base’ version could then be tailored to each individual to suit their specific needs.
In the other universe, all of this was easy. Anyone could obtain the basic form of the program, then plug their biometric data into their terminal, define their objectives, and their personal AI assistant would then customize it appropriately.
Obviously, that wasn’t possible for Lucas.
In fact, the True Unarmed Foundations Art Lucas had been teaching everyone was actually the version the man he inherited his memories from used as his basic military training routine, not the true basic version.
Of course, even in this format, the Unarmed Foundations Art was still orders of magnitude better than the regular methods available in the Rockwell Kingdom, but if Lucas wanted to get the very best results possible from it, he would first need to return it to its original configuration then customize it for each user.
The fact that the Unarmed Foundations Art Lucas was familiar with wasn’t completely generalized was actually first noticed by Celestina.
In the process of teaching the Art to his Master, Lucas had tried to do the same as he had with everyone else, adjusting their postures and range of motion to match his memories.
Celestina had noticed fairly quickly that the ’corrections’ Lucas was giving her actually ran counter to her own experiences in tempering and training her body.
The Master and Disciple had debated this matter vigorously, but in the end, Lucas had come around to Celestina’s perspective, agreeing with her that the version of the Unarmed Foundations Art he knew probably wasn’t its original format.
The inherited memories Lucas unlocked thanks to his subsequent breakthroughs had only confirmed his Master was right.
Once he understood this, Lucas had been attempting to remember or derive the standard form of the Unarmed Foundations Art, and had actually made significant progress in that regard.
Returning the Unarmed Foundations Art to its original format actually wasn’t too difficult for Lucas; after all, his benefactor had learned the generic version at one point, so that knowledge was contained in the inherited memories.
As an aside, Lucas still couldn’t remember any personal details from his benefactor’s life, which was a mystery that the young boy spent quite a bit of time pondering over.
Every now and then, a face or a name would come to him, but then it would fade away again.
Perhaps personal memories were vaguer?
Perhaps those memories had been erased somehow?
Whatever the case, Lucas figured he would eventually uncover the truth, and hopefully learn the name of the man who had changed his life in all sorts of incredible ways.
At that point, Lucas would finally be able to properly thank his mysterious benefactor and honour his memory.
He might have been put into a life-threatening situation because of that man, but Lucas had ultimately survived and benefited immensely, so the young boy really felt nothing but gratitude.
In any case, that wasn’t an immediate concern.
What was a concern was how to go about customizing the Unarmed Foundations Art without the assistance of advanced sensors, scanners, and supercomputers.
That was the first objective of Project Ascension, and it was what Lucas and Celestina had been working on ever since they arrived in Misty City.
Unfortunately, they had run into a rather frustrating problem.
It wasn’t that the two of them weren’t capable of solving this issue; in fact, they had found something of a workaround already, the problem, was time.
Celestina was a Marquess and a General, so she had an enormous amount of responsibilities to attend to.
Lucas also had many projects he was working on, leaving him with very little free time.
Now, Project Ascension was obviously of critical importance, but it was also extremely sensitive and needed to be kept as secret as possible.
That said, there were others in Misty City who knew about the True Unarmed Foundations Art.
Lucas and Celestina had considered bringing in Allina, Farah, Sasha, Christina, and Eris to help them, but after thinking about it for a while, they had decided to hold off.
This wasn’t due to lack of trust; it was simply because Lucas and Celestina thought that adding more busy people to a project that was already suffering from its participants being too busy was only going to complicate matters further.
What they needed, was someone with more free time.