The question was how he ought to go about gaining control over the energy and nutrients that his body obtained from the Hungry Pain technique. This was where the hard part began.
('The issue is that cells deal occurs uniformly across the body barring the brain,') He sighed. ('This makes it hard for me to gather all of it and channel it the way I want to.')
Had, for some reason, all the dead cells that the Hungry Pain technique recycled all been concentrated in one location conveniently, then there would have been no problem for Rui to come up with some way to control it as he pleased because it was so conveniently rounded up for him.
It would have just been a matter of engaging in some conditioning, both mental and physical.
But he wasn't sure how he could redirect all of the yield of Hungry Pain to whatever physical parameter he wanted.
('Well, unfortunately, I can't really improve my offensive or defensive output with this or my maneuvering,') He sighed. ('So it's really a question of how do I control whether my Hungry Pain technique improves my stamina, or my healing factor at the moment.')
Just simply supplying more energy and nutrients to muscle cells would not make those muscles generate greater force. That was not how muscle tissue functioned. They weren't steam engines that would generate more power the more coal was dumped into the furnace. They had upper limits, and could only burn so much energy to output some corresponding result.
('This is, of course, barring the Martial Heart, which can and does increase output.')
The energy and nutrients that his Hungry Pain technique provided was stamina at its core, it allowed him to fight far longer due to the recycling of energy. Thus he wasn't too concerned about using it to improve stamina, that was what it did by default.
Improving his healing factor, on the other hand, was something he needed to figure out how to handle. When the human body was wounded, the cells at the edge of the wound would immediately begin the division process, closing the wound with new cells over time. This required the body to slowly supply cells with the necessary compounds and nutrients to divide and form new cells.
Rui narrowed his eyes. ('So if I find a way to dump all the energy and nutrients of Hungry Pain into my blood when I'm severely injured, then the cells healing the wound will be able to receive the required energy and nutrients to make new cells much sooner, allowing the production of a new cell to occur much sooner, and the process of the new one also growing quicker.')
That was an optimistic condition for him to set for himself. If he suffered a wound, then all he needed to was find a way to simply use the energy and nutrients of the Hungry Pain technique to enter the bloodstream after the wound was inflicted.
He didn't need to somehow control where it went after it entered the stream. Blood reached all places in the human body, and dead cells were present everywhere in the human body, thus if he could get them to enter the blood when a wound was inflicted, the cells around the wound would naturally begin taking in the huge amount of energy and nutrients that would enter the bloodstream, thus healing faster.
All he needed to do was come up with a conceptual framework of how the mechanism would work.
('Hm, I need some sort of principle that will push the energy and nutrients of the assimilated dead cells into the bloodstream,') Rui narrowed his eyes.
It was not easy, after all, the only interactions between the blood and cells came in the form of the diffusion of gases. Every time one inhaled, one was essentially dissolving the gases breathed from the outside into the blood, while expelling the gases from the blood out, which was exhaled. The blood would then travel with the oxygen and other gases dissolved into it, before exchanging gases with cells.
Rui's eyes lit up as an idea popped into his head. ('Wait a minute, I can use air to wash out all the energy and nutrients stored in cells and tissue from the Hungry Pain technique.')
It sounded silly, but it might work. Cells received oxygen from blood and returned carbon dioxide. If the amount of carbon dioxide that exited it was great enough it could also allow for the removal of excess energy and nutrients in a cell from Hungry Pain.
It was sort of similar to how water cleaned out a bucket when it was thrown out, in a sense. However, it only worked if the density of gas was enough to be able to hook along excess and non-essential nutrients with it like a fishing net.
('In order to get such a dense fishing net that will extract all the energy and nutrients, I need to inhale dense breaths.') Rui realized.
However, he didn't fail to recall that he was on an island where the atmosphere was naturally extremely dense. n0velusb.c0m
('However, that's not enough, it needs to be even more, and I also need to replicate it when I'm off the island,') Rui realized.
He did not want a technique that was off the island, and considering that the island didn't do the trick, he needed to find a way to make sure that he could inhale and exhale that much air at once.
Thankfully, this was a much more manageable area. Breathing techniques were one of the most foundational bread-and-butter techniques of nearly every Martial Artist in the world. There was an enormous amount of research that had gone into the field, and he was sure that he would be able to find some technique the principles of which he could apply to his Hungry Pain technique to create a new technique that allowed him to enhance his healing factor.
Rui grinned as he found the path forward to eventually realizing Project Metabody.
