***

Miscellaneous Non-Duelling Arts.

For the second-to-last study—and the final original, the next merely being a return to Twenty Tools—Henry stepped as far away from martial arts as possible.

Picking one of Saana’s regions at random, he tallied up every job and social duty in the area that was not duelling, reaching a total of approximately 574. Then, speeding through this lengthy list, he wasted a couple days trying out every single one. He donned a roofer’s worn-out boots. He wrapped his hands in a fishmonger’s smelly gloves. Etcetera.

Numerous reasons might be given for this generalist study. To search for gems of inspiration from domains never considered, to cultivate himself into the renaissance ideal of an artisan in everything, to gather fuel for the final martial synthesis, etc, etc. But if he had to pinpoint a single, dominant reason, it would be to clarify the place of duelling within the rest of his life.

As he’d plunged into the deepest abysses of this topic, he’d made the 1v1 his sole fixation. Steadily, he’d amplified its importance across the preceding arts until it'd consumed his soul, until he'd thought, moved, felt, eaten, breathed, and dreamed in duelling. Without a doubt, if one were to win the most challenging of duels, this absolute level of investment was a necessity. Nevertheless, one should always be wary of plunging too far into any obsession and mistaking the universe glimpsed within it for the universe proper. In the case of the duel and the duellist, there was much more contained in life’s grand tapestry beyond these, the pair constituting only a single role and a single moment in the broader human timespan.

Thus, by sampling a bit of every art that was expressly not duelling, Henry'd aimed to expand his shrunken focus. This collection of generalist perspectives would enable him to re-examine the duel from many distant and oblique angles, to redetermine its rightful dimensions within the whole. He asked himself, to what extent, precisely, had the duel escaped its proper boundaries and limits? Where, spatially, should the duel venture, and from where should it keep out? When, temporally, should the duel begin and when should it conclude? What quantities of spirit, of effort, of sweat, and of blood should be sacrificed in the pursuit of the duel’s ascent, and what quantities of these—as importantly—should not be sacrificed?

In other words, what Henry sought through this episode of non-duelling was that highest of goals as first fathomed in A Thousand Tool’s extensive ethical treatise, that holy grail of the 1v1 long coveted by this field’s preeminent philosophers: a healthy duel-life balance.

To rise beyond the question of ‘To duel, or not to duel’, to both duel AND not duel - was such a balancing act possible? Could a human heart obtain the strength to house such a fiercely-unstable moral contradiction? Could it survive the attempts of the duel, through both wakeful hours and sleep, to burst the walls separating its four chambers and erupt out of the duellist’s bleeding chest?

For lesser duellist geniuses, perhaps not, doomed as they were to an eternity of duelling and only duelling.

But Henry was not them. He was history’s greatest duellist.

Reassuming this champion title, he would thus invite duelling itself for its turn in the sand. His strength tested against duelling, he would pummel it with 574 rapid strikes of non-duelling. What control of himself he’d given this fascination, he would reclaim and force it to kneel in submission to its proper station as a mere side-hobby, duelling reduced in defeat to just another item checked off the bucket list of conquests.

So Henry did that. He did not duel.

Not duelling, he sniffed the ocean breeze through the sailor’s nostrils, and, not duelling, he steered the helm with the captain’s tanned hands. Not duelling, he twisted the sagas of the court into the bard’s heroic metres, and, not duelling, he guided ancestral skeletons with the prince’s haughty gaze. All of these, life’s forgotten sensations, he absorbed into his heart and circulated through his arteries narrowed and calcified upon the duel.

Then, after sampling these hundreds of roles in isolation, he stepped further back. He became remoter still as he assumed the highest vantage point of all - of a god. As a god—all-seeing, all-knowing, all-loving, all-not-loving—he judged how each of these duties combined like mere cells within the total organism of humanity, each individual constrained by place and task and season.

And from this view, as one who’d been all and gone beyond all, he beheld the specks of the duellists. Amongst these specks, he located the tinier speck of himself, wasting a few hours of retirement in their speck-like trade.

It was this mindset, of plunging into the heart of all, then leaving it, that he would carry forward into A Thousand Tool’s closing synthesis. As the duellist must situate himself appropriately within life’s higher order, so must each of the tools acquired in this journey find their exact proportions amongst the order of the duel.