The press conference was broadcast in seventeen languages, beamed into neural feeds across half the world, and trended under the tag #PreserveThePast.
Dr. Aiko Yulan stood center stage, flanked by delegates from the United Nations Cultural Technology Council and corporate representatives from Hydracores, Amida Analytics, and GenSpec. Behind her hovered the symbol of a rising lotus encoded in radiant glyphs—the official seal of the newly formed Codex Preservation Initiative.
"We stand at the threshold of a new era," Yulan said, her voice precise, calculated. "An era where tradition no longer fades with memory. Where the martial arts of our ancestors are not lost, but immortalized—preserved, learned, and evolved through science."
The room erupted in applause.
But not everyone celebrated.
---
They came in waves.
Teams of Codex Archivists, dispatched with surgical precision to every corner of the Earth. Their mission: digitize every known martial art before the last masters died.
They arrived at Okinawan dojos with handshakes and contracts. They set up scanners in Tibetan monasteries. They offered six-figure buyouts to Brazilian jiu-jitsu lineages. In West Africa, they promised legacy grants in exchange for combat dances preserved over centuries.
Some agreed. Most didn't.
The ones who resisted were labeled non-cooperative entities.
"We will not reduce our way to data," one Shaolin elder warned, his staff barring the entrance to a temple courtyard. "You cannot understand chi through equations. You cannot quantify the will."
"Tradition dies without replication," Yulan responded when asked about such objections on the WorldSphere NewsNet. "This is not theft. This is preservation through transformation."
She believed it. At least at first.
---
Inside the Codex Lab, they mapped everything.
Each master who agreed to cooperate was outfitted with biomechanical tracking suits. Motion capture nodes. Chi sensors that pulsed with faint electrical readings. Every strike, stance, breath—converted into waveform blueprints.
They built an internal database called the Scroll Archive. At first, it was cleanly categorized:
Shaolin Long Fist
Aikido Flow Principle Set
Capoeira Combat Chain Level I
Kali Knife Range v1.3
But soon, the files began to blur together.
Corporate analysts optimized the sequences. Coders removed what they called "inefficiencies." Movements were shortened, angled, made symmetrical. Style variance was trimmed to uniform packages.
"What you're doing is no longer archiving," said Dr. Yue Fei, a biomechanics specialist who defected from the project. "It's curation. No, worse—it's sanitization."
He was discredited within a week. His teaching license was revoked. The footage of his critique was replaced by an approved segment on "Combat Equity Through Digitization."
---
In the underground circuits, whispers began to circulate.
Masters disappearing.
Schools shuttering overnight.
One rumor spoke of a Cambodian bokator elder who broke three Codex suits before being forcibly taken. Another claimed a Korean sword line was wiped out when they refused to submit their scrolls.
But the Initiative pressed on.
By the end of the year, over 700 styles were archived, with another 2,000 in progress.
Yulan's team built an interface prototype: a neural HUD that could visualize martial forms in real time and allow instant playback from the Archive.
The first field test occurred in Geneva, at a black-tie military demonstration.
A volunteer soldier was equipped with a subdermal relay, synced to the HUD, and fed the motion script for a Taekkyeon sweep-kick combination.
He executed it perfectly. No warmup. No training. Just feed, sync, and move.
A second script followed—a hybrid mantis-to-crane series, traditionally requiring years of dedication.
Executed in seconds.
The military investors smiled.
Yulan didn't.
Something about the movement was… hollow.
---
At a tea house outside Hangzhou, Yulan visited her former teacher—Master Hong, who had taught her basic Wing Chun as a girl.
He served her quietly, without expression.
"They've taken your school," she said after a while.
"They took the name," he replied. "Not the form."
"I didn't know they'd do it this way."
"You knew."
She tried to explain the vision. The preservation. The purpose. He listened.
Then he tapped her chest with two fingers.
"This," he said, "does not digitize."
When she left, she didn't look back.
---
By the second year of the Archive Directive, martial arts were no longer something you learned.
They were something you licensed.
And behind closed doors, corporate strategists began drafting the first blueprints of what would become known as Combat IP Law.