(last updated: 12/28/17)A very select few people in the fighting circuit consider themselves sorcerers, witches or gypsies, able to lay hexes and curses on their opponents both inside and outside of battle. Regarded commonly as an oddity in traditional martial arts and often exasperating to fighting purists, these individuals refer to their techniques and methods as spells and sorcery, and may be capable of more than your standard fireball.
The truth is, regardless of how it's branded by the individual fighter, rituals and long-spanning techniques have existed in the world as we know it for as long as martial arts has. They are distant cousins to the martial arts techniques that most are familiar with. In this vein, a Shinto priestess casting salt on the earth to ward off evil is no different than a branded warlock uttering a lengthy incantation on a mountain peak.
While it stands to be said that most of these rituals have little practical effect on the world, several are intertwined with actual martial arts principles and precepts, and actually can in fact have major effects on the world. The strength of these abilities, while not publically known or understood very well, are in practice in secret by several fighters, such as the Hakkesshu, or Those From The Past.
A ritual can accomplish anything a normal martial arts technique can. This is because a ritual is a technique that controls energy, the same as a martial arts technique does. However a ritual is something different entirely in that it can involve complicated material, somatic or verbal components. As a result, rituals take longer, making them unsuitable for direct battle.
The advantage of using a ritual in whatever form it takes is that one can typically access some ability that is within their realm of understanding but outside of their reach in the normal martial arts. Creating a seal over a doorway, for example, is something that an experienced sealing priest might be able to do trivially, but a novice might be able to do with time, effort, and a ritual. Summoning fire might not be possible for a chi specialist who uses wind, but he might be able to conjure the effect after spending an amount of time meditating.
That said, rituals have the same limitations as normal techniques. A ritual dealing with the mind or the soul is most typically only used by a ritualist who has tapped into their own psionic power. A ritual that controls the water is most typically only used by an experienced chi user. Multiple ritualists can also collaborate on the same ritual to increase the strength.
Some caveats should be considered. Rituals are largely not shortcuts, or means to power. Technically speaking, it is a systematic, predictable form of the same kind of effort one would apply to training a new martial arts technique in a controlled environment. While not conferring any extra instinctual understanding inside of an arena, a ritual is able to expand the breadth of one's abilities outside of a fight.
That said, ritualists are bound by the same constraints of power as a normal fighter, time aside. A fire specializing ritualist of a lower ratio might be able to conjure enough fire to burn down a forest, but the ritual to do so could take months, or years to properly prepare, while the same feat could be accomplished in minutes by a true master of the infernos.