The Martial Unity

Chapter 3635: Working Scientific Hypothesis

The realization was shocking, but the chains of logic that led to it were solid. Indeed, if there was a ’purpose’ to the manifold, it was likely to hide and protect something across and within the continent.

It would explain why the flow of time in the Great Panama Manifold was the opposite of that of the Mellow Manifold. It would explain why the Eldritch Chimera and the manifold tree ruled over the continent through the Beast Domain and through the Authority of Alpha in the manner that they had.

Additionally, it even explained the presence of esoteric matter in the Panama Continent, something that nobody, not even the Esoterist himself, had been able to explain.

After all, it was known that before 1300 years ago, there was no esoteric matter in the Panama Continent. The esoterified remains of ancient civilization in the Lost Cities made it clear that these people did not shape their civilization as if they had an abundance of esoteric matter. The origin of esoteric matter coincided with the erasure of information on the Panama Continent and the birth of the manifold, which occurred alongside the Epoch of Evolution outside the manifold.

”If everything had gone according to the ’intention’ of the foreign agent that had arrived to Gaia, then most likely, our manifold would still be erected,” Rui realized. ”And in addition to being erected, the continent would still be covered in the original Beast Domain under the iron grip of the manifold tree and the Eldritch Chimera. Most likely it would have remained this way until the esoteric matter did what it did. However...”

He turned to the Divine Doctor. ”Nobody has been able to identify this alleged purpose of esoteric matter to produce negatron matter and increase the mass of Gaia. Esoteric matter isn’t alive so it can’t act with its own purpose. How do you think esoteric matter could possibly be responsible for the presence of negatron matter in our world?”

”I don’t know,” the Divine Doctor admitted. ”However, for all our understanding of esoteric matter, there is plenty we don’t understand of the way that it interacts with our world. It is possible that deep within the surface, there are interactions that we don’t understand and haven’t been able to identify. Now that we have a better idea of what to look for and where to look, we can begin searching for evidence of our hypothesis. It is only a hypothesis for now based on relatively spurious, even if compelling, reasoning. But I do think that there is a lot of merit to it.”

Rui nodded. He had to admit that what they had come up with made a lot of sense and wrapped a lot of things together in a neat little bow.

It explained why the manifold was there.

It explained why it diluted time instead of accelerating it.

It explained the ’purpose’ of esoteric matter on the continent.

It cleared out a lot of the lack of clarity regarding the negatron core and why the planet was going larger.

It also explained why there were so many coincidences countless years ago during the Epoch of Evolution. It all made sense if they were each the result of a unifying cause in the form of some foreign agent arriving to Gaia and planting itself in her depths.

More importantly, it was a hypothesis that could be falsified with enough empirical research that was within the realm of pragmatism, qualifying it for a valid scientific hypothesis.

They could begin searching for some correlation between the esoteric matter in the Panama Continent and the production of negatron matter in the depths of the core. They also had strong reason to suspect that whatever was the cause, it was almost certainly going to be deep into the depths of Gaia.

One of them alone hadn’t been enough to deduce all of these possibilities, but together, they had managed to uncover the most logical implications and inferences of all the scattered pieces of information from countless different sources, time periods, and geographical regions across the entirety of the planet.

There were still some things that were shaky, of course.

”We still don’t know the ’purpose’ of the foreign agent, and we still don’t know if it even had purpose,” Rui remarked. ”It is theoretically possible, as I mentioned, that this was not done with some kind of intentionality. Even the virus comparison is merely an abstract comparison, we lack evidence in that regard.”

”For now,” the Divine Doctor replied. ”The grand purpose is indeed the give mystery. Why did such a thing come to our world? What objective did it have? What was the point of enlargening our planet?”

He shook his head. ”These are all questions that cannot be answered by simply examining the circumstances of our planet alone since we have already thrown the plan out of array.”

Rui nodded with a hint of pride. ”Martial Art is not to be trifled with. Without it, we would have never conquered our prison. We would have never conquered our continent, and eventually even win a war against our wardens without the power of Martial Art.”

”That is true.” The Divine Doctor nodded with an acknowledging expression. ”If there was some grand conspiracy from a foreign agent intentionally making all these changes to our planet, then it seems that this foreign agent wasn’t prepared for the power of paths.”

That remark made Rui fall into thought. ”Is it even possible for aliens to have paths?”

That was a difficult question to even parse. Paths were not just a Gaian phenomenon, they were a homonid phenomenon. There were millions if not billions of species in the true world altogether across the many kingdoms of life.

And yet, out of all those species, only seven pureblood species had developed paths. And each of those six species were evolutionary descendants of one ancestral homo sapien species.

In other words, even if a planet was teaming with life, it wasn’t likely for paths to develop. One could even have an advanced civilization like ancient homo sapien did, and still not have paths.