The Martial Unity

After fighting for many hours straight, conserving their Hearts and Minds as much as possible, Rui and Ieyasu too reached the end of their stamina. If there was one weakness that Martial Artists had, it was that their power was not their normal output but the result of squeezing every ounce of their potential.

It was not something that could be maintained extensively even if they minimized their output to the absolute minimum or killed as many as possible to weaken the tide.

Regardless, after hours of adaptively evolving heaven and earth to antithetically oppress the many beasts and monster, both of them had finally reached their limit.

Thankfully, the next shift had finally arrived.

“Fall back!” the leader of the pre-existing shift instructed tiredly.

The two shifts switched as the exhausted Martial Masters returned back home in safety.

STEP

The moment they arrived a team of medics, doctors, and nurses of the emergency medical ward immediately swarmed them, identifying the Masters that were most in need of first aid.

“Man, I’m totally done!” Kane complained as he gasped for air. “It’s endless! Just how many beasts and monsters are there in the Beast Domain?!”

“Trillions.” Rui calmly supplied him with the answer.

“…We’re so doomed.” “Not if we do everything in our power to win,” Rui replied with a composed tone. “If all Martial Artists learn to adaptively evolve to beast and monsters, then we will have a much easier time dealing with them.”

Kane scoffed. “Not everyone can adaptively evolve like you, man.”

Rui nodded. “That is precisely the problem that needs to be solved.”

In some sense, this was his first shift fighting against the beast tide. The first time, he had acted as auxiliary support by sabotaging the quasi-Sage-level and Sage-level beasts. While his contributions had been enormous, he hadn’t directly participated in the battle the way he did now. He understood the plight of the average Martial Artist much better now.

It wasn’t that Martial Artists had no idea how to fight beasts and monsters, no.

The issue was that most of them trained to fight other Martial Artists because most missions, commissions, and operations they dealt with did not require them to fight beasts and monsters in such a head-on manner.

Even Martial Artists that hunted beasts did so in a manner that utilized covert tactics that could not be applied to the defense of human civilization from the Beast Incursion. None of them had ever waged war with beasts; it was normally stupid to do so.

In this particular circumstance, they didn’t have much of a choice.

For Martial Masters of the Upper Realms, their Martial Minds weren’t often very compatible with dealing with a tide of beasts too well.

This battle taught Rui of how much humanity desperately needed the proto-Tree of Life model that he was soon to embark on. It would serve as a guideline that would allow them to counter beasts in an extraordinarily effective manner.

Although they would most certainly never be nearly as good as Rui without the full-fledged version, they would still be orders of magnitude more effective than they currently were. In fact, as long as they fully embraced it and fully trained around it, the strongest of Martial Masters would be able to sweep all quasi-Sage-level beasts without requiring any aid from the Martial Sages.

The Martial Sages would be able to dominate Sage-level beasts even harder than they already could. It would alter humanity’s strategic outlook massively and ensure that it would be able to hold the line much better than the current grim situation.

“I’ll need to get to work immediately.”

Rui got up, walking away.

“Hey, where are you going?” Kane frowned.

“To get some sleep in the manifold,” Rui replied. “After that…”

He turned to Ieyasu who was resting. “You and I will begin training for two weeks in the manifold.”

He turned away, heading off with a determined expression.

He thought more highly of the initiative of the human sages to aid humanity when it needed it the most, whatever their motives were. It was stupid to be greedy when everything he cared about could potentially be destroyed as a consequence of holding back.

The Kandrian Empire needed more time to break past the Great Limit, and it would not receive that time if human civilization fell.

On top of that, Martial Artists had stark strategic weaknesses after a battle ended such as drastically lowered combat ability, forced sleep, and whatever the price of using even higher Realms of power was. Without a proper civilization and establishment, they would die very easily after exerting themselves to the very limit.

“I need to finish that proto-Tree of Life as soon as possible, I need to get stronger and stronger as soon as possible.” Rui narrowed his eyes.

Over the next month, he would spend most of the day in the manifold training, only coming out to participate in his shift of the battle before returning to the domain. That was about nine months in the manifold, which was more than enough time to create the proto-Tree of Life that could be disseminated across human civilization very quickly.

Once Martial Artists around the world mastered it, even if they didn’t master domains, they would be able to deal with the beasts and monsters better.

“Ideally, I would love to skip out of fighting the beast tide entirely, but I do have to keep my end of the deal and impart the Tree of Life to Ieyasu.”

It was rather surprising how the epoch of the Beast Incursion suddenly caused the value of this system of thought to spike. It might have even turned into his most valued system of thought even beyond the VOID algorithm which allowed for breakthroughs.

And yet, what had earned his true excitement was not the imparting of his power to other people but the forging of his own power and taking a new step down his Martial Path with Project Forge. He suspected that out of all the projects he had ever tackled, nothing had revolutionized his fighting style as much as this particular system would.

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