The Martial Unity

Rui remained frozen with a shell-shocked expression while Amare’s expression with disgust and horror.

“H-He’s not a stud to be used for breeding!” her protests emerged.

The Blood Lord shifted his gaze towards her blankly.

“Who are you again?”

Her eyes widened as his earnest question reached her. “Ah…” his eyes lit up as he recalled. “His partner. Right. Well, don’t worry, little miss. You can think of this as ‘science’ as opposed to infidelity. Pure and impassive copulation. A purely biological process. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

His words evoked deep disgust from her. “…That’s impure!”

The Blood Lord tilted his head with confusion as he failed to parse his words. “Impure? You mean the specimen is contaminated? I am unable to understand what that means.”

“It is spiritually impure,” she insisted with a defiant expression.

The Blood Lord stared at her with pure confusion.

“It taints the human being to regard such a sacred act with such dispassionate lens,” she continued with a sharp gaze. “The act of creating another human being is far more sacred than just a science experiment.”

The Blood Lord simply stared at her for a moment before bursting into laughter at her words. He found her message to him to be so funny that he momentarily shed his postured dignity, bursting into a mirthful guffaw.

“Ah, now I remember…” he remarked once he finally regained his composure. “You. You’re the Omni-Martial. From the Gen Temple.”

He sneered at the mention of her powerhouse. “A bunch of unscientific fools who think ‘everything is Martial Art.’”

She furrowed her eyebrows indignantly, which, by her standards was nothing short of a murderous glare due to how averse she was to showing hostility.

“We are not fools,” she knitted her eyebrows. “We simply recognized that the act of creating another human life should not be done for the sake of power or any other impure motivation. It should only be done with pure love and nothing else.”

The Blood Lord snorted contemptuously, shaking his head.

He had no interest in debating this out with a follower of Genism. As far as he was concerned, they were already far too gone to be saved with logic, rationality, or science.

And yet, a smile emerged on his face as he gazed at Rui.

“You say all this, but… he has yet to reject me.”

Rui’s expression was severe as he grew immersed in thought.

On the one hand, he wanted the bloodwhirler blood evolution treatment as soon as possible. He didn’t want to skimp out on something that could allow him to adaptively evolve much better to his opponents and get him that much closer to fulfilling Project Water.

Project Water was the ultimate goal.

On the other hand, he was reluctant to father children.

He knew that there was no way that he could possibly be the father that they deserved. He wasn’t fond of the idea of fathering children and then just leaving them in the hands of the Blood Cult.

Naturally, the Blood Cult turned out to be more reasonable and rational than other polities. He still didn’t want to leave his child in their custody.

That being said, he wasn’t particularly hung up on the idea of blood relations, either.

Blood didn’t bind a family, not in his experience.

A bunch of strangers with whom he had absolutely no blood ties had given him the most wonderful family he could have ever asked for. Meanwhile, his own half-sisters and half-brothers tried to assassinate him. There was also the chance that his mother was not innocent and was involved in the embedding of John’s memories in him. He also thought of how much Kane hated his own blood relatives and spent most of his life breaking away from his family.

In other words, one didn’t need to be surrounded by blood relatives to have a wonderful family. Nor did being surrounded by blood relatives mean that he would be blessed with a real family.

‘That being said… I can’t pretend that these children will have a good life.’

He knew they wouldn’t.

They were essentially doomed to become test subjects, baby machines, and breeding studs. Their entire life would revolve around spreading their blood, the blood of their mother, across human civilization, reproducing endlessly till the very day they died.

He glanced at the suspended Blood Goddess with a hint of pity.

Her life was probably miserable.

On paper, she was revered as a goddess and was even more important to the cult than the Blood Lord himself.

But her fate was sealed.

She was destined to reproduce until the day she died. It was a horrible destiny that he would not wish upon any person, but certainly not any woman, for the amount of suffering she would have to endure for the sake of evolving the human species. If he had sons, they would be subjected to what he was being asked to do for the rest of their lives, and if he had daughters, they would be subjected to her fate. The very thought of his children suffering so much was something that he found unwilling to tolerate.

And thus, he was faced with a choice.

Was he willing to forsake his children for the sake of taking one more step towards Project Water?

He found himself at an important crossroads.

He found himself at an important juncture in his life. It was the kind of hypothetical that one would ask about out of morbid curiosity, but even if one gave it consideration, one would probably not be able to peer deep enough into one’s self to understand how one would act.

It was easy to imagine and talk. It was very difficult to actually make a choice when one was thrust into the hypothetical in the real world. It was especially difficult to do so when one was thrust into it out of nowhere, having completely been caught off-guard.

And yet, Rui had already made his choice. A choice that helped him understand who he was even better.

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