The Martial Unity

Heaven and earth and quaked.

It quaked under the weight of his power.

The blood-red Suns in his eyes flared with bloodlust as his oath bore heavy on the world. “I will kill you if it’s the last thing I do.”

The Demon of Asmodeous eyes were pitch black with murderous malevolence.

“Let’s see you try.”

An endless flood of death and darkness surged from within the Demon, converging upon the Rui.

An attack of Death.

More Death than Rui had ever faced in his entire life.

An attack far beyond anything that a newborn Martial Sage should have ever been able to handle.

And yet, a single whisper escaped Rui.

“Genesis.”

RUMBLE!!!!!

The world shook as Rui manipulated all of heaven and earth.

He breathed within them life.

Metabolism.

And even sentience.

A series of complex self-replicating chemical reactions derived from the common elements in heaven and earth. A system of processing centered around chemical states as memory centers and chemical reactions as a means of communication. All it took was triggering a self-sustaining set of reactions and modeling a system that leverage them in a manner that life did.

With these two as the foundation, Rui created a form of life itself.

Abiogenesis.

The process by which life arose from non-life.

Rui deployed these principles in the Forge of Creation to create a technique that would allow him to breathe life into non-life.

An extraordinary technique unlike any other. Genesis.

RUMBLE!!!!!

Chills crawled across the skin of the Demon of Asmodeous as the world around him shook.

It shook with life.

He could feel heaven and earth growing alive with each passing moment.

He could feel them growing sentient.

The fundamental building blocks of metabolism and sentience spread as Rui built a tremendously expansive lifeform within heaven and earth across the entire battlefield.

The Gu poison that surged towards Rui dissipated in the blink of an eye.

WHOOSH

The Demon of Asmodeous froze as he watched his potent poison of death consume the very life that Rui had created.

In turn, it spared Rui.

“Your Martial Path is death…” A faint whisper escaped Rui. “Then, I will adaptively evolve to your Death with the power of life.”

RUMBLE!!!!!

Heaven and earth shook as it grew poisoned by the Gu poison.

Rui had mercilessly created a lifeform of metabolism and sentience amid heaven and earth only to use it as a shield. It was effective because Rui knew that the Gu poison only targeted life and life alone. By design, the poison targeted life as moths were to a flame.

He had noticed when the Demon had spilled one drop in the Sage-level Gu ritual. The drop didn’t act like a liquid when it struck the ground.

Instead, it had vaporized into a dense dark gas that spread across the entire battlefield but also only targeted living beings. Even the notorious genocide that the Demon of Asmodeous had perpetrated with a single drop of poison was because the poison spread in search of all life, infecting and killing billions of people before its potency finally died.

That was why he knew.

That was Rui knew that if he created a lifeform of sufficient magnitude, the Gu poison would be irresistably sucked away from Rui and into the transient lifeform of heaven and earth.

And that was exactly what happened.

RUMBLE!!!!!

The world shook as a lethally deadly surge of Gu that threatened to kill Rui where he stood was drawn away from him and towards all of heaven and earth.

The Demon of Asmodeous was frozen.

He was frozen as he watched Rui effortlessly redirect his poison.

All the years, decades, and centuries he has spent on making the Gu unavoidable and undefendable.

He had overcome every defensive technique.

Every evasive technique.

He had designed the Gu to be able to reach its opponent and kill them no matter what.

Yet, in the blink of an eye, Rui identified a shortcoming and adaptively evolved to create a technique that rendered his Gu obsolete.

One technique was all it took.

For the most powerful poison known to all of mankind to be rendered entirely useless.

A technique that created life itself.

Horror erupted within the Demon of Asmodeous as he watched Rui singlehandedly destroy everything he had ever built in his entire life.

In that moment, the premonition that he had gotten many times since his meeting with the Dawnbringer only grew stronger.

‘I have to kill him.’

He needed to kill the Dawnbringer.

‘Right here.’

His pitch-black eyes flared with bloodlust.

‘Right now.’

RUMBLE!!!!!

The Demon of Asmodeous surged towards Rui with a ferocious bloodlust and maddened desire to kill. His poison hand, rendered pitch black with all the poison, sharpened into a powerful jab as it surged forward.

As it surged forward towards Rui’s heart.

An attack he would have been able to block or dodge under normal circumstances.

But not with Amare in his hands.

Had he been by himself, he may have died then and there.

And yet, he wasn’t by himself.

VMMMMM!!!!!

An astronomically powerful beam of light crashed into the Demon of Asmodeous, blasting him off trajectory.

A ferocious light of determination and willpower flared in Bodhisattva Maitreyi’s eyes as she deployed the sum totality of her power to protect Amare.

To protect the man who restored her life.

Even as she faced off against the Demon of Asmodeous, she could feel her granddaughter’s life.

She could feel her granddaughter’s emotions.

Her warmth and brightness.

She didn’t have the faintest fathoming how Rui did it, but somehow he had managed to reverse time itself as far as her death went.

That was enough.

That was enough for the Boundless Light.

“Enough of your meddling.”

RUMBLE!!!!!

The Demon’s eyes flared with wrath and anger as a surge of darkness erupted from him, converging upon the Boundless Light.

“Genesis,” a faint whisper escaped Rui as he deployed his power to protect Bodhisattva Maitreyi from the Gu poison.

One moment, the poison converged upon the Bodhisattva, threatening to snuff the light within her. The very next, the poison veered off, infecting all of heaven and earth and everything except for the one target that the Demon of Asmodeous had chosen.

It rendered him toothless.

A single opening was all that Bodhisattva Maitreyi needed.

“Disappear with the Light.”