The Martial Unity

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!

Their fists collided into each other as the sheer collision launched them apart, causing them to skid away from each other to the other ends of the open fields.

The long battle had long since entered dusk.

They had been exchanging blows at high intensity for an hour by then.

Rui’s body was ravaged with blood and wounds covering every inch of his body. Even Weaving Blood had grown sluggish after cleaning up all the wounds that the Devil left on him. The Devil, on the other hand, was not nearly as wounded.

Even after all the punishment he had taken from Rui, not a single wound went below the flesh, even if his body was peppered with gruesome bruises one after another. Unlike Rui, however, he was truly exhausted.

While Rui was limited to heavy breathing, the Devil staggered unsteadily as he felt his body entirely deprived of vitality and vigor. His breathing was beyond labored, leaving him gasping for breath even as his body felt heavier than a mountain. He sweated more than he bled, unlike Rui. The two of them simply stood in place.

“Is that… the best… you can do…?” the Devil asked between pants even as his sharp gaze fixed on Rui. “You still haven’t used your greatest trump cards.”

Rui huffed lightly. “Neither have you.”

Rui wasn’t sure if he could adaptively evolve to a goddamn black hole, but he was surely willing to try. The Devil, on the other hand, had stayed his hand, waiting for Rui to use the Gu and the Gigabrain.

Ultimately, neither of them used their final trump cards even until the very end, where they now struggled to even stand up straight, let alone continue a fierce and intense battle.

They were too immature to call for a draw, unfortunately. Even Rui, while level-headed in other avenues, could be absurdly stubborn when it came to adaptive evolution. He would not call for a draw as long as there was still a dim opportunity to win the battle with his Water.

Fortunately for them, there were others with common sense.

STEP

Bodhisattva Maitreyi landed in front of him with a gentle step, gazing at him with respect and admiration. “You have fought extraordinarily well, but this needs to end now.”

On the other hand, the Reverend of Reckoning simply stood in front of the exhausted Devil, fully prepared to subjugate him by force. He didn’t even bother trying to reason with the madman, simply staring at him with a pointed gaze.

For once, even the Devil didn’t have the energy left to be stubborn.

Rui, however, relented as he heaved a sigh, turning off his Realms of power as he slowly healed his wounds with several potions that Bodhisattva Maitreyi provided to him. The Devil, on the other hand, relented to consuming some stamina and nutrient potions, recuperating all his spent energy reserves.

It wasn’t even that he was particularly low on them under ordinary circumstances. He had excellent stamina, but Rui had entered a whole other level entirely with the Blood of Solaris that he had long consumed. He had also consumed a permanent stamina potion prior, so his stamina had been on the higher side even before that. There was virtually no Martial Sage who could even match him outside of stamina specialists themselves.

He simply basked under the bright and intense light of the noon Sun in the Beast Domain, gratefully accepting all the power that he possibly could from the Sun.

“You have mastered the power of primordial seed, have you?” Bodhisattva Maitreyi asked with a raised eyebrow. “It is a very impressive thing to accomplish in just the span of a year. I can understand why you decided to pursue this route. The abyssfeeder’s power is very within your purview, and it would do you good to master it.”

Rui nodded, gazing at his arms. “I will need to replenish it, though.”

Technically, he wasn’t replenishing the pluripotent exotic matter itself, but replenishing the things it was replacing.

For instance, most of the pluripotent exotic matter he has assimilated and integrated into his body was now in his regenerated arms, which the Devil had erased with the sheer gravity of his attack. In order to regain the pluripotent exotic matter that was functioning as his arm, he would need to consume a lot of nutrients to regenerate his arm organically so that the primordial seed could return to its norma,l uncollapsed state.

STEP

Sage Damian approached him with an excited grin.

“Next time, we will settle the score for good.”

He walked away, still physically amped up by the blood-rushing fight that he had just gone through. It appeared that he was satisfied with his battle with Rui, for now. The resistance that Rui put up was considerably greater than he would have expected, and that only hyped him up for more in the future.

After all, the list of people who could fight him as an equal had gone up from two to three. A fifty percent increase was an extremely exciting thing.

The gathered Martial Sages, however, gazed at Rui with an impressed expression. They truly had not anticipated that the Devil would fail to defeat the Dawnbringer who had reached an exceptional echelon of power.

And yet, despite being as strong as the Devil, he didn’t ‘feel’ like a Transcendent candidate. One of the reasons that the Transcendent candidates were given their status was that the Martial Sages around them had detected a qualitative change in their power, in their Martial Art, in their Martial Embodiment, and in their very presence.

It was hard to put into words.

But it was a unanimous agreement, leading to a somewhat informal designation of their Transcendent Status. Rui was very strong; not a single person could deny that.

And yet, even as they watched him retreat to his jet in a hurry, they couldn’t feel the nigh-Transcendent quality from him.

Not yet, at least.

And yet, if he was this strong, having yet to reach that stage of quality, none of them could imagine just how strong he would be when he did eventually reach that stage.

It was something that they looked forward to.

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