The Martial Unity

Rui heaved a sigh as he put the high-minded metaphysical talk aside.

He didn’t enjoy having discussions so devoid of any basis in empirical reality. He truly wasn’t sure about anything, and there wasn’t any data for him to even hedge his opinions on. The conversation was so fundamental that even the concept of data was undermined.

“Well, good luck with that,” Rui said, getting up. “Let me know if you discover the ultimate secret of reality or whatever.”

The Psycher raised an eyebrow. “Are you not interested in pondering the fundamental ontology of reality? Even if it has something to do with the Transcendent Realm?”

Rui directed a meaningful gaze at the Psycher.

“I intend to reach the Transcendent Realm and beyond. If this philosophical stuff is part of the path, then I will inevitably learn more about it. If not, then no,” Rui answered. “I was there when Damian broke through to the Transcendent Realm, and I assure you that he didn’t have any of these considerations, not once.”

“…I see,” the Psycher replied simply.

Rui turned to Amare. “I’m heading to experiment with the evosapien spell, you coming along?”

She shook her head. “Watching you play with a cell is boring. I want to talk more with the Psycher.”

“Fair enough,” he replied. “I’ll catch you later then.”

Rui didn’t find playing with an evosapien cell boring at all.

He was brimming with visible impatience by the time he reached the laboratory where they held the evosapien cell in stasis. It was invisibly small, at the very center of a lab where the biotechnologists of Esocline Federation took their time to study its structure.

After all, even in stasis, they could learn more about evosapien microbiology by studying the alive and restored cell that Rui had magically resurrected.

STEP

Rui’s eyes lit up as he beheld his prize.

“Open up the chamber,” he instructed them.

The biotechnologists hesitated, but did as he said.

VMMM…

The glass chamber opened up, allowing him in.

He could feel the stasis field trying to freeze him in time.

But alas, it was too weak.

“Disable it.”

Rui’s command was firm.

The biotechnologists watched him sitting down on the chamber floor with an invisibly small evosapien skin cell.

Now that Rui was at full power, he finally had the ability to study it in peace to his heart’s content.

His powerful senses scoured the singular cell floating in the air between his hands.

He could sense the cell structure.

He could see the cell components.

He could detect the molecular and atomic constituents of the cells.

When he closed his eyes, he could visualize the functioning cells.

There were many things that stood out to him.

“The cell is old.”

It was a cell extracted from the equivalent of a decrepit old man, after all.

Even if Anthea had evolved to a Realm above his old self, he had done so at the cost of burning his lifespan as Rui had discovered. The price of genetic adaptive evolution was drawing closer to death.

On top of that, his lifespan had been further reduced by Rui’s Gu and further adaptive evolution to become resistant to the Gu.

Thus, even when resurrected, he was dealing with the cell of an old man on the very verge of death. That meant that the cell structure was imperfect; it had lost much of its telomeres, the part of chromosomes that allowed for new cells to inherit DNA, making it almost unable to divide at all.

And yet, this was hardly a problem for Rui.

“Nothing that can’t be fixed.”

He had already achieved immortality by using his bodily manipulation to restore his telomeres.

RUMBLE

The world shook as he activated his Realms of power, activating one of his most powerful techniques to restore the molecular constitution of the telomeres. The biotechnologists watched with fear and alarm as Rui deployed a great amount of power just to tinker with the chromosomes of the DNA.

Within seconds, he had restored all telomeres.

This was a process he did for his entire body and all the cells in it, after all.

Doing it for one cell was hardly troubling.

“Now to extract a stem cell from it.”

This was a process that existed even on Earth.

The ability to convert skin cells into stem cells was known as pluriopotency, and it functioned by introducing specific genes into skin cells to effectively ’rewind’ their development to a pluriopotent state.

The reason he wanted a stem cell was that stem cells could become any kind of cell in the body, allowing him the full potential of Anthea’s power, if he was able to integrate successfully.

This was where Rui was a little out of his depth; nonetheless, he relied on what little he recollected of the transformation between skin cells and stem cells, while also heavily relying on his power as a Martial Sage to do things that ordinary scientists would not be able to do.

RUMBLE…

The world tremored as Rui exercised his power to create fine little quantum gravitational tweezers to operate on the cell on an atomic level, playing around with the DNA stored in the nucleus while stimulating change in the cell ever so gently.

Had any other Martial Sage tried doing what he did, they would have undoubtedly failed.

And yet, Rui succeeded.

He didn’t just use his knowledge, mind, and physical power.

He also deployed the Eye of Prophecy.

It was in situations like this where it shined brightly.

Ordinarily, it was constrained by the scope of the target of prediction, but in this case, the scope was a small cell.

It could work with very few restrictions.

As he continued with the process, it allowed him to avoid a million failures.

He could avoid absolute blunders when tinkering with the cell that would have caused the wrong outcome to unfold.

He could avoid them and get closer and closer to success.

Rui laughed as he felt a surge of triumph, watching the skin cell transform into a stem cell.

A stem cell containing Anthea’s legacy.