The Martial Unity

“The elves are doing great here!” Amare remarked with delight. “Let’s go say hi to them!”

“You’ve spent the past nine months with elves,” Rui huffed. “Let’s explore something new.”

His eyes lit up with interest as he turned to the dwarves. “I’m curious to see what the Bournvyrne Empire has to offer.”

The Bournvyrne Empire was the largest haven of dwarves in the Continent of Sirinwel, said to be the heart of craftsmanship of the entire world and the forge of some of the greatest weapons in the world. They were one of the most powerful polities in the entire world, and one of the question marks that the Kandrian Empire faced.

“Let’s go check out what they’re bringing to the market of the Hlakaschken Trade Empire.”

The two of them slowly descended upon a densely packed market with haggling customers.

The air smelled of iron and ash.

The noise in the air emerging from the crowd was not just from the customers, but more so from the sellers who seemed to grow even more heated than the people they were selling to.

“Bonuld nei iakil tvim aden firodal lulkris odaluld?!”

“Enookh ti rnokh!”

“Cei rnoy am lyad, nulnn odaldaeaulmodalyauthlin!”

Rui and Amare had to get closer to actually see them because of how diminutive they were, but the loudest people in the entire market were none other than the little dwarves themselves.

This was the first time that Rui was seeing them up close in person, and he found it rather remarkable that ancestral homo sapien had truly evolved to grow shorter in the Land of Sirinwel over many eons.

“They’re so adorable!” Amare had to hold herself from lifting one of them and hugging them like they were little kids.

Rui turned to the angry, loud, potty-mouthed bearded men at the storefront before turning back to her with an expression of disbelief. “Seriously?”

“Aren’t they just the cutest?”

“You find interesting things cute.”

“Don’t be silly, I’m sure everyone would agree.”

“…”

Rui heaved a sigh, shaking his head, before returning his attention to the dwarves with a curious expression, studying them with his Tree of Life Enlightenment. It allowed him to see environments that were most fit for them, and what he saw was an environment that was deprived of life-sustaining resources.

It helped him understand why their evolutionary trajectory went down the path that it did, relative to the other five.

The elves evolved to bond with nature and harness its power directly because only those ancestral homo sapien species who were genetically predisposed to having a nature affinity went on to survive, eventually creating the elves over eons.

The dwarves, on the other hand, experienced a different pressure.

’Scarcity of life-sustaining resources,’ Rui mused knowingly. ’That is why my Tree of Life enlightenment shows me that as their optimal environment, that is what they were evolved for.”

The Continent of Sirinwel was a land of volcanoes.

Even from outer space, the continent had a visible red glow to it among the black of solidified molten rock.

The material spewed out, and the toxic gases released by the volcanoes made it difficult for flora to survive. Volcanoes also impeded the light from the Sun with the heavy particles they released into the air, making it even more difficult for an ecosystem of rich organic chemistry to survive.

This caused an evolutionary pressure that killed off all ancestral humans who needed more food to survive.

In other words, taller humans died while the smaller ones survived.

Insular dwarfism.

It made them small and weak in a hostile world.

That formed another evolutionary pressure.

They began forming tools out of the precious metals and hard substances that the volcanoes spewed out, along with the heat that it contained in its heart, thereby speeding through stone, bronze, and iron ages in their respective histories at an astronomical rate compared to every other race.

The dwarves that successfully harnessed the power of metal and the heat of volcanoes survived the best, producing the most offspring that retained genes that allowed them to gain the proclivities that they did. The dwarves that couldn’t harness metal and fire to build tools very well all simply died off as a result of their physical weakness.

Over the years, generations, and eons, the dwarves evolved the highest brain-to-body-mass ratio, with the brain and its cognitive intelligence becoming central to their existence.

They were the most cognitively gifted race out of all six pureblood races of the homo genus.

That wasn’t the only profound transformation that the dwarves had undergone, however. Another profound transformation they had undergone was the fusion of two separate genes pertaining to their nervous system and the interconnective fascial tissue in their body.

The brain used the former to connect with the body, while the latter bound different parts of the body with surrounding parts, ensuring that people didn’t just become free-flowing bags of flesh and bone with no fixed form, connecting with every square millimeter of tissue, even on a cellular level.

In dwarves, over 187,000 years of evolution by natural selection, the two systems had merged within their physiology.

It connected their brain with every single cell in their body, giving them a level of precision and accuracy in their motions that was exponentially and astronomically above anything that the other five races.

Rui found it truly unfortunate that their physical power and other combat parameters were so terrible, for they would have made extraordinary Martial Artists if their bodies had the power that humans did. After all, their Martial Soul with the physiology they had would have been so unfathomably powerful that it would have blown every other Martial Soul in existence.

He was certain that the dwarves had something similar to it in their Path of Creation.

He could tell just by looking at all the weapons, both electronic and otherwise, arranged about it in the massive market.

They were made out of ordinary non-esoteric materials that existed on the periodic table, but they possessed a solidity that exceeded anything Rui thought was possible from ordinary steel.

He saw possibilities for his Martial Path that he had written off before.