The Martial Unity

He could feel it in his bones.

The onslaught of accelerating particles at 99.999% the speed of light was powerful enough to annihilate him on a quantum level if he dared allow it to strike him without mustering his strongest defenses.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

Each time a wave of particles struck him at such unfathomable speeds, they eviscerated the tons of concentrated invintium he covered his body in, vaporizing his outermost layer of skin like water on lava.

On top of that, the sheer force each particle accelerated was off the charts. Because they were accelerated to such extraordinary speeds, their relativistic mass was at a whole other level, increased by orders of magnitude.

It was like being hit by mini neutron stars.

Billions and billions of mini neutron stars.

It was overwhelming.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

“Arghhhh!!!” He bellowed in agony as the astronomically intense accelerating hadrons only grew stronger and faster.

They only grew more frequent.

It took every ounce of power he possessed just to stay alive in each moment.

Sometimes the particles would strike each other at the perfect angle, rather than him, giving rise to a blindingly bright explosion and excitement in the quantum fields, unlike anything he had ever seen.

They would give birth to new particles.

Particles he was familiar with.

Negatron particles.

Rui’s ethereal eyes widened at that phenomenon even as he struggled to stay alive.

It was only then that he realized that these weren’t attacks.

Or at least, if they were being used as attacks, that wasn’t their normal purpose.

“This…” He realized even as the onslaught of accelerating hadrons collided into him. “This is a particle accelerator.”

He was in the collision chamber.

Considering how fast these particles were being accelerated, it would have required an unfathomably intense electromagnetic field that the true world would have long been detected, giving the game away.

“Unless it had distance.”

The entirety of the Panama Continent and the crust and mantle beneath it, he quickly realized. The esoteric matter embedded within them was somehow turning the continent it was within and the planet beneath it into a particle accelerator that relentlessly accelerated particles to extraordinary speeds across vast distances underneath the Panama Continent before having them collide in this very chamber.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

The invintium protecting him vaporized in the blink of an eye, only for the next round of accelerated hadrons to arrive at him a beat too soon.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

“ARRRGHHHHH!!!” Rui roared with pain as a round of hadrons blasted into him before he activated the invintium armor once more, causing his body to be impaled smoothly by tremendously heavy particles.

They boiled him inside out.

If not for Autocorpus’s swift deployment of the Gene Realm, adaptively evolving on a genetic level to survive what would have been a death sentence to every other pathwalker in the world, he too would have died then and there.

He couldn’t simply continue with such a primitive defense alone. He activated the Forge of Creation, quickly weaving together a powerful technique adaptively evolved to the threat he was facing.

“Diverging Field.”

A powerful electromagnetic field created from rotating supercharged and superheated gas particles from an improvised breathing technique.

“Soul Retcon.”

He dedicated all of his mastery to that one technique, becoming unprecedentedly good at that one technique, allowing him to divert a large majority of the hadrons away from him, leaving him to weather a smaller and more manageable onslaught of accelerated hadrons.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

He gritted his teeth, weathering it as he directed his attention outwards, studying his environment. He didn’t have much time, given that the accelerating hadrons only continued to grow faster and faster. He would eventually reach his limit with this technique before being forced to deploy another solution.

He needed to gather more information about this cavity, which he speculated to be a collision chamber in a continental particle accelerator.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

His ethereal eyes sharpened as they perceived exactly what happened when all the accelerating hadrons collided with each other, rather than with him.

WHOOM…

They produced large amounts of negatron matter around him, which promptly moved towards the core. They passed through what felt like a space-time barrier, drawing towards the inner negatron core.

It was a natural process.

The gravitation potential within a hollow sphere was zero, mathematically, while the gravity from the negatron core attracted it mathematically, causing the lake of negatron matter created with each round of hadron bombardment.

Each round of hardon collisions created negatron particles that were automatically drawn to the inner core, making it slightly larger. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

Over the span of 187,000 years, he could understand how this could lead to such an extraordinarily massive negatron core. He could also understand how this would continuously make Gaia, formerly Earth, bigger and bigger.

What surprised him was that the process hadn’t stopped even after all these years.

They had assumed it had stopped since the Age of Tumult, a period of great geological volatility and expansion, had long ended.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

But the process had never stopped.

It must have been that the amount of negatron matter added became smaller and smaller relative to a larger and larger planet, leading to almost no discernible geological volatility beyond a certain stage. However, the planet continued growing larger and larger.

To what end?

At some point, the anti-gravity would overwhelm the gravity, causing the planet to be destroyed and…

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

His ethereal eyes widened with realization.

That was the purpose.

That was the end goal.

It was to expand the planet until it was destroyed in an outward explosion that would hurl its depths outwards into space, propelled by the anti-gravity.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

The esoteric matter.

The negatron matter.

“And the alien entity.”

They would become seeds that would be propelled deep into outer space as meteorites containing the absorbed information from the worlds they came from, containing the esoteric matter from the worlds that they came from.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

It reminded him of a phenomenon in the plant kingdom.

Fruits and flowers would sometimes explode to spread seed as far as possible, to colonize more area. Sometimes it would be the bark. Sometimes it was the leaf. It varied by species.

But the purpose was the same.

To use the force of a biochemical rupture or explosion to spread seed as far as possible.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

There was another type of entity that used such a tactic.

Viruses. They would infest an infected cell with virions and eventually cause the cell to rupture and explode, spreading its progeny to other cells.

What if the alien entity was deploying a similar tactic?

What if its reproduction entailed spreading alien seeds across the universe, propelled forth by the rupture and explosion of Gaia? His eyes widened as a chilling realization dawned on him. “Was Gaia—no, Earth—infected by one of those alien seeds? Was that what caused the Epoch of Evolution? What planted the Manifold Tree? What caused the esoterification of Panama?”

Before he could even answer the question, a change occurred in the collision chamber.

It produced an electromagnetic field.

An extraordinarily powerful one.

One that canceled out the one Rui had generated with his newly created Diverging Field technique.

Chills crawled across his skin as a single realization dawned on him.

It was adaptively evolving to him.

His eyes widened as his protective electromagnetic field was nullified just a moment before the most powerful onslaught of accelerating hadrons struck every cell in his being.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!

RUMBLE!!!!!!

The world shook as the attack threatened to wipe his existence out of reality.