The Martial Unity

It was a level of power that would have annihilated him had it struck.

But it didn’t.

In the very final moment, Rui managed to activate what was the most powerful defensive technique he had acquired.

“Corpa Etherea.”

WHOOSH!

His body became intangible as the incoming onslaught of bombarding hadrons zipped right past his body, slamming into each other in a catastrophic explosion that sent shockwaves throughout the entirety of the Panama Continent and the true world.

RUMBLE!!!!!!

A maelstrom of seismic radiation emerged from the cavity, spreading through the bedrock of the Panama Continent. It moved upwards through the mantle and to the crust, threatening to cause mass destruction on the surface of the continent.

And yet, it came into contact with powerful organic biotechnological roots that smoothly absorbed the seismic radiation. It was the same biotechnology that allowed the light elves to ensure that the destruction of their ambush on Rui many years ago wouldn’t spread beyond a single forest.

The roots were also in a state of heightened effectiveness thanks to energy being redirected to them from human civilization, allowing them to ensure that not a single drop of seismic radiation spread to the surface of the continent.

The people barely noticed the tiniest of remnants by the time it reached the surface, leaving them perfectly safe.

“That was close.”

Rui’s voice was grim as his body rematerialized, reestablishing a connection with the Higgs field, restoring the substance to his body. He could keep the connection cut off for too long, because it threatened that the particles of his body would turn into light and dissipate. In fact, Bodhisattva Maitreyi had mastered that phenomenon because the essence of her Martial Art was Light, but for Rui, who mastered water, he couldn’t hope to have that kind of control over light.

He was deeply relieved that he took the measure of fighting his clone and copying his Gigabrain technique as a precaution. The reality was that the sheer amount of power in the continental hadron collider’s collision chamber was extraordinary, enough to create lakes of negatron matter at once.

That was a dimension of energy that exceeded even his ability to survive. RUMBLE!!!

The cavity he was in seemed to roar with seismic activity.

His ethereal eyes shot around, sharpening in alarm as the world around him shook. The exotic lights that clad the walls of the cavity, comprising transcendent esoterics that he couldn’t even identify, despite having had access to Kandria’s esoteric inventory and database.

RUMBLE!!!

His expression hardened with grim severity as his nerves and instincts rang alarm bells of danger.

Danger that radiated from everywhere. ‘What is happening?’

His earlier evasion of bombardment had suddenly caused the bombardments to stop. That didn’t feel natural.

He could feel ‘eyes’ on him.

Eyes that came from everywhere.

RUMBLE!!!

The world continued shaking as he struggled to get a good grasp of his circumstances. He had come here expecting the alien virus, and he had instead found the collision chamber of the hadron collider that the alien virus had constructed to feed the core of the planet with negatron matter.

The alien virus, however, was nowhere to be seen. He didn’t even know what to expect from it, but he was relatively certain that it wasn’t in such a dangerous area as the collision chamber of a titanically enormous and powerful particle accelerator.

RUMBLE!!!!!

The quaking of the world around him intensified, causing his expression to grow more intense.

‘The alien virus doesn’t appear to be here, but this is still the point of maximum fear.’ Rui sharpened his eyes. ‘Most likely because…’

He directed a knowing glance at the negatron core. ‘Because this is the apparatus with which the alien virus is engineering the destruction of Gaia.’

Ultimately, his goal was to protect Gaia.

In which case, there was only one thing felt to do.

His ethereal eyes flared with intensity.

“I must destroy this place so that it can’t create negatron matter anymore.”

RUMBLE!!!!!

The quaking of the world reached a zenith, as if realizing the danger that Rui posed towards the collision chamber. It seemed to understand.

It seemed to understand that Rui wasn’t merely an intruder or a foreign contaminant in the collision chamber.

He was an existential threat.

That was when the change occurred.

RUMBLE!!!!!

The transcendent exotics lining the inner wall of the collision chamber began glowing as the very fabric of space and time began shifting.

Rui’s ethereal eyes widened as the very fabric of space and time began to shift.

THWOOM…

It began to solidify. It began affecting the quantum fields within the collision chamber, making them less… malleable.

Making it more difficult for him to sever his connection with the Higgs field.

He couldn’t become intangible as easily as before.

On top of that, he couldn’t teleport out. The sheer ferocity with which the collision chamber bound the fabric of space and time was so intense that even with black holes and negatron matter combined, he wasn’t certain if he could teleport away.

“Shit.” His expression darkened.

It meant that the collision chamber had no intention of letting him escape.

RUMBLE!!!!!

The world shook as the hatches in the collision chamber opened up, producing large oceans of a very familiar exotic. Primordial seed.

WHOOSH!

“What…?” Rui’s ethereal eyes widened with shock as a large amount of exotic pluripotent matter began gushing into the collision chamber. So much so that it completely dwarfed even the fields of primordial seed that the Namgung Dynasty controlled. It formed an enormous lake whose surface faced the negatron core, repelled by its anti-gravity like all positive matter. RUMBLE

The surface of the primordial seed lake began quaking as indentations emerged from it, taking on strangely familiar shapes.

The shapes of beasts and monsters.

Rui’s ethereal eyes widened as he found himself confronted with a wide variety of blobs of primordial seed shaped like beasts and monsters. Serpents, big-cat carnivores, angels, dragons, phoenixes. To his shock, the blobs of primordial seed not only took on their shape, but also began transforming into the substances that comprised their body. It became those beasts and monsters.

“The exotic pluripotent matter…” Rui whispered with shock. “It’s being fed the existential information of the beasts and monsters!”

He couldn’t even fathom the sheer depths of the miracle that was unfolding before his very eyes. It was theoretically possible to create conventional life from a primordial seed since it could become all matter, including the matter that comprised the chemistry of life, but to actually create life, primordial matter alone was unfathomably difficult, if not outright impossible!

Or so he thought.

“My understanding of exotic pluripotent matter was… limited,” Rui realized. “This substance… is limitless.”

Exotic pluripotent matter—as far as he understood it, having spent years with it—simply adopted the wave function of whatever it came into contact with, able to become that substance.

Its wave function was a probability distribution of all possible wave functions.

Until this very moment, however, he didn’t fully fathom what that meant.

“Exotic pluripotent matter absorbs information…” His voice chilled with wonder. “Not just of fundamental particles and chemical compounds, but even existential compounds!”

He was witnessing the feat of creation itself.

It was also then that he realized the truth of where he actually was.

It wasn’t just a chamber for collisions.

It was a chamber of creation itself.

A realm of creation that vastly exceeded anything Rui was even capable of fathoming.

WHOOSH!

In the blink of an eye, what were lifeless blobs of primordial seed became alive and fully formed sentient creatures.

Their feral eyes shifted in his direction with a primal bloodlust.

“ROOOAAARRR!!!”

“KRRRIIIEEEKKK!!!”

“RAAAWWWRRR!!!”

They leaped at him in an aggressive charge, threatening to crush him where he stood.