The Martial Unity

That was simply true. After all, it took too much time for Martial Sages to mature to reach the level of Transcendence. This was especially true for the latest generation of Martial Sages in the Panama Continent. The reality was that they were probably centuries away from Transcendence. Not just because they were extremely brittle, untested, and had very little experience as Martial Sages, relatively speaking. But it was also because they were inexperienced as Martial Masters who had broken through or as Martial Seniors who had broken through.

This was the downside of breakthroughs. While the civilization did indeed go astronomically stronger, the individual Martial Sage and the average quality did go down a significant degree. Not enough to cancel out the overall improvement to the net military power of the nation and the civilization, but enough to significantly delay the progress to the next Realm.

That was why Rui knew that Martial Transcendents would likely emerge from those peak Sages and Candidates who were at that level even before he started breaking Masters through to the Sage Realm.

“Don’t be too harsh on her,” Amare defended her grandmother protectively. “She’s been through a lot. And she deserves some peace and rest.”

“Well, I’m afraid she’s not going to get it,” Rui replied with a slight bit of apathy. “The reality is that our civilization is going to be expanding to the stars, and we are going to be reaching a new level of power and a whole new scale. Our warriors are going to need to be ready.”

“Yes, but imagine in the short-term, it is very unlikely that there will be any kind of conflict that would require Candidates to put their lives at risk. We have thousands of Martial Sages and those numbers are only rising,” Amare insisted.

Rui shrugged. “I suppose that’s true, she can rest for a while, but I hope that she keeps up her Martial power and at least makes sure that she doesn’t regress in her progress to the Transcendent Realm, because that can happen.”

In fact, it could even happen to Martial Transcendents. The reality was that, just like with Enlightenment of Self, phenomenological uniformity was not a permanent thing that could never be lost. Although Rui couldn’t imagine it, if he ever lost touch with Water, he could potentially lose his Transcendence. That was a reality that Rui desperately wanted to avoid. That was why he was constantly in touch with Water and what it meant for everything to be Water.

All in all, it wasn’t easy to have such power and maintain it without any effort. “What do you think about the other races and their Paths?” Amare asked, raising her eyebrows. “If you aren’t satisfied with the progress of the Transcendent candidates of our civilization, then you could look into other races and their Transcendent Candidates, could you not?”

That was a pertinent question, and one that certainly had occurred to many others on the matter, without a doubt. Martial Artists had long wondered if the other races and their Paths also had a corresponding Transcendent Realm. In reality, however, none of them knew if that truly was the case.

Aside from Rui, of course.

“I have already spoken to Mother Maeria on the topic, but yes, I do intend to help the other races achieve Transcendence, there was an informal race to TRancsendence that we were all sharing with each other that caused all of us to try and push towards it, but now that I have won, I don’t mind sharing the truth with them,” Rui remarked. “The stronger they are, the better it will be for our civilization as a whole, because frankly, our continent and our civilization are probably far too strong right now. They have every reason to be wary of us if they are unable to match our power. That is the reason that I don’t want to fight on this particular matter.”

He knew that the other Paths were surely capable of reaching Transcendence. Especially since phenomenological uniformity and intrusion into the Transcendent Realm were something that could happen even without any kind of Path, he had already seen the virus recreate it with the Noosphere. And given that the other Paths had their own equivalents of the Realms of the Martial Path, he couldn’t imagine that they didn’t have the equivalent of the Transcendent Realm.

This was especially so since he had the example of Mother Maeria and her breakthrough to the Transcendent Realm and her momentary step into the Transcendent Realm. That moment alone was enough proof for him that the Realm existed for the other races; they simply didn’t have the understanding and the knowledge to get there.

“Once the other races get their own Transcendeds, we will be able to have great power as a civilization,” Rui remarked. “And the probability that we will be wiped out by powerful alien forces who come towards us even as we speak to get their hands on the secret to Transcendent is extremely low.”

That was fundamentally what everything boiled down to. Everything was about to strengthen human civilization and make it stronger than it used to be, either by quality or quantity, but ideally both.

The biggest force in the entire universe was, of course, the Universalis Mensis and was something that even he didn’t think he could contend with. He couldn’t help but wonder what kind of phenomenological uniformity the universe had. Just how did the universe perceive the universe and all of reality?

It was something that he would have loved to find out, but more importantly, it was something that he was worried would get corrupted by the virus. He had no doubt that the cosmic virus that was infecting the universe, star to star and planet to planet, would likely be able to take control of the Universalis Mensis and get a hold of its power without losing it to its opponents. In order to combat that, just how many Transcendents would they need to get their hands on?

“More than we could hope to get our hands on.”