The Martial Unity

Ria wasn’t unaware of her father’s story. After all, who wasn’t unaware of it? However, she had to admit that she had never truly pondered what her father’s life was like.

After all, which teenager thought to dig into their parent’s past and why they ended up the way they did? Even at that stage, most teenagers pedestaled their parents too much to consider how their past had shaped them to be the way they were.

She knew her father had an extraordinary story, having grown up in an orphanage, before racing through the ranks of the Martial Path very swiftly, before going through a lot of twists and turns, before finally arriving at the stage of life he was in.

“…Fine,” she remarked. “I guess we can go sit through it.”

It wasn’t long before they had purchased tickets, as well as some popcorn and some fizzy drinks. The screen lit up, featuring a woman in labor on a medical bed. Her face was pale and gaunt. She was covered in sweat, panting heavily as her eyes grew hazy, losing vitality and strength.

Nurses around tended to her, while holding her hands tightly, insisting that she had strength, and telling her to push. The background music was tense, while the videography flew from person to person. The woman exerted herself, pushing herself to the very limit until she finally managed to give birth. The doctor held the baby in his hand, showing it to the mother, who took one last look at her baby with deep love before passing away.

The scene was tense and well sculpted, pulling at the heartstrings. Ria felt a faint tingle in her chest at the thought that her father had never met his biological mother. She wondered how she would have felt if she had never had the opportunity to meet her parents. She could also feel the negative emotional energy of everybody else watching the movie, feeling that weigh down on her as well. Then, the scene cuts, shifting to another scene. It was a wide-scale elevated shot of a shrubby area. A picturesque view of grasslands that stretched a long distance, covering hills and plains along either side of a path.

It panned to what was a primitive rickshaw made up of wood, pulled by a man who pedaled hard to pull the rickshaw with him.

“Are we serious right now?” Runark scoffed. “There’s no way technology was this primitive seventy years ago.”

The camera slowly shifted towards a woman in the carriage. She was in her mid-thirties. Her hair was a light golden, while her eyes were a stark blue. She wore simple, homely attire, while her hair was woven into a pigtail. In her arms was a newborn infant swaddled in a cozy white cloth; she smiled at the young baby with affection.

“Rui.”

It was the first time that the name of the protagonist was revealed, of course. And from there on, the movie showed what his childhood was like. Ria watched with amazement at how archaic life was back then. There was no technology, there was no interweb, there were no neural inlays. She couldn’t even imagine how difficult life must have been for everybody living in such a primitive era.

And yet, she envied how happy the child depiction of her father was when he played with his friends, as he trained with them. He had been enamored by Martial Art at a very young age and had decided to systematically train for it, aiming for the Martial exam.

One thing she didn’t understand was why his eyes were black. Also, seeing her father like a normal child made her realize that he wasn’t born translucent. For some reason, she had assumed that he had always been this way, even if she only now realized how absurd that was.

The movie skimmed through his early childhood remarkably quickly, showing a paced montage of everything that had happened until the Martial Exam arrived.

“Hey, look,” Runark whispered to Ria. “That’s my dad.”

Rui and Kane got along extremely well from the day they met, according to the movie. The movie also featured her father losing to Runark’s mother. “My mom still brags about that to this day,” Runark told her. “I didn’t know it actually happened, though!”

A smug smile emerged on Ria’s face. “I will make sure to make fun of Papa for this the next time I see him.”

She grew immersed in the story of her father as she studied what kind of Martial Artists, only hoping that the movie had done a good job documenting accurately.

But based on what she could see, her father was different than her, as far as Martial Art was concerned. He didn’t have the same kind of overwhelming talent that she did for virtually everything Martial Art. “I will fulfill Project Water.”

The young teenage boy swore, sharpening his black eyes.

She frowned at those words. “What’s Project Water?”

“It’s the ambition that the Emperor of Water set out to achieve, to be able to adaptively evolve to anything in the universe,” Runark explained to her.

Her eyebrows furrowed. “What an absurd ambition. What kind of madman would dream up such a goal and actually try to achieve it?”

Those remarks drew glares from others around her, even as they sniffed, moved by the story of the Emperor of Water. Runark directed a pointed look at her, shushing her. Her expression grew amused at these reactions before turning back to the young man on screen as he drowned himself in pursuit of adaptively evolving to anything.

She didn’t recognize him. Not just because the actor was still different from her father, but also because the father she knew was very different from the kind of character he was portrayed to be in the movie.

She couldn’t figure out whether they were wrong or whether her father had truly changed that much. But for all of his eccentricities, her father had never given her anything less than everything he had. That was the one thing that she truly appreciated from him.

It contrasted sharply with the ambitious young man who was willing to distance himself from family to achieve such an ephemeral goal as adaptively evolving to everything.

It made her wonder. Just what had her father gone through to become who he was today?

She didn’t know, but for the first time in her life, she found herself wanting to know more.