The Martial Unity

The revelation made her feel even weirder. Even among the hyper-talented engineered Martial Artists, she was somehow an aberration? That just made her sound like some mutated monster.

”What… what does this mean?” She couldn’t help but squeeze out as her amber pupils wandered about in confusion. ”Is this just chance? That my Martial Path is Martial Causality? Your Martial Path is also an unprecedented one, right? So is mom’s. Speaking of which…”

She did a double-take. ”Where is Mom? Why isn’t she here? I want to talk to her right now.”

Rui heaved a deep breath, shaking his head. ”Your mother immersed herself in deep, isolated training after you left last month, since you clarified you intend to spend several more years on the frontier. She instructed me not to interrupt her for any reason. If she’s doing what I think she’s doing, then it is best that she is not disturbed. It could lead to bad consequences.”

Ria’s expression tightened at those words. She wanted to meet her mother, but she took her father’s words seriously. It was her fault, anyway, since she had said that she intended to spend more time in the frontier. Her mother would not have done that if she had chosen to stay at home.

”To answer your previous question, indeed, there are others with unprecedented Paths,” Rui replied, returning to the main topic. ”However, your Martial Path is even more unprecedented than theirs. I only realized it two years ago when I saw your Martial Embodiment after you broke through to the Master Realm.”

Her expression tightened. ”You mean the universe.”

”Yes, do you know what that Martial Embodiment means?”

”I’ve told you, Dad, I have no idea why my Martial Embodiment is something so strange. Even you said you don’t know what it means.”

He stared at her with a tinge of guilt in his melancholic smile.

”…You do know,” she realized. ”You’ve always known. Is this what it’s all about?”

”I kept the truth from you because you were too young to understand it,” he remarked with a wise, patient tone. ”Frankly, you still are.”

”I’m eighteen years old,” she insisted with sharpened amber eyes. ”I am a legal adult. I have every right to know. Especially if this was potentially caused by your doing and may have adverse impacts on my life.”

Rui wasn’t particularly moved by her declaration of adulthood. She was still a child in his eyes, and perhaps would always be her precious baby, more than anything else. But her other appeals were compelling. She did have a right to know.

He heaved a deep breath. ”What do you know about the universe?”

She frowned at the broad, general question. ”…I don’t know, a lot? I know it has trillions of galaxies, and I know it may very well be infinite. I know it that the universe was created from the Big Bang and everything of it and within it emerged from a singularity. I know it’s thirteen-point-eight billion years old. And that it’s expanding thanks to dark energy.”

”What you probably don’t know is that it’s alive,” Rui remarked, as if he were stating an ordinary general knowledge fact. ”Conscious. Even intelligent.”

Her expression morphed into one of plain disbelief. ”Come on, papa, I’m being serious here.”

”I am serious,” Rui replied with a calm tone. ”The universe is alive and conscious. It possesses a mind so vast and unfathomable that it exceeds even my capacity to even begin to parse.”

He raised his hands, generating a high-definition three-dimensional hologram of the observable universe. The galaxy clusters and filaments bore an unmistakable resemblance to the human brain and its neurons and dendrites.

”Consciousness is a phenomenon of information,” Rui informed her quietly. ”It’s a phenomenon of integrated information. Any cluster of information that is lost when the system is separated, any cluster of information that only exists in an integrated state to form a whole that exceeds the sum of the parts, is consciousness. And the universe does indeed possess a cluster of information that exceeds the sum of its parts. It is a living being. And we are to it what bacteria are to us. Perhaps even less.”

She stared at him with a bewildered expression, unable to even utter a word.

He directed his ethereal eyes towards her.

”Those in the know within human civilization call it Universalis Mensis, and you, my precious baby girl,” Rui spoke with a profound tone of voice. ”Have a special relationship with the Universalis Mensis.”

”What…?” Her voice was reduced to a whisper.

”Your mind…” he tapped the side of her head. ”…is in a state of what I have come to call integrated quantum informational entanglement with the Universalis Mensis.”

Her amber eyes widened with shock at those words. Her expression grew horrified at those words. ”What… what did you just say?”

Rui’s expression grew a little severe at those words, heaving a deep breath. ”Bear with me, because this is a new field of metaphysics, quantum meta-information theory, that the Psyker has pioneered after discovering your… condition, shall we call it.”

”Condition?” She repeated with unfettered anxiety. ”Am I sick?”

”Perhaps state is a better term for it,” Rui quickly corrected himself. ”Regardless, your mind is in a state of entanglement with the universe, like so.”

He raised his finger into the air and began scribbling an extraordinarily complicated equation midair.

|Ψnested Φ max⟩ = 1/√ZΦ ∮M D[χ] exp(−i/ħ Ξ̂TPU) [ ( ⨂c=1N Π̂cog(c)|ψbrain{Φ}⟩ ) ⊠ R̂Ω|ΨΩ∞⟩ + eiθsync ( R̂Ω |ΨΩ∞⟩ ⊠ ( ⨂c=1N Π̂cog(c)|ψbrain{Φ}⟩ ) ) ]

Ria simply stared at the monstrous equation with a dumbfounded expression. ”Papa, I have no idea what this means. This may as well be gibberish.”

”It’s an equation that describes the state of the entanglement between the information of your consciousness and that of the universe. The results of the past two years of my effort in trying to understand the relationship between your mind and the Universalis Mensis,” Rui replied with a knowing expression. ”It essentially says that there is a flow of information and perhaps even causality between your mind and that of the Universalis Mensis.”

Ria felt ill at those words. She wished all of this were a bad dream. That all of this simply wasn’t true.

But alas, her father was devoid of mirth.

He dropped the bombshell on her, leaving her reeling as she struggled to process this reality.