The Martial Unity

”Ahhhh!” Ria crashed face-front into an ergonomic luxury smart bed in one of the guest rooms in the Kandrian Palace, feeling a surge of euphoric comfort from the smart bed that carefully scanned her body before adjusting its firmness, its contours, and other parameters to generate the maximum amount of comfort possible.

The technology made her feel like she was in outer space, simply floating weightlessly in zero gravity. Compared to the beds that she was accustomed to in the frontier, lying down on the pinnacle of comfort and luxury reminded her of the aspects of home that she missed and the things that she had had difficulty adjusting to when she moved away from the Kandrian Palace.

”Well?” Runark asked with an impatient tone of voice, walking to her side. ”What did Uncle Rui say? Did he get you the answers you sought?”

She turned on her back, staring at the ceiling while her other friends gathered around, equally curious. They had immediately gathered in Runark’s room the moment Ria returned to them, eager to learn what she had learned in her conversation with her father.

”…I came out with more questions than answers.” She heaved a sigh. ”He did tell me the truth, though.”

She got up, sitting with crossed legs, her amber eyes growing hazy with thought.

”…Was it good news or bad news?” Sternon asked carefully.

”…Both,” she muttered. ”It was disturbing.”

She still hadn’t figured out how she felt about her father ’engineering’ her talent. Her talent had been a double-edged blade in her life. It made her all the more isolated from her peers, both age-wise and Martially. Her peers, age-wise, were too weak, and her Martial peers tended to be much older. No sixteen-year-old would ever be able to befriend full-grown adult women just because they were both Martial Masters.

On the other hand, she knew that her talent was her only ticket to being able to escape the princess prison. Only power could overcome that kind of status and the shackles that came with it. Her father had thus given her her only ticket of hope.

She also knew that there were countless people who would kill to be in her place, to have talent granted by the Emperor of Water, of all people. She knew that she would have power beyond anything that she could ever imagine thanks to her father’s gift.

More than the talent part, what really consumed her was the revelations regarding the state of entanglement between her and the Universalis Mensis.

She couldn’t even fathom what this meant for her.

Hell, she struggled to even comprehend the fact that the universe was alive, conscious, and intelligent. How could that possibly be the case? She wasn’t a neurologist, but she knew that intelligence was a result of the information-processing capabilities born from the web of neurons in the brain.

Was the universe processing information? How could it possibly process information across countless light-years of distance?

She didn’t understand; it was simply far, far beyond her head. So much so that in her immersion in it, she didn’t hear her friends trying to gather her attention.

”Let’s give her some space instead of pressing her for answers,” Misha remarked with a calm tone. ”Clearly, this is not something that is easy for her to speak about. She needs time to process it, and we shouldn’t demand that she spill the beans.”

The other three felt guilty at trying to pry answers from her. Runark was impatiently curious, Sternon had been concerned, and Siliscia felt guilty about thinking about her own personal interests regarding Ria’s special abilities.

”However, we do need to know if you still assess yourself as capable of tracking infected worlds, Ria,” Misha informed her gently. ”This affects our future plans. Since if you have changed your mind on that, then there’s no point in hunting for infected worlds, since we would never be able to achieve any success without your professed ability to detect infected worlds.”

Those words made Ria return to reality.

”No, my ability to sense infected worlds is real.” She shook her head, turning towards Misha. ”My talks with my father only confirmed that. We should go ahead with the plan, because we will achieve tremendous success.”

Misha’s cybernetic eyes lit up at those words with a hint of rare enthusiasm. The fact that Ria had managed to confirm her supposed ability to detect infected worlds was proof that she was the real deal. Anything that got the stamp of approval of the Emperor of Water was undoubtedly highly credible.

That meant that they could very easily dominate the highly lucrative industry of virus-hunting.

The very thought of it made a smile of excitement emerge on her face. Up until now, all of her ventures in the frontier, her very presence in the frontier, were merely because she wanted to be as far away from her life as a princess.

It was a life she lived merely in aversion to another life, rather than a life she had actively sought, and once she achieved it, her life increasingly felt meaningless and purposeless.

She would merely go on missions with Runark to provide for themselves and occasionally go out at night drinking and partying. But there was nothing more to it. The novelty of the frontier for a princess like Ria wore off. It was one of the reasons she had agreed to go home last month after two years on the frontier.

Now, however, she had an active goal.

’I need to understand what I am.’

For that, she needed to be stronger. She needed to go deeper down her Martial Path.

At the same time, the virus, previously merely an intriguing cosmic anomaly, was now an active threat.

Her father didn’t explicitly say it, but she had managed to put two and two together.

If the virus was a threat to the Universalis Mensis and she had some strange, profound relationship with the Universalis Mensis, then the virus was a threat to her.

Hunting was directly in the interests of her well-being.

And, it would benefit human civilization with more esoteric matter, especially when there was war on the horizon.

She turned towards them with a determined expression. ”I’m all in for us becoming a party of virus hunters. If you guys are alright with that, then I’d like to get started with that immediately.”