The Martial Unity

Those words made Siliscia extremely curiously.

”I wonder if I can manipulate them with my nature manipulation.”

The question gave pause to all of them. Indeed, it was the kind of question that could grab attention and make one ponder it with great curiosity. On the one hand, it was known that elves couldn’t manipulate the exobiological equivalents of trees the way they could manipulate the plant kingdom in the Gaian Tree of Life.

However, there was also the fact that trees were a recurring form of life in most worlds with complex life that humans had run into. It wasn’t the same as the trees in Gaia. They usually had different kinds of shapes, structures, and often even different chemical processeses.

But the basic archetype of trees was a common blueprint in life.

Sort of like how everything eventually seemed to evolve into crabs, for some reason.

And the reasons were mechanical in nature. Stationary and immobile life had much lower thermomechanical load than mobile life that constantly expended energy to move around a substantial amount of mass. Trees required less energy to survive because of that.

And more often than not, trees consumed energy from the biggest open and source of free energy in the universe, the suns that the planets revolved around. These two factors were highly recurring, so much so that there was a form of convergent evolutionary trajectory in the history of all worlds that bore life.

The recurring pattern was that at some point, a form of single-celled organism learns to harness the energy of the sun much more efficiently than all other known alternatives in the solar system. And eventually, it would go on to form multicellular structures that were stationary and focused entirely on converting more energy from the sun into chemical energy that could be consumed by others, giving rise to other forms of more complex life.

It was shocking how recurring this pattern was, but because it was recurring, the elves had managed to figure out universal methods of nature manipulation. These were techniques that relied on universal patterns across all exobotany that could manipulate them even if they came from a different tree of life.

However, it wasn’t a guaranteed success and the results varied greatly, such that no two trees of life possessed the same compatibility between its native exobiology and the methods developed by the elves.

Nonetheless, Siliscia closed her eyes, raising her hands, deploying her nature manipulation upon the primitive macrobe-trees. Silence hung in the air, save for the rustling of the trees to the winds that blew past them. Ria watched with a skeptical expression as the elf tried to manipulate the macrobe-trees.

She didn’t think she would succeed, not because she wanted the elf to fail, certainly not. But rather because she thought that the macrobe-trees were far too different from anything in Gaia for this to possibly work. The difference between a macrobe in Pinky and a microbe from Gaia was astronomical, as far as she was concern. They were fundamentally different kinds of life, even if they shared anatomical similarities.

But to her surprise, the macrobe-trees around them began to shift.

They began to move.

The entire forest began responding to Siliscia’s nature manipulation.

RUMBLE

A surge of euphoria spread through Siliscia’s body as her expression beamed with delight and ecstasy. She hadn’t expected to run into such a nice treat in such an exotic world.

”Hahaha! It works!” She spread her arms, causing a wave to spread across the macrobe trees in response to the action. ”I can harmonize with this forest!”

RUMBLE!!!

”Woah!” Runark yelped as the ground beneath their feet began shaking.

”Siliscia, you need to stop whatever you’re doing!” Sternon’s expression grew nervous. ”This doesn’t feel good!”

Ria had to concur. In fact, her face grew pale because she could feel the presence of the virus in the manifold. It was scorching hot compared to the signals she had endured in the past.

The more Siliscia manipulated the forest, becoming a beacon of an anomaly to the virus, the greater the risk they faced at simply being wiped out by the life within the manifold.

”Sorry!” The elf paused, realizing that she was getting carried away. ”I just got swept up in the moment. Ahhh, it feels so good to be back on home turf!”

She had gone from being a supporting member of the team to immediately becoming a powerhouse. The upside to being an elf was that while you were prone to being outside your home, you were also the undisputed strongest within it.

Genora was the most well-defended continent in Gaia, utterly impregnable, even to the neo-evosapiens, who didn’t dare to invade the continent despite their massive power boost with their generation of miracles.

She suddenly went from being the weakest member on the team to potentially the strongest.

A part of Ria was curious about how well Siliscia would fare against her, but now was certainly no time to test that. Especially when Ria could feel the virus breathing down her back.

In Planet Amadeus III, the virus had remained entirely passive until it detected Ria’s… condition, which had only happened after she revealed in battle with her Martial Embodiment.

’I’m going to have to hide that information here. If the virus gets a whiff of what I am, then it will completely drown me in mind-controlled macrobes.’

She had no doubt that all life within the manifold was fundamentally within the control of the virus, directly or indirectly. They absolutely could not draw the interest of the virus, otherwise they were doomed.

It was a chilling feeling.

”Ok, we have made it in,” Ria told her teammates with a serious tone. ”Now, we need to find the epicenter of the manifold and get to it immediately. Once we find the manifold tree, we take shelter within it, and then I plant Dad’s poison in the ground and let it do the rest.”

The only question that immediately presented itself, of course, was where the epicenter of the manifold was.