The Martial Unity

RUMBLE!!!!!

Heaven and earth shook violently, if unsteadily. As if the very exoplanet she was on didn’t understand what was happening.

RUMBLE!!!!

The winds danced, while the lands beneath her feet shook violently. The dark sky broiled in the power that Ria unleashed. Her expression was one of defiance, as was the flaring determination in the depths of her amber eyes.

The anger, the hatred, and the grief, they settled behind a single, profoundly unparalleled drive.

An act of defiance.

Not of a physical foe.

But against a phenomenon that was regarded as absolute.

Death.

It was the singularity of all the causality of a life. Once reached, it could not be undone. Or so Ria had thought herself.

Yet, that was before she became a Martial Sage.

Now that she had become a Martial Sage, nothing felt absolute. She had obtained her Martial Soul. She had obtained power unlike anything she had ever felt in her entire life. She had obtained a level of Martial Art mastery that vastly exceeded an overwhelming majority of Martial Artists.

She felt as if nothing was beyond her.

Not even death.

RUMBLE!!!!!

Her mind surged with boundless power as she deployed her newly elevated senses into the depths of the causality of the death around her. Her amber eyes sharply perceived each and every cell in the cadavers around her. Her ears heard every little sound that emerged from their body or passed through them. Her nose could smell every single change that occurred with an extraordinary level of accuracy and precision.

More than that, every single cell in her body had become a high-resolution sensor. And with the Martial Soul, each of them was intimately connected with her mind, allowing them to perceive even the most profound depths of the causality around her.

She used every single cell in her body to search.

To search for a path back.

A path back from death to life.

She knew that there had to be one. The impossibility of a return to life was not a law of Physics of reality. It was a law of the human understanding of the nature of life. In other words, there was nothing strictly chemically, physically, biologically, or mathematically impossible about the restoration of life from death.

And if it wasn’t impossible, then it was a matter of power.

”I will find it.”

RUMBLE!!!!!

She pored through not just the death around her, but also all the information she had regarding death. She was not an expert on the biochemical processes of death by any means, but she knew that she had undoubtedly studied it at some point in the past. She quickly browsed her neural inlay’s database, searching for any and all information she could get her hands on.

If she wanted to reverse death, then she would need to understand it. There was no one place in her neural inlay database that was tagged as ’death,’ where she could conveniently find all the information, unfortunately. Death wasn’t something that she spent a lot of time thinking about or trying to understand at the chemical level.

But she had entire textbooks, research papers, and other scientific literature she had read during her studies. She had dumped all of what she had read into her database after reading them, simply so that she could spontaneously refer to them if she ever wanted to for whatever reason.

It was in moments like these that she was glad she had access to this priceless knowledge.

She managed to weave together a concrete tapestry illustrating the causality of death bit by bit as she spun thread from the knowledge that she slowly revisited, searching for every single mention of death and other keywords related to it.

She managed to understand death more and more with each passing second.

Death itself could be broken down into multiple different phases.

There was, of course, the clinical death. This was the point where the heart stopped beating, where breathing halted, and blood circulation also no longer occurred. At this point, if resuscitation methods didn’t work, then they would be declared dead by the doctor or paramedic overseeing the procedure or operation.

However, clinical death was not complete death.

The brain was still alive. Often for several minutes after critical body systems had failed. Neurons would fire for several minutes, often every erratically, until even the brain finally died.

Ria herself had been less than a minute away from clinical death when she had managed to pull herself back from the brink.

But her current task was much more herculean.

She was dealing with corpses that were both medically and brain dead. They were also dead at the cellular level across the entire body. Not a single spark of life was left within any of their bodies, including that of Runark and Misha, who had managed to prolong their lives for much longer than Siliscia and Sternon.

And yet, it was not impossible.

”First, I must halt cell death from proceeding any further.”

But cells broke down at the molecular and even the atomic level. The countdown began the moment they died, although complete cellular breakdown wouldn’t occur until an hour or so after death.

She absolutely needed not only to prevent that from occurring, but also prevent it from worsening. Every second she allowed to pass after death was a second that she would have to undo with her own power.

But how could she find a way to prevent any of the chemical processes associated with death from occurring?

The answer to that was simple.

”I must terminate the flow of causality itself.”

She knew what she needed to do.

She created a new technique.

On the spot.

She wove together Martial Art principles and mechanisms, and combined them with a scientific understanding of quantum electrodynamics and fluid theory.

”Frame Freeze.”

RUMBLE!!!!!

She created a domain.

A domain was bathed in a tremendous amount of light.

But not ordinary light.

But rather, countless electromagnetic scalpels that physically held on to each and every single molecule in place, refusing to allow them to move even the slightest bit.

She created a stasis field where time didn’t pass.