The Martial Unity

”The Angel of Laplace measures vectors…” she realized. ”But integrated information can’t be represented as vectors.”

That meant that the Angel of Laplace couldn’t record consciousness or thought. It was why Rui had never been able to create SOUL models based on the data that he collected from the Angel of Laplace, only predictive models.

Her eyes widened, quivering, as she gazed at the bodies of Siliscia and Sternon. ”…That means that I can’t restore their consciousness.”

Consciousness was an extremely fleeting and delicate phenomenon. It didn’t take much time after death for the information transcribing a person’s consciousness to be eroded in quality.

Misha and Runark hadn’t been dead for very long, the integrated information of their brains hadn’t deteriorated.

But with Siliscia and Sternon, their brains had been dead for longer. Their neurons had begun to deteriorate, and with it, the information that was integrated along those neurons had also been destroyed.

She could restore the cells, but she couldn’t restore the emergent phenomenon once it had been destroyed.

It didn’t matter how well she cleaned up their bodies and restored them to the moment of death, but nothing she could do would be able to bring them back to what they were like before.

That information had already faded.

It couldn’t be accessed.

At least, she didn’t have the power to access it.

But she knew someone who might have been able to.

”Papa…” she realized. ”If anybody can do it. It’s Papa! I’ll just have to ask him to find the integrated information of their consciousness and restore it!”

She knew how extraordinary her father was, having beheld his power up front on Planet Amadeus III. She knew that he wasn’t bound to the laws of reality the way she was. That he could do things that were physically impossible. That he could defy causality.

More than that, she was distinctly aware that he had defied death before, even if it wasn’t a very well-known fact about him.

She had no idea how he would be able to, but she had to believe.

She had to believe that he was capable of it.

Ria was someone who rarely relied on her father for anything. For she knew that the more she relied on him, the less independent she was. The less she would be able to get away from her life as a princess.

But this time, she didn’t have even the slightest qualms about reaching out to him.

For the sake of her friends, she would do anything she could.

”I won’t let death take my friends away from me.” Her eyes blazed with determination as she dispelled her Revival technique, carrying her friends’ bodies with an air current, before immediately heading to the manifold tree.

The manifold tree had remained unmoved in the face of all the chaos that had unfolded around it, much to Ria’s gratitude. She had been informed that the manifold tree was generally passive as a floral lifeform. It was why it relied on guardians and mind-controlled biospheres that it could manipulate to act on its behest.

Once that was overcome, its harms were more passive and long-term, rather than direct and acute.

From her bag, she extracted a special device. One that had been developed specifically for the laminar integument model of life. It was a device that very much resembled a zipper. It had been developed specifically to introduce manipulable and fixable incisions into the body of a laminar creature.

She placed the device on the bark of the manifold tree, activating.

VMMM

The zipper cleanly dug into the tree’s body, surgically cleaving through the manifold layers of the body. It wasn’t long before it flashed green, indicating that it was prepared.

BZZZT

She immediately unzipped the device, opening up the many layers of the tree to create an open cavity within the tree, within which she and her teammates could fit. She placed the four bodies of her friends, two corpses on the brink of life, and two living, unconscious bodies.

Neither Runark nor Misha had woken up yet to help her with this part, something that pricked in the background of her mind. Of course, she would expect them to take some time to wake up after having been brought back to life from the depths of death, so she wasn’t too shocked by that. She was just happy that they were alive, more than anything else.

From within her bag, she plucked out an orb containing the true Tide of Samsara that she had picked up from her father. She calibrated the machine to release the tide in just about a minute, planting it on the ground, before entering the open cavity in the manifold, before zipping it closed.

A minute passed quickly.

RUMBLE!!!

The Tide of Samsara erupted with a violent surge, consuming the world around them. The Anicca Current, driven by the Antithesis Hive Mind, immediately began expanding across the depths of the land within the manifold, spreading far and wide.

It immediately attacked the virus hidden deep within Planet Pinky, as it was accustomed to doing so at this point.

But this time, the challenge was different.

Quite different.

Across most of the manifold, the virus was composed of deep biosphere bacteria that tended to be very small, much smaller than normal human skin cells.

But in the world of Planet Pinky, cells were generally massive.

And extremely powerful.

As it turned out, that applied to the deep biosphere as well.

The Tide of Samsara had come across its most powerful version of the virus this time.

RUMBLE!!!!!

The powerful poison found itself facing stiff competition from the deep biosphere within the manifold. An extraordinary amount of power surged from the depths of the planet, causing an almost catastrophically violent earthquake to spread across the entire manifold.

The land cracked while the heavens shook. A tremendously intense clash boiled at the depths of Planet Pinky as a seemingly endless army of macrobes fought back against the Tide of Samsara, elevating the resistance against the poison to a whole new level.

RUMBLE!!!!!!

The world shook as two mighty forces clashed beneath the surface.