The Martial Unity

”Good,” Rui nodded with a satisfied expression.

He was happy that she hadn’t developed an ego because of her newfound power and the speed at which she got it. Most Sages couldn’t help but develop egos when they broke through; it just couldn’t be helped. And Ria had managed to reach that power at a truly shocking speed of growth.

However, her mentality was tempered, much to his relief.

It had to do with the fiasco that killed two of her friends and traumatized her lifelong childhood friend. That tragedy had caused her to develop guilt that kept any arrogance and ego at bay. Rui wasn’t sure which option was worse, even if it pained him to see his daughter blame herself for what happened.

”So, what is the secret to the actual breakthrough to the Transcendent Realm?” She raised an eyebrow, folding her arms with a curious expression. ”How do I access the information dimension?”

”A little something called phenomenological uniformity,” Rui smiled before proceeding to explain what it was.

He was happy that he got to tell her his compiled Theory of Transcendence, rather than what he had been given by his seniors, which were just a bunch of flowery poems and the riddles that came with them.

The junior Martial Sages born in the Era of Expansion simply had no idea how good they had it compared to their seniors. Of course, this was true in every fathomable respect, not just the knowledge aspect.

As Ria listened, her expression grew more and more amazed at what she heard. She had known that the secret to Transcendence was undoubtedly going to be something extremely profound, but her father’s explanation left her astonished.

”Phenomenological uniformity…” she murmured. ”I have to alter my perception of the world to make it completely uniform? Like see… some concept or element everywhere?”

”Not just perception and not just seeing,” Rui corrected. ”But comprehending everything uniformly. For example, take me.”

He smiled. ”The entire universe. All of reality and everything that we conceive of is Water, as far as I’m concerned. When I look at the world, when I think of it, the only thing that appears in mind is Water.”

Her eyes widened at those words. ”You’re… you’re insane. That’s the most clinically insane thing I have ever heard anybody utter.”

Rui’s smile grew wry. ”I can understand why you think so, but—”

”Wait, everything is Water? As in, even people?”

”People are just ripples in the flow of Water from past to future, ripples that develop integrated information, a consciousness,” Rui replied. ”But yes, even people are water?”

”So that means you look at me and you see water?” she stared at him like he had gone mad.

”I do,” Rui admitted. ”You’re a very adorable collection of water, and very important to me, but fundamentally, you are water. As am I. As are we all.”

Ria stared at her father with disbelief for several seconds, as if struggling to parse the words her father was saying. Suddenly, the power of Transcendence was not looking all that attractive to her.

Even putting aside how crazy it sounded, she couldn’t even imagine how difficult it would be to, both literally and metaphorically, see one thing everywhere, and in everything, she looked. She felt like even trying to reach such a state of mind would make her slowly lose her sanity.

”So the breakthrough to the Transcendent Realm is mental illness, great,” she sarcastically remarked, shaking her head. ”I’m good, for now. I’d like to live some time more with a lucid mind before I decide to go nuts in order to have more power.”

Rui chuckled at his daugther’s irreverent remarks. It was refreshing to see someone talk about Transcendence in such a manner. It reminded him of Kane’s aversion to the Transcendence Realm, although even his aversion to it had reduced in the past eighteen years as he inadvertently grew closer to it through the Corporeal Realm.

His daughter was less awed by the Transcendent Realm simply because she had had a father for a Martial Transcendent. Where made the entire thing less astounding to her than it would be normal people. It allowed her to look at things without rose-tinted glasses.

”It’s actually a good decision from you not to rush for the Transcendent Realm anyway,” Rui replied with a calm, wise tone of voice. ”The reality is that there are some implicit conditions that you are nowhere near fulfilling. Normally, people who aim for Transcendence have generally squeezed the absolute most from their other Realms. They have developed and expanded their Martial Art to the absolute limit possible within the Sage Realm, and only then aim for Transcendence.”

This inadvertently made the process of achieving phenomenological uniformity less impossible, even if extraordinarily difficult. Ria, on the other hand, was so inexperienced and so lacking in any complete manifestation of her existing potential that she lacked that foundation upon which to begin building a bridge to the Transcendent Realm.

”Tell me about the Corporeal Realm and this corporeal consciousness business,” she grew more eager. ”I saw how overpowered it made Kane. He was so fast that I couldn’t even remotely compute his existence when he moved. It was like he moved out of existence. Will I get to pull that off?”

”Not exactly,” Rui remarked. ”The Corporeal Realm is different from the other Realms. It’s less general and more focused because of its highly abstract nature. It’s extremely impractical to try and wield for multiple purposes. Thus, the nascent common practice is to turn it into a hyper-specialized computer that does one thing. In my case, I have Autocorpus. Which allows me to react without thinking. Kane engineered his corporeal consciousness to become an FTL warp drive, making him one of the fastest Martial Artists to have ever existed. Others have taken other approaches. But, for you…”

Rui directed a pointed gaze at her. ”I would recommend something else entirely. I would recommend that you focus on your existing Realms of power. Get experience and develop them to the best of your ability. You can think about higher Realms after a decade of experience.”