The Martial Unity

”This is your tenth attempt,” Rui remarked. ”Do you really think you have something worthy of me?”

The dwarf grinned at him. ”Come with me, Your Majesty.”

The Elder Sage walked with a curious Rui following him. It wasn’t that he categorically rejected exo-Martial suits, although he personally didn’t like them at all since they ruined the martial arts aesthetic. But he respected the value and pragmatism they offered. In an interstellar age, exosuits were a necessity. And exo-Martial suits were naturally developed to create exosuits tailored for the needs of Martial Artists.

He also recalled what his daughter had told him about being open to change, if he truly wanted to claim to be Water. And she certainly had a point. He decided to keep an open mind.

Of course, his prejudice was not the main reason he had never adopted a suit for himself.

It was just that no suit could survive even a single beat of a battle that he partook in, which was the whole reason it was a challenge in the first place.

STEP

They arrived at the gates of a special room, with some of the heaviest security Rui had ever seen. His eyes sharpened as his instincts tingled. Very few things could cause his nerves to react, at the stage of life and power he had reached. He abstained from looking into the information dimension out of respect for the elder sage dwarf, who promptly opened the door to reveal a narrow, corridor-like showroom with exo-Martial suits arranged in a showcase.

Rui recognized them as the previous failed attempts from the elder sage. A suit made up of a radioactive isotope of invintium. A suit made up of Transcendent-grade esoteric substances that was even more indestructible than invintium. Suits with hyperdimensional extensions folded away in pocket dimensions.

The latest attempt a few years ago was a suit made entirely of primordial seed engineered into a lattice that could serve as a cloth. But even that suit simply wasn’t able to survive his power. Not to mention, the suit was wholly redundant with the amount of primordial seed that Rui carried in his body.

If he was going to wear an exo-Martial suit, it needed not only to be able to withstand a battle, but it also needed to offer some meaningful utility. Otherwise, it would not be worth it for him to actually wear in battle.

However, at the stage of power that he was in, he couldn’t help but wonder if there was any exo-Martial suit concept that was truly worth it to him. He was inclined to say no, at least until the elder sage led him to the exo-Martial suit at the end of the showroom.

Rui’s eyes widened as he beheld what he saw.

He didn’t see solid armor.

Instead, he saw a series of inter-connected fractal geometries that looked as if reality itself had been shattered. As if they were pieces of a broken portrait randomly pasted together, a portrait of the world around them. Light seemed to bounce about like it was in a maze of mirrors, creating incoherent images. There were overlapping images across each of the fractal plains, as if different images on transparent slides with images had been stacked upon each other, creating a bizzare form of reality that was unlike anything Rui had ever seen.

More than anything, however, was the texture of the armor. The fractal images flowed and shifted across the entire body in a fluidic manner. Almost as if it was a liquid. The geometries rippled and curved; one could even detect a strange kind of viscosity in their movements.

The strangest part, however, was that the fractal, incoherent image geometries weaved together a recognizable shape.

An exo-Martial suit.

The strangest part was that his physical senses struggled to comprehend what the hell he was looking at. He sensed matter and energy, but they were fuzzy. As if pixelated. He wasn’t able to cleanly locate where the atoms and molecules were. His physical senses wasn’t able to identify the structure of the armor. And he had no idea what they were made up of.

Rui’s ethereal eyes sharpened with interest as he peered at the suit at the information of the armor with deep curiosity before the truth finally donned on him.

”This exo-Martial suit… is made up of information, not matter or energy,” he realized belatedly.

It was an armor made up of dense, flowing qubits.

Information was not as easily measurable as matter or energy, but it was not undefined either. The principal building block of information was the qubit, or the quantum bit. It was, in many ways, the fundamental particle of information. Except it could be manipulated like other fundamental particles, under ordinary circumstances.

Even when Rui manipulated the information dimension with his Martialverse, he was only rearranging the qubits that all the information was built from. It took Transcendence to manipulate them to do anything, yet he was clearly gazing at a product that was built from qubits.

”How did you…?” Rui couldn’t help but mutter.

The Elder Sage Dwight grinned at Rui’s reaction. ”Your Majesty, this armor uses a special form of matter created by trapping matter cooled to absolute zero, stored in a quantum electromagnetic containment field that prevents it from losing its state of decoherence. In other words, what you are looking at is a superfluid of quantum probabilities that are being sustained even at room temperature. Using these particles trapped in superposition, I am able to finally ’wield’ qubits as if they were a tangible building block.”

Rui understood enough about high principles in the field of quantum mechanics to finally understand the point. ”In order to build an armor of information, you needed to create a special form of matter that would allow you to manipulate information.”

After all, an absolute law of reality was that the information of the information dimension necessarily described the state of reality of the universe at all times. But that also meant that the state of material reality affected the state of information, necessarily.

Independent qubits were extremely hard to control under normal conditions. But certain states of matter, including particles in quantum superposition, allowed one access to a large number of qubits, for uncollapsed wave functions contained a lot of information, allowing the dwarf to create an armor of a large number of qubits that served as a metaphysical fortress.

”I call it the Armor of Flowing Wisdom.”