The Martial Unity

His early childhood had been a brutal, competitive regime meant to filter out and elevate the gifted and the driven. Very early on, Argenton had displayed prodigious talent for not just mastering technology, but assimilating it into his body. He was on a whole other level compared to other kids.

The state, which was the Imperial Tekvorian Federation, supplied him with the necessary resources to further his growth. He quickly became a rising star in his state, increasingly mechanizing his body.

The more he did so, the more he lost the essence of human experience, but he gained ever more power despite that. The Federation only grew more and more ruthless as one climbed the ranks of paths. Merit took a backseat to power-mongering. Entrenched pathwalkers didn’t want to concede power to upstarts who were more worthy of resources and political power than they were.

He overcame them anyway, mastering not just technological combat but political conflicts as well. Eventually, after centuries, he reached the very pinnacle of his path, having technologized every part of his body except for his brain.

He was among the very strongest of his kind, except for NOVA, who possessed an intellect that dwarfed even his. She was so smart that her intelligence alone propelled her to the top ten most powerful pathwalkers in the world.

No matter how hard he worked, he couldn’t surpass her.

Then, she went into a period of deep isolation, lasting nearly a century.

Argenton had been happy to see her go. Although the fact that she was still alive and voluntarily away meant that her presence always loomed, serving as an impediment to his ambition, it was undeniable that her absence gave him the space to monopolize even more political power over nearly a century.

It was then that the Unfolding had occurred, completely changing life as he knew it. The limitless potential of the esoteric miracles within the Lost Continent had spurred him to trigger a war with the Esocline Federation, which he had ultimately lost. His battles against Bodhisattva Maitreyi had taught him that there were other ways to manipulate light beyond technology.

The defeats had been heavy blows, but what had truly hurt the most was NOVA’s return and her—or it’s—subsequent tyranny. Her mind control of every tekvore on the continent had crippled their civilization, possibly forever. It crippled the growth of every pathwalker.

And only now had Argenton fully taken a step in the right direction, albeit in a direction that rapidly deteriorated his sanity.

Yet along with the memories of his life came the memories of the technology and science that he had mastered.

It was not an exaggeration to say that the Tekvore’s mastery of light and electromagnetic radiation was at the very pinnacle of their entire civilization. As far as light manipulation was concerned, not even dwarves could surpass him.

He understood the very essence of what light was.

Most people thought of light as packets of energy known as photons or waves of electromagnetic stuff.

But he knew that this was merely a superficial understanding.

What light, as they experienced it, truly was, was change limited by the speed of causality.

That was the true essence of light.

And he suspected that he was the only one who understood this. Not even Bodhisattva Maitreyi, who possessed a profound intuitive and instinctive understanding of light in other ways, understood this fundamental truth.

A vast majority of his memories were filled with such insights and knowledge. It was this knowledge that served as the core of tekvore power, not just the ability of their body to accept and facilitate technologization.

And it was this knowledge that ultimately preserved his consciousness and sanity from an infinite wave of schizophrenia.

The never-endingness of light signals in his mind had profound consequences for his memories.

Every memory connected with every other memory. His memories of life mixed in with his knowledge, which mixed in with his thoughts, emotions, and phenomenology itself. And as his very sense of self and the root of his identity were almost destroyed by chaos, his consciousness discovered the thread.

The thread that threaded all of them.

The entire world was holographic in his phenomenology, but only when his profound knowledge and wisdom were mixed in was he able to consolidate the underlying root of it all.

[Light.]

This was the underlying root of the unified thought, the unified emotion, the unified memory, and the unified phenomenology. It was only when every thought, emotion, memory, and experience were forcefully unified that he finally understood the essence of it all.

[Everything in this world is an image of Light, and the world is the screen upon which the essence of our existence is projected.]

In that moment, on the very verge of total and complete insanity, he achieved Enlightenment of Transcendence.

He achieved phenomenological uniformity.

RUMBLE

The world shook as consciousness evolved.

He didn’t have thoughts.

He had one thought.

One thought that encompassed all possible thoughts his extraordinary mind could have, which in turn merged with one emotion. One memory. And one experience.

They all merged to create the phenomenological uniformity.

His mouth opened as a single whisper escaped him.

”I̵̱̼͇̝̜̝͔̫͔͉̲̭̝̠̟͆... a̷̫̻͇̘͉̜̣͌͋͛͋́͂̌͗̋̈͠͝ͅṃ̸͎͎̦̗́̎̿̓̐̈́͂̈́͗͂̑... L̴̢̺͈̤̙̫͇͕͙̩̃̆͌̋̐̅̍͘͘͝ͅi̵̢͓̲̺͛͛̈͗g̸̼͇͓̟̝̯̒͋̂̾̓͂̎̃̔͛̀̆͝h̸̙̹̒̔̎͑͗͊̅̃̅͛̋t̶̨͉̪̹̬̘̲͂̂.”

RUMBLE!!!!!

He opened his eyes, his cybernetic eyes glowing with extraordinary power. His consciousness elevated to a whole other dimension of reality that he had never experienced before.

He began seeing the very essence of reality.

But his experience of the information dimension was different from that of other Transcendents. He experienced the information dimension as the underlying light signals that created the images of their existences.

And he could alter this image as he pleased.

With the power of his Lightverse.

His mind began settling into its new ascendant state. His consciousness began to finally stabilize in its profound form. He slowly began to acclimatize to his uniform phenomenology and his singularity of a mind.

Then, he experienced a new emotion outside of the unified emotion.

He experienced a horrifying terror unlike anything he had ever experienced in his entire life.

[What... is this?]