The Martial Unity

An irritated Rui opened his eyes in a medical tube, teleporting out. He didn’t even bother grabbing his clothes, clearly far too upset at his oversight to care about anything else. He simply gazed at the other bodies in the laboratory with a dissatisfied expression. They were all non-hyperdimensionally united bodies whose laws were the same as those of the rest of the universe. The thought of painstakingly converting all of them into metaphysically divergent bodies whose laws had been altered made him shake his head.

”This is not a realistic plan. I can’t spend all my stamina simply Legislating for future vessels. I need something that is much more convenient.”

Ideally, it needed to be something that allowed him to preserve the progress he made from his previous body.

His eyes sharpened as he pondered alternatives. ”What would happen if a cell were to detach from my body, would it still possess altered laws?”

He actually wasn’t sure about that. The way that it worked was that the changed laws applied to information forms specifically, not to matter and energy itself. The information that comprised his body was bundled up in what he had come to call an information form. Because the information in his body was so integrated, it functioned as one entity. In the information dimension, he applied his Legislation to the system as a whole.

”I’ll need to run some experiments.”

When his phenomenological stamina recovered, he immediately redid the hyperdimensional Legislation, becoming hyperdimensional a second time. This time, he did it quicker and more efficiently, having already gone through the whole process before.

This time, however, he applied it not to his existing body, but rather to the third cloned vessel, before transferring his consciousness to it after his second body disappeared.

This time, when he woke up, he was in a hyperdimensional vessel and not at risk of disappearing again.

”Finally, time to start experimenting.”

Now that he could peacefully investigate the nature and extent of his Legislation without disappearing, he quickly began testing its limits.

The first thing he did was to sever his arm off and investigate the changes it brought about to the laws in his arm and in his body. Did separating his arm from his body, creating two distinct objects, preserve the Legislation in both newly separated objects?

He separated his arm from his body almost with a simple thought. His control over his body was so high that he didn’t need to cut it off by force; he could simply command his cells at a juncture to separate.

THUD

His left arm fell off, falling to the ground with a heavy thud, causing tremors to spread across the ground, caused by its hyperdimensional mass. He lifted it up, studying it with a curious expression.

His investigations left him pleased.

”The divergent laws haven’t disappeared just because the arm is severed. That’s great. So the information forms do not lose their altered laws just because they are separated.”

He was worried that separating from his body would have meant that the information form of his severed arm wouldn’t be preserved, but his fears were unfounded. With this result alone, he was confident he could whip up some solutions that would ensure continuity in his Legislative progress without having to retread old ground for every vessel.

”However, the biggest question is whether or not this arm will disappear if I use my Martialverse.”

In truth, he had never actually tested this out. He had never felt the need to. However, his instinct and intuition told him that if the arm was severed after he activated his Martialverse, it would disappear. But if it was severed before he activated his Martialverse, then it would not disappear.

”The price of the Verse extends to all those in the same system of information as the offending consciousness.”

The reason Transcendents disappeared was, as far as Rui could tell, some sort of ’law of conservation of causality’ that was even deeper than the actual law of causality itself. Transcendents increased the ’quantity’ of causality with their Verses. In order to ensure that the law wasn’t violated, the Transcendents were naturally removed from reality, thereby reducing the quantity of causality.

Transcendents would then probably return only after the quantity of causality was restored. It was the causality equivalent of ’every action had an equal and opposite reaction.’

To intervene into reality through the information dimension was, in some ways, to become more real. Thus, the equal and opposite reaction would be to become less real. And that was exactly what the disappearing from reality did.

It was the universe’s way of restoring balance to causality.

Given that not even the Universalis Mensis was free from this law, he could assume that it was extremely fundamental and could not be directly violated. But it could be functionally gamed.

The universe was a stickler for technicalities. If one could technically pay the price but practically avoid it, the way Rui did, then the universe couldn’t complain. It was similar to the speed of light technically being absolute, but functionally bypassed with warp drives and wormholes and other gravitational phenomena.

In fact, Rui could actually conceive of other ways to avoid paying the price.

The first was to time travel to the future while using the Verse. Doing this would spread the causality over time to prevent it from diverging from the expected quantity of causality in the universe. He suspected that this would prevent Transcendents from disappearing, but they would have to time travel a lot into the future, centuries or so, in order to avoid the price.

Another solution he could conceive of was time travel to the past, but this was very difficult even by the standards of Martial Artists. Rui hadn’t tried it, but he already knew that he would be violating so many laws that time traveling even a short period into the past, if it was even possible at all, would consume all of his metaphysical stamina, and he would end up disappearing for much longer.

In comparison to these solutions, his solution was much better.