The Martial Unity

Chapter 3224: An Advanced Society

The dark elves of West Genora had never seen a human before.

Naturally, they were engrossed in studying this new elf-like species.

”Where are your ears?” A young girl asked with curiosity.

”I have ears,” Amare gestured to them. ”But they’re small compared to yours.”

The dark elf girl widened her eyes, as if the very notion of it was unfathomable to her.

”How do you hear the forest whisper then?” the dark elf girl asked with an even more intrigued question. ”How do you speak to the trees and the plants? How do you tell them what to do?”

Amare’s smile grew wry as she kneeled down, gently stroking the adorable girl’s hair. ”I don’t. I don’t communicate with nature.”

The dark elf girl’s eyes widened with shock. ”What?! But how? How do you even survive?”

”Don’t be rude,” her father chided her, before glancing at Amare apologetically. ”She has yet to learn of the world outside of the continent, pardon her words.”

”It’s ok,” Amare giggled as she allowed the young girl to touch her ears.

A boy ran up to her, pointing at her ears with a gasp. ”It’s like a monkey’s! She’s a therianthrope of the Saru Clan!”

Instantly, he got berated for his rudeness.

”Don’t say that to her!” his mother cajoled her. ”She is not a therianthrope. She is a human being.”

They all gathered around Amare with a curious expression, the children unscrupulously made their way to the very front, openly engaging with her. The women formed something of a circle around her with profound curiosity and amazement, while the men stood further away.

Rui, on the other hand, found himself standing near the Matriarch of the clan alone.

Every once in a while, people would steal an apprehensive glance at it with a flicker of disgust.

”I apologize for their behavior,” the dark elf elder heaved a soft sigh. ”Unfortunately, your presence is quite revolting to our senses. I hope you don’t take this to heart. We still welcome you to our home as an honored guest.”

”No worries,” Rui replied. ”I actually prefer this. I’m not the most open person, and I tend not to do well with crowds.”

He had hated the attention ever since he began getting it for whatever reason or occasion. This feeling had grown even more intense after he became the youngest Senior, and his identity as a prince was disclosed to the entire world.

Although decades have passed since his identity came out, he still hasn’t gotten acclimatized to the exaggerated attention he got.

In fact, he loved the fact that they kept their distance and left all their curiosity and fawning for Amare.

While she joyfully played with the curious and eager children, Rui studied the home of the dark elves.

Generally, living in trees was associated with primitiveness in his mind, for better or worse, but a single look at the home of the dark elves, and he understood that he would be gravely mistaken if he simply wrote Aerrirgieff Tribe off as primitive.

Their way of life was vastly more sophisticated than it appeared on the surface.

Manipulating the body of the tree allowed them to essentially carve out a home for themselves instantly. It also allowed them to move very easily and made civil planning a breeze.

Their homes were definitely on the smaller side, but that was largely due to preference rather than an inability to build larger homes. He knew the fact that the little cottage he had was considered ’luxurious,’ that they had very different standards of materialism. Most likely, in the minds of dark elves, even these little huts shaped into the inner walls of the giant tree would be considered quite comfortable by the preferences of the dark elves.

Higher up the tree, he spotted non-housing infrastructure that was also part of the tree lifeform in the form of plant organs, of sorts, that protruded from the tree. Wood infrastructure that could ’manufacture’ all forms of objects of all manner of shapes and purposes, made from living wood that was essentially its own lifeform. It could produce woven clothes that the dark elves fashioned to cover themselves.

His Primordial Instinct even detected a powerful defense system that was similar to an array of siege weapons that were integrated into the very lifeform of the tree, allowing the Aerrirgieff tribe to defend itself with a biotechnological defense system that the tree was armed with, in the event of an invasion.

He also sensed an information network with a tremendous flux of chemical signals that the dark elves could tap into with a single touch. It wasn’t just their ears that had evolved to help them ’hear’ trees; it was also their nervous system and their sensory neurons that could tap into the flux of signals across the superintelligence of the Genoran flora network and all its information with a single touch.

They could connect their minds to a network so enormous that it dwarfed even the internet and was sentient with an intelligence that was proportional to size.

Even as the dark elves fawned over Amare with curiosity and intrigue, Rui couldn’t help but notice that any time they wanted an item, they merely needed to reach their hand out, and a branch would immediately emerge from the inner wall spontaneously, supplying them with what they needed. It could even spontaneously create items that they sought on the spot with an extremely quick production system.

”Here!” The little dark elf girl raised her hand as a branch emerged from the tree wall, spontaneously blooming some amber flowers.

The little girl plucked the flowers, giving them to Amare with a smile. ”Flowers that match your eyes!”

Amare beamed at the gesture while Rui marveled at the ability itself.

The tree was extremely biotechnologically advanced, serving as a biotechnological system that could take care of everything they needed, and they had mental control over its systems, allowing them to manipulate its biotechnology.

This was no primitive society.

It was an advanced society that somehow maintained the aesthetics and the essence of a hunter-gatherer society.

It was unlike anything he had seen on the Panama Continent, despite all its diversity in culture.

The dark elves were simply fundamentally different from humans in many ways.