The Martial Unity

Chapter 3688: The Origin Story

Without these memories and muscle memory that Rui was inheriting, it would have taken him many, many years at the bare minimum to achieve even solid mastery.

For him to reach Anthea’s level would have taken him decades at the bare minimum.

This was a time when Rui was not the most eager to go through. He had already gone through one stage of re-acclimatization in his life when he was reincarnated, so he knew that getting used to a radically different body was not easy.

All of this got solved by this ’trap.’

It was now the opposite of a trap, as far as Rui was concerned.

’The only problem is how long this will take in real time, but given that Amare experienced ten thousand years of memories in ten years of real time...’

He could infer that his process would take months in real-time, at most. There were, of course, probably differences that would cause the ratio to be different. It was even possible that he would take less time, given that his mind was much more powerful than Amare’s and could handle a greater throughput of memories.

On top of that, he was inside the manifold.

Which meant that it would take days.

Rui had no idea what was happening outside the manifold.

It must have been roughly a year in real time, given that sixteen years had passed in the manifold. He couldn’t imagine that the Panamic Alliance would simply crumble in the span of a single year, not with his father at the head of the alliance.

On top of that, he was still alive.

Which meant that the Kandrian Manifold had not been breached.

Which probably meant that the Kandrian Empire was not in too terrible a shape.

That was good enough.

’Just hang in there for a few more days, and I’ll be there.’

His pitch-black eyes flared with a profoundly intense drive.

He knew the moment that he was done with this process, it was over.

The war would spontaneously end.

He would achieve such an absurd level of power that all the enemies he regarded as threatening in the past would be rendered useless.

There would be no force in the world capable of stopping him.

There would be no power capable of defeating him.

There would be no weapon, no path, no pathwalker, and no civilization that would be able to resist him.

The moment he arose, the war would end.

’Just hang in there.’

He immersed himself in Anthea’s memories actively, submerging himself in them. He engrossed himself as he tried ’living’ as Anthea.

He tried being Anthea.

When he tried hard enough, it became impossible to distinguish memories from reality. This must have been why Amare eventually came to delude herself into thinking that she truly was the Esil of origin.

He grew impatient at having to go through the baby years of Anthea. There was nothing to be gained by watching the toddler be raised in an evosapien military child-rearing facility.

He had been stripped away from his evosapien mother, who had returned to active duty, and was being raised by staff dedicated to shaping evosapien children into perfect soldiers.

Discipline was enforced from an extremely young age with powerful incentives and disincentives. The rules were harsh, but fair, and competition was encouraged.

It was very different from the upbringing that Rui had gone through.

Rui had been born and brought up in love from a very young age. He had been surrounded by brothers and sisters whom he truly cherished and elders who truly loved him. He regarded Lashara as his true mother, and she had given him one of the most wonderful childhoods he could have ever asked for.

In comparison, Anthea had gone through a child’s version of boot camp from a very young age. The child-rearing staff who raised them were not devoid of affection, but they maintained their distance, learning not to get too emotionally involved, only to be forcefully separated from their children.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t as inhumanely cruel as he might have imagined. Most children were not tortured or anything of the sort, but it was harsh and tough.

The Continent of Moridia had extreme climate swings that Rui couldn’t even imagine.

It could go from being a desert that was devoid of any moisture at temperatures that would cause all humans to experience heat strokes, and then rapidly go to freezing cold, where one could easily experience hypothermia if one wasn’t extremely careful.

It was these environments that had led ancestral homo sapiens on the Continent of Moridia to evolve into evosapiens, which could adaptively evolve rapidly by altering their DNA.

Perhaps the truly cruel aspects were that children were not given adequate temperature protection from the heat and the cold.

The army believed that doing so would remove the evolutionary pressures on their species that led them to develop adaptive evolution. They ensured that these perils remained, so that children would naturally hone their adaptive evolution.

And for children that couldn’t hack it... Well, the army did not intervene even if they succumbed. Most children who could adaptively evolve were treated well, but those who couldn’t were treated poorly and would eventually die.

”Adaptive evolution is everything,” a young Anthea murmured as a tear dripped from his eyes.

In his arms was the corpse of a young girl his age.

She had been unable to adaptively evolve to the cold and had succumbed.

In the Evolutionary Army, adaptive evolution was everything. It was ruthlessly meritocratic in that, and ruthlessly contemptuous of those who could not survive its tests.

Rui’s expression softened as he understood why Anthea had become the power-hungry monster that he had been.

’Poor child.’

Anthea internalized the trauma of seeing weakness kill those he cared for, and proceeded to dedicate his life to cultivating power like nobody before him. He achieved stellar results in tests and examinations. He achieved stellar results in the field and in missions and would go on to become the Supreme Commander of the most powerful army on the planet.

And Rui had every intention of experiencing every moment of that journey.