The Martial Unity

Chapter 3976: A Single Question

If not for the last moment of Gene Realm adaptive evolution, his hand would have been utterly destroyed, with every cell in it dead. He didnʼt even have his exotic pluripotent matter because of how much of it had been exhausted in the battle against the alien virus mind and the embodiment of the Noosphere.

The laminar integument, on the other hand, also rapidly began healing its body as the breached layers of its body began reconstructing. The fluid that leaked out of its body magically seemed to return to its body, taking its right place in its laminar osmotic metabolism.

However, when the parts of its body that Rui had ruptured had healed, they were… blank.

The colorful spectrum of chromatography etched across that portion of the layers in its body was… gone. It created a sharp line of simple blank transparency compared to its colorful surroundings.

It resembled a scar.

Ruiʼs attack on its body had caused it to lose memories.

Memories from different parts of its life.

Such was the plight of a creature whose body was its brain.

Attacks on its body were attacks on its memory center.

Each time the laminar integument alien got into a fight, it lost memories. Thus, each battle it partook in was a battle that took a toll on its very mind.

On its identity.

The integrity of its soul was the price that the laminar integument paid for engaging in war.

Ruiʼs expression hardened a little as he healed his hand, studying the laminar integument with deep eyes. He didnʼt put too much stock into the ʼimpressionsʼ he had of the laminar integument, because it was an alien entity whose nature was truly unfathomable to him.

However, his instincts told him that he wasnʼt dealing with a predatory or malicious species. Of course, while he could sense malice from life on Gaia, that didnʼt mean that he would be able to sense malice from the alien entity in front of him. It was possible that even as the jellyfish-like alien elegantly floated some distance away from him in outer space, the flashes of light permeating through his body were actually it cursing him or spewing the laminar equivalent of hatred at him.

But he increasingly doubted that.

The Light of Soul allowed him to interpret the network of flashes of light that flashed through its body by correlating it with its actions.

It was the same kind of pattern recognition that the VOID algorithm and the SOUL System were based on.

The same kind of pattern recognition that a lot of his systems of thought were based on. That was why he was starting to understand its mind. The two alien entities simply hovered some distance away from each other despite healing their bodies.

They simply beheld each other in the sacred silence of space. The ephemeral beauty of the backdrop of the Milky Way and the cosmos created an atmosphere of profound intensity. Even the mighty laminar world ship far in the distance could make anybody gasp its profound beauty.

They were not of the same species.

Or even of the same Tree of Life.

Or of the same world.

But in that moment, he felt a kind of kinship with the alien. It was a creature that had suffered what they would have suffered. Its world had undoubtedly been infected by the alien virus.

And the laminar integuments had failed to stop it.

The fact that this alien species had survived, perhaps through world ships like the one far in the distance behind the laminar integument, meant that they had to watch their world explode as the alien virus spewed its esoteric seed in all directions across the cosmos.

He was certain one of those esoteric seeds, having recorded information of their native tree-like laminar flora species, the manifold tree, had come to Gaia. That esoteric seed must have landed in what went on to become the Panama Continent.

Why then had this laminar integument come to this solar system?

Why had it come to their world?

They had undoubtedly sensed the ripples through the information dimension.

They had undoubtedly sensed the death throes of the alien virus.

They had come to destroy the world that it had infected.

When he considered the actions of the laminar integument in the context of what he could deduce of their past, their actions were no longer as malicious.

He could even understand it to an extent.

They sought to destroy any trace of the virus that had spread from the destruction of their home world.

Why? Perhaps for revenge.

Perhaps they wanted to exterminate every body, branch, and seed of the alien virus for what it had done to their world.

Or perhaps out of compassion. Out of compassion for other forms of life across the galaxy and the cosmos. To ensure that no other life elsewhere in the universe would ever have to go through what they did.

Rui was not in the habit of forgiving those who tried to destroy the world his daughter lived within.

But, he stayed his hand from resuming the battle.

Instead, he generated light from hyper-charged and excited electrons in his body, using it to create an image midair.

WHOOSH…

An image of the alien manifold tree.

Both the manifold tree present in the Kandrian Empire and the greater manifold tree that cast a manifold across the Panama Continent.

The flux of flickering light signals that comprised its photonic consciousness suddenly heightened with intensity as it perceived the image that Rui had conjured before it.

Its body vibrated a little as one of its tendrils emerged non-threateningly, touching the image he created softly. It was an expression of sorrow and affection, or whatever was the equivalent within its photonic consciousness.

It clearly was moved by Ruiʼs gesture.

The blood-red suns within the depths of his eyes shone with blinding brightness.

They began flickering.

Just like the flickering light signals within the laminar integument.

It was an attempt at communication.

Studying the laminar integument and forming the Light of Soul model on this alien life form allowed him to understand the nature of its thought and consciousness.

Its logic style was not sequential like his.

Its mind function, instead, was like an optical Fourier Transform. Instead of calculating every variable of a math problem one by one, it ʼinputedʼ the variables as light frequencies. The way the light bent and interfered through their memory-strata was the answer.

The chromatographic spectrum stains of its body added even more dimensions to its thought, correlating with interpreting and recording sensory data, relying on wave mechanics instead of the electrical impulses in Ruiʼs brain that flowed through neuron connections that had greater plasticity.

It was a fundamentally different model of integrated information, of consciousness, thought, and mind. Crossing the gulf between them to communicate should have been impossible.

And yet, through the flicking suns in his eyes, he converted words into information and logic, and then converted those into electromagnetic frequency, polarity, and a pattern of flickering light closest to those.

He asked a single question.

”Why have you come?”