The Martial Unity

His breathing strained as his heart beat at a heightened pace. His Martial Heart burst into power subconsciously as glowing red streaks flashed across hi body as his circulatory system flowed.

Suddenly, the vision disappeared as he returned back to reality.

“My child,” Matriarch Nephi patted him with concern. “What happened?”

“I-I don’t know.” Rui’s eyes swam around subconsciously as he struggled to regain his composure. “I just-“

He choked.

Words could not describe the torment he experienced.

He didn’t understand.

He didn’t understand what had just happened.

“Perhaps we should take a small break,” Matriarch Nephi suggested with concern and worry. “Sometimes, my prophecies can be overwhelming. It is a large amount of information being flooded into the mind, after all. The subconscious mind sometimes rejects it, while the conscious mind actively seeks it. This disharmony can bring about mental stress, which is experienced as anguish.”

Rui sat down on a small wooden stump in the shed, taking deep breaths to calm himself down.

“…What happened, my child?” She gazed at him with concern.

The air grew severe.

Rui inhaled deeply, closing his eyes.

“I think I saw the Divine Doctor…” Rui murmured softly as his eyes swam around.

“…Isn’t that a good thing?” Matriarch Nephi asked.

Her tone was careful and gentle.

“It is, but…” Rui’s hand covered his heart. “…He asked me a question.”

Just the memory of it brought about an emotional turmoil, an echo of what he felt in the prophecy.

“…Question?”

“Yeah…” Rui whispered, turning to meet his grandmother’s gaze.

“Who am I?”

Matriarch Nephi’s eyes sharpened.

“But it wasn’t a question,” Rui whispered. “It was the answer.”

“Tsk. Meddling fool,” Matriarch Nephi muttered under her breath.

Rui’s eyebrows furrowed at that strange remark. “What?”

“Nothing.” She closed her eyes. “Forget about it. It’s nothing at all.”

Rui narrowed his eyes sharply at her sudden dismissal of it.

She knew something.

That was odd. The knowledge bases of Matriarch Nephi and the Divine Doctor ought not to overlap. Yet it seemed as if that question held significance to both of them.

His conscious mind immediately raced into action as it furiously processed the information, outputting hundreds of possibilities, each less likely than the one before it.

“If you know something, I would appreciate it if you shared it,” Rui remarked.

“I cannot,” his grandmother replied firmly.

“…” He closed his eyes, heaving a deep sigh. “…Fine.”

“Did you gain anything useful?” His grandmother asked, diverting the topic.

“…Yeah,” Rui replied. “I got a decent view of what he looked like. That will definitely help.”

“That’s good,” Matriarch Nephi nodded. “Anything else?” “He had a lot of tools and instruments,” Rui murmured. “Lots of artifacts. I recognized a lot of them and I can research the remaining because I stored the whole prophecy in my Mind Palace. The traces they leave can help me potentially find more clues about him if he’s used them in the Beast Domain.”

Rui was reluctant to revisit them, however.

He did not feel what he felt a second time.

“Who are you?” He asked himself out aloud.

He didn’t feel anything.

He was Rui Quarrier Silas Kandria, as he had recently updated his official name a second time.

It was a benign question. It made sense that the Divine Doctor would ask him that question since they were strangers who, as Rui hoped, would be meeting in the Beast Domain.

Yet, when his memory went back to the Divine Doctor, he couldn’t help but feel like something was deeply off.

He was deeply mistaken somewhere.

Yet, he didn’t understand.

It was frustrating.

‘I guess I’ll just find out when I find the bastard,’ Rui narrowed his eyes.

For now, he put the matter aside as he revisited the prophecy with a heavy heart, this time, he blurred out the Divine Doctor, instead focusing on the environment around them. The visions were distorted and even incoherent, yet Rui could undoubtedly detect a world around them.

They stood on sandy land.

Rui was able to ascertain that much.

That in itself was a valuable clue.

However, that wasn’t all.

“…I smell the ocean,” Rui murmured as he revisited the sensory data of the prophecy stored in his Mind Palace. “…I think we might be on the coast of an inland ocean.”

If that was true, it was a huge clue!

It drastically narrowed down the possibilities from half the Beast Domain to a much more manageable set of locations!

Of course, there were many salt-water bodies in the Beast Domain, many seas, and inland oceans in the Beast Domain, thus he still had a huge amount of possibilities as to where the Beast Domain was. However, it was no longer as absurdly large as it had been before.

If he compared the intelligence that the Beggar Sage had given him with the information of the Adventurer’s Guild, then he could significantly narrow down the possibilities.

On top of that, he had the Angel of Laplace, a technique in the same tier of thought as the VOID algorithm, and his evolved Mind Palace that could allow him to scry the past. If he combined that with more information from the remaining prophecies of his grandmother, then Rui was starting to grow truly optimistic about the prospects of finding the Divine Doctor.

Before, what had seemed like an almost impossible task was now very much within the Realm of possibilities. It appeared that pursuing paths and avenues of learning more about the Divine Doctor to hopefully give him a chance to find the Divine Doctor together was the right choice.

Of course, it was still going to be extremely difficult. He had no doubt that he would be thoroughly pushed to his limit, but the possibility of winning would fix everything about his life that he didn’t like.

Failure would mean ascending the throne.

“Huff…” Rui heaved a sigh, composing himself as he steeled his determination.

“Let us continue,” he told his grandmother. “I still need more if I am to accomplish what I seek to.”

–