The Martial Unity

He had put the man to good use in manufacturing and developing large amounts of Martial resources with proprietary technology three years ago. Emperor Rael possessed the deep political foresight to know that without ensuring a great surplus of Martial resources and market opportunities, he would not be able to retain all these extra Martial Apprentices.

It was one of the reasons that he had decided to root out the Underworld at all. He needed to get his hands on this man who would be able to increase the quantity of available Martial resources without compromising on quality.

However, resource availability was just half of the matter, he also needed to ensure that the surplus Martial Apprentices had ample market opportunities.

He had long thought of a solution for this.

“Inform the Martial Union to commence the acceleration of Apprentice commissions for the Elder Tree operations.” He glanced at his secretary.

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Making use of the Elder Tree’s intelligence and fulfilling his end of the bargain with the Elder Tree required Martial labor. Thus, he could provide job opportunities to the surplus of Martial Apprentices by having them fulfill the Elder Tree missions.

Deploying them to the Beast Domain would not only give them a good experience and a handsome income, but it would also prime their development to become hunter-class Martial Artists. A class that was about to become sorely needed if the Kandrian Empire wanted to maximize the benefits of the Beast Domain.

It was killing multiple birds with a single stone.

This would satisfy the Apprentices of the Kandrian Empire in the long run, erasing any reason for them to leave. It left them and the rest of the economy and markets happy.

“Dealing with the local economic and political ramifications was easy enough, but…” Emperor Rael’s eyes narrowed. “The international and geopolitical ramifications will not be easy.”

The news would not remain restricted within the Kandrian Empire, after all.

It never did.

From local and international investigative and news organizations to spying and intelligence agencies, there were many paths for these juicy revelations to spread to the rest of the world. And spread, they did.

It spread like wildfire far beyond the Kandrian Empire.

It spread to all of East Panama.

“Mass breakthroughs of Kandrian Apprentices?!”

“How can that possibly be true?!”

“Dammit! Just what is happening in the Kandrian Empire?!”

It shook the entirety of the political class of East Panama, leaving them frozen in horror as they slowly processed the horrifying implications of what they were witnessing.

Guildmaster Bradt sat in his office with a grave and severe expression.

He fully understood what they were looking at.

“The Kandrian Empire… the Emperor of Harmony is attempting to overcome the Great Limit.”

The Great Limit.

It was an obscure concept of Martial anthropology that was mostly known within the political class of human civilization. It referred to the barrier that restricted how Martially and militaristically strong any human organization could possibly get. It included all groups of all kinds. Whether they were Martial organizations like the Panamic Martial Federation, the Kandrian Martial Union, or the Martial Consortium of Gorteau, whether they were religious organizations like the Gen Temple and the Virodhabhasa Theocracy, whether they were intelligence organizations like the Beggar’s Sect and the Shadow Guild, whether they were underground organizations like the Underworld, or whether they were nations like the Kandrian Empire, they all were limited qualitatively by what was known as the Great Limit.

It was not an absolute cosmic limit, per se, more so one of logistical, pragmatic, and Martial reality. The power trajectory of human civilization was not a straight line trending upwards. It was not even a curve.

No.

The trajectory of human civilization resembled steps. Every time a new Realm was discovered, there would be a period of astronomical and exponential growth in human civilization as nations and organizations rapidly upgraded to a new Realm of power.

As long as it continued, there would be no true cap for human civilization.

This was the prevailing school of thought for much of the Age of Martial Art.

However, that ceased being true with the advent of the Transcendent Realm. Upon the birth of the first Martial Transcendent, the Martial Primordial, humanity did not grow stronger.

For Martial Transcendents did not move.

To this day, nobody knew why.

But, these unfathomable gods refused to exercise their power.

Even the most warmongering of Sages like Emperor Arthur of Britannia became an aloof, unmoving ruler who distanced him from all lesser affairs.

It meant that organizations that obtained a Transcendent essentially lost a Martial Sage without any compensation.

In other words, becoming stronger made them weaker.

It was a paradoxical yet brutal reality, one that limited how much stronger Sage-level powerhouses could become. More precisely, it limited how fast they could become stronger, making any gains in power extremely grueling and marginal over great periods of time with none of the many spikes that were common throughout the Age of Martial Arts.

This was the Great Limit.

Even if Martial Sages continued to be born en masse without dying in combat with their peers in the depths of the Beast Domain, they would essentially continue to ‘die’ as assets when they broke through to the Transcendent Realm.

It put an extremely hard limit on how much stronger Sage-level powerhouses could get, one that none of them could find a solution to. Yet, as East Panama realized, the Kandrian Empire might have found a true long-term solution to overcoming the Great Limit.

An exponential increase in Martial Apprentices eventually yielded an exponential increase in Squires, Seniors, Masters, and Sages.

Thus, the birth of young Sages who were far from the Transcendent Realm meant that the influx of Sages would far outweigh the outflux of Sages into the Transcendent Realm, allowing for a spike far past Sage-level powerhouse territory into a proper Transcendent-level nation.

And that was precisely what the Kandrian Empire was attempting to do.

Yet, while most of East Panama was merely aghast and shocked, the reaction of the other three Sage-level powerhouses was a lot more volatile.

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