The Martial Unity

The Beast Incursion continued as waves of beasts and monsters continued sweeping through all of human civilization. Even though the first wave hadn’t been entirely dealt with in many places, the second wave came nonetheless, putting a lot of pressure on human civilization.

Martial Artists experienced a resurgence in the brutality of battle that was similar to the original wave of beasts and monsters. Battles became more gruesome and deadly, restoring an air of gloom and dread.

Thankfully, human civilization had finally begun to stabilize for the first time since the inception of the Beast Incursion. Although there certainly were plenty of human polities that had still fallen to the beast tides, the overall trend slowed down as human civilization got over its initial shock and finally acclimated to the new reality.

Not all nations directly came in touch with the beast tide; many were locked territorially in the middle of other nations and would only come in touch with the beast tide if one of the other nations fell to the Beast Incursion. Naturally, under the sheer pressure that they were experiencing, most leaders were far-sighted enough to see that the need for cooperation with nations they might not have had the best relationship with. Countless pacts, treaties, and alliances were forged in order to protect human civilization. All existing seafaring capacity had already been repurposed for the sole sake of restoring the most important and urgent supply chains, such as food, esoteric energy, potions, and esoteric ammunition for siege weapons.

And thus, human civilization grit its teeth as it weathered an endless flood of frenzied beasts and monsters.

Meanwhile, the Human Summit drew closer and closer.

With each passing day, human civilization awaited the knowledge, insights, and solutions of the human sages.

To the common man, many of them were no more than myths. However, the Martial World and the political sphere knew that they were extremely real.

Not only were they real, but they were extremely powerful.

After all, knowledge was power.

Many were certain that the solutions that they would provide would go on to revolutionize human civilization’s approach to the beast tides. Rui felt the weight of expectations that fell on his shoulders. He knew that whatever he provided needed to be effective and powerful. That was why he took the task that he had chosen to undertake very seriously.

When he wasn’t working on Project Forge or participating in the defensive line, he was working on the proto-Tree of Life model. Thankfully, the end goal was just downsizing the Tree of Life predictive model to ensure that it was something that Seniors and above could master.

He didn’t expect anything for Apprentices and Squires for they were much more limited in their ability to exploit the knowledge of the Tree of Life to produce powerful outcomes. They could not manipulate heaven and earth as well as Masters or even Seniors could. On top of that, they were not accustomed to thought-heavy techniques, thus it was deeply unlikely that they would be able to master everything that they needed to do in order for the model to be of any use.

His proto-Tree of Life was mostly limited to the Upper Realms and the Senior Realms, and that was good enough for now. In time, Apprentices and Squires would eventually learn it due to the burning need for effective retaliation against the beasts and monsters. But it was those of the Upper Realms who truly possessed the ability of mind and thought to make use of it. Rui predicted that in time it would become the bread and butter of Martial Artists as their sole important enemies would be beasts and monsters. Thus, there would be extremely powerful incentives for all Martial Artists to master his proto-Tree of Life.

He worked hard to develop not just a downsized system of thought but also created memory solutions that could help Martial Artists memorize and internalize the proto-Tree of Life as well as possible as quickly as possible.

“I need to ensure that I don’t cut out too much of the resolution of the proto-Tree of Life model to the point where it loses too much of its effectiveness.”

He had already decided to get rid of all the species-level resolution and patterns; there were trillions of species and there was no way that other Martial Artists would be able to memorize the countless patterns integrated into the predictive model needed to identify not just the species but also the antithetical environment.

However, his predictive model was so vast that even if he cut out this impossible level of memory recollection and internalization, there was still too much data of the average person to even fathom.

There were still millions of genera and each genus had its own average antithetical environment.

And thus, he began stripping the system of thought of much of the resolution, drastically reducing it of much of its data and lowering the load on memory and cognition.

“It may very well be that Martial Artists will have to rely on a team of analysts to supply them with the right answer initially,” Rui muttered to himself. “Though, teams of analysts are extremely slow, causing a massive disconnect.”

They could potentially deploy Martial Artists in the team in order to ensure that accurate intelligence could be quickly supplied from the proto-Tree of Life. They needed to have the most power they could as soon as possible until they memorized the proto-Tree of Life entirely.

Rui even devised self-hypnosis techniques that would allow them to internalize the proto-Tree of Life system of thought as quickly as possible.

Any little bit that he could do to make the technique easier to memorize and master would be of great help to all of human civilization. Despite being confronted with enormous stakes, the likes of which were much greater than anything he had done in his entire life, he retained his composure and worked hard to meet the timelines set by the Beggar Sage.

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