The Martial Unity

When Rui woke up, he realized he actually hadn’t. “This…” A whisper escaped him as he swept his gaze in and around at the pitch-black darkness that enveloped him. “This is surely a dream.”

He was immersed in an endless darkness, floating about weightlessly.

It took him a moment to remember his last memory.

“…Punching the hell out of Sage Sekiei.” A smile cracked at the edge of his mouth. “Ah, I hope that worked.”

He recalled the attack mangling Sage Sekiei’s body, but he wasn’t sure if he won the battle or not. Regardless, it was over. “At the very least, I’m probably not dead.” His mind felt fit. And while it’s own subjective view on itself was hardly credible, he didn’t detect anything off about his mental faculties or cognition. He could even access his mind palace despite being in this little mindscape.

“I’m probably in a post-Gigabrain coma.”

He had gone through those multiple times by now. And he loved every single time he did.

“Three Martial Sages and Amare,” he smiled as he recalled those instant perfectly well. “Good times. But…”

He gazed around him once more. “I don’t think I can get out of here.”

This was probably a very immersive lucid dream that he was having of sorts. Though he wasn’t sure why everything was black. He wasn’t even sure why he was awake in his mind amid recovery. In the past, the coma had always been a passage of time that he was entirely unaware of. He would close his eyes one moment and open his eyes another moment and just like that, more than a month would be gone by.

“I actually prefer it that way,” Rui glanced at his body that was as it normally was. “I’m not sure what to do in this remarkably lucid dream—”

He paused as an idea popped up in his mind.

“What if I try to use this time to make progress with the large soul model?”

While he didn’t have access to his sensory data within this dreamscape, he had plenty of working data stored within the mind palace. And this time, he was entirely free to focus exclusively on this mega-project.

In the past ten years, he had worked tirelessly on this project.

Even in the seven years that he had spent with Tokugawa Ieyasu, he had continuously had this model in the back of his mind as his powerful mind chugged away at it, building a predictive model around his very existence. This hadn’t stopped even in the three years after he departed from the Kandrian Empire.

It was the single most overwhelmingly immense project that he had ever cultivated in his entire life. It was so enormous that it dwarfed even the massive Angel of Life.

It towered over even the astronomical Tree of Life.

Not even the Forge of Creation could a hold a candle to the sheer magnitude of the large soul model that he had worked tirelessly to complete for one hold decade!

It was in a league of its own, dwarfing the entirety of his Martial Mind.

That was why he knew that when it was complete, it would be the most astronomical accomplishment of his life. Till this day, he had no idea whether it would truly get him to the Sage Realm as a conscious form of the Enlightenment of Self.

Regardless, he had to try.

And thus, amid the endless darkness that surrounded his entire being, he began deploying the sum totality of his mind toward the project. In the past, he could only ever have devoted a fraction of his time towards completing the large soul model.

This time, he was going to dedicate all his time while in this mental state to making as much progress with the large soul model as possible. This would make him even more productive than when he only dedicated half his mind to working on it while the other half was focusing on the things happening around him. The only exceptions were battle or training.

The greater the progress he made with the model, the more he realized that his tingling suspicions on the matter were on the money.

He could not help but feel this was the true nature of the Enlightenment of Self. However, nobody could ever describe what it was, not just because of a lack of vocabulary but also because he was the first person to make a conscious path to the Sage Realm while all other Martial Artists before him had made progress in the Sage Realm subconsciously.

They subconsciously gained a large language behavioral predictive model through experience, intuition, and instinct. Not that there wasn’t any thought behind it, but all that thought went towards refining a model that they weren’t quite conscious of.

How could someone accurately define what they weren’t conscious of?

That was why no Martial Sage could explain what the Enlightenment of Self was in proper, concrete terms.

It was also why the exact and true nature of the Martial Soul was beyond their ability to explain.

Rui suspected that if these suspicions were accurate, then he would be the first person to actively and consciously reach the Enlightenment of Self. He wasn’t sure what the impacts would be on his Sagehood.

His mind grew increasingly immersed as he drowned in the process, making incredible progress with his large soul model. An unknown amount of time passed.

It felt like an eternity.

Over what felt like an eternity, the large soul model slowly came to take shape as he made an immense amount of progress with the time that he had at his disposal. As astronomically titanic as the model is, he had already chipped away at a huge portion of it in the past decade, and now, with absolute time at his hands, he continued making enormous  progress with it, approaching the conclusion of this decade-long project.

Approaching the conclusion of the single longest project of his entire life. And that was when he woke up.

–