The Martial Unity

Suddenly, the air changed.

The atmosphere shifted.

The beast tides, galvanized and energized by not just their overwhelming numbers but also the Abyssal Dragon’s emergence, suddenly grew quiet. The maddened primal aggression that had flared in their eyes suddenly dimmed.

In its place emerged a primordial fear.

The fear ingrained in their blood.

In their bones.

Every ounce of it screamed to them not to enter this hellhole of a place.

They froze where they stood as their body leaned away as if struggling to run away.

And yet, they couldn’t. Even if they wanted to, they couldn’t. Orders were absolute.

A once aggressive frenzy of a rampage had been reduced to a cautious and fearful approach.

It was unlike anything Rui had ever seen the beast tides act like. Even in the face of the Kandrian Empire, they gallantly ran to their deaths without fear. And yet, before the hellhole that was the Gu, they experience paralyzing fear.

He didn’t blame them.

He glanced at the hairs on his arm.

They were frozen stiff.

Every instinct in his body begged him not to enter the abyss.

Primordial Instinct, especially, was ringing alarm bells and sirens in his head about the sheer danger associated with the abyss. Before this hurdle, every other hurdle that he had overcome in his journey before this was all but trivial.

“Let’s go.” He gripped Amare’s hands as they took the plunge.

The beast tides followed suit, reluctantly charging into the abyss with fearful gallops.

WHOOSH

They were swallowed into the darkness as they entered what may as well have been its own world.

A world of madness.

“AAAARRRRARARAGRHRRHRARHRH!!!!!!”

Chills crawled across their skin as they witnessed an endless ocean of carnage, violence, and death.

Men, women, and even children fought with a primal aggression and violence, taking each other’s lives.

Blood gushed to their feet from how much it was spilled.

Yet, it wasn’t the clean red blood neatly spread across the Blood of Valley by the Blood Cult to intimidate.

It was rotten and black.

The beasts and monsters were almost dumbfounded to find human beings with even greater primal aggression than even them.

What especially shook Rui was that there was no care for civilian protection whatsoever.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!! BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!! BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!

The Sage-level beasts and monsters rampage right past them, killing millions of people in the blink of an eye as they surged deeper and deeper into the abyss.

Rui’s face morphed with horror as the Martial Artists that emerged showed absolutely no care for the civilians either, unleashing their full power. They flared the power of their Martial Bodies, Hearts, Minds, and Souls without even the slightest care of protecting their people.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!! BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!! BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!

RUMBLE!!!

And just like that, countless people died.

“How could they…?” Amare had never felt as helpless as she did then. “Nggg…!”

She held her head as a flood of memories, unlike anything she had ever seen before surged from within the depths of her mind.

“This place…” she murmured. “I have been here before.”

“More importantly,” Rui clasped her hand. “We need to get out of here before we get caught up!”

RUMBLE!!!

He gritted his teeth as he pulled her across an ocean of fresh corpses stretching as far as the eye could see.

Countless people had died with the new incoming wave of beasts and monsters.

And yet, it had caused a seismic shift in demographics as Martial Artists emerged from the depths of the abyss, and the scant few that survived shifted away from the direction from which beasts and monsters.

Because the Gu was enormously wide and was extremely far away from the Beast Domain, the beast tides were limited to one and only one part of the abyss. The further away people could remain, the likelier their survival.

In other words, people fought to get to the other side, and those who couldn’t make it were the weaker ones.

It was survival of the fittest.

Rui’s eyes widened with horror as he realized that the Gu didn’t bother protecting its massive populations because doing so would prevent a Darwinian mechanism from being applied.

Under ordinary circumstances, the sheer amount of deaths that the prior attack had caused would have completely destroyed most Sage-level powerhouses. Not even the Nest of Terra could afford to lose so many people. And yet, it was but a drop in the ocean in the population of the Gu. Having robbed people from across the entirety of its domain of influence, the Gu likely possessed the raw population needed to be able to afford such titanic losses of people. Rui’s expression grew ugly as he traveled deeper and deeper into the abyss with Amare, who simply pressed her hand against her forehead as she struggled to process the flashes of memories that bubbled up from deep within her. Rui, on the other hand, got a broader perspective on the Gu’s internal structure.

On one hand, it would appear that he had just entered a choatic hell with no order and only madness.

But upon a deeper look, he could immediately understand that it was engineered.

The outskirts were unfit for life.

Those in the outskirts would simply die.

A scarcity of water and food drove the conflict.

People fought for survival.

Those that managed to claw through the outskirts would enter a region of limited resources: just the bare minimum. Housing and food.

They would have to fight tooth and nail all day in zones restricted by darkness.

This was the gu ritual.

The Gu was a nest of gu leading to more gu.

And survival was the incentive.

Self-preservation was the most powerful drive that a living being could generally experience. It was primordial.

And when continuously threatened, it could constitute a drive unlike anything else possibly could.

The Gu harnessed the drive for self-preservation, creating an army of warriors with the most powerful Martial drives that the world has ever seen.

The result?

“This…” Rui’s eyes widened with shock as it happened upon an endless ocean of Martial Artists that stretched beyond the eye could see.

It exceeded even his wildest expectations.

RUMBLE!!!