The Martial Unity

The change was noticeable.

Gone was the air of thought and control that was characteristic to his presence. In its place was a primal sense of instinct and intuition.

Driven by nothing but the subconscious mind.

His pitch-black eyes flared with an entranced will to adaptively evolve.

WHOOSH!

One moment, he was in the back, adaptively evolving to the entirety of the nest of Inferno Serpents.

The very next moment, he had already emerged to the very frontlines of the battlefield, taking his Niflheim technique with him as he emerged right in front of an Inferno Serpent, drowning it in the cold of his domain.

“SSS!”

The serpent strained with effort even as it deployed all the heat at its disposal to try and dispel the cold, but alas, it wasn’t able to do that. He threw a thundering Yin-Yang Spear attack at the serpent, landing a powerful impact upon the creature. CRACK CRACK CRACK!

The scales that withstood the blow cracked even as the vibrations of the technique permeated the impact deeper.

“SSS!” the flaming serpent lashed out as its tail swung at him with tremendous speed and momentum.

His pupils dilated as just the faintest of instincts alerted him to attack before it began.

The nascent subconscious precognition of the subconscious mind brought to the forefront of his mind in his current state of mind.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!

Rui barely managed to evade the devastatingly enormous tail threatening to crush him where he stood, burying him in the depths of ash land they were on. The very next moment, the serpent’s massive body coiled around him, unleashing a devastating inferno upon him with a fiery power.

FWOOOSH!!!

Rui leaped, surging for the skies as he contracted the Niflheim domain, dispelling the heat of the domain with the concentrated cold of the frost realm.

THWOOM THWOOM THWOOM!

He blasted the serpent with a barrage of sound projectiles, blasting its entire body with powerful concussive blows, chipping away at its scales bit by bit.

The snakes were extraordinarily sturdy as a whole due to their massive body, but they weren’t extremely tough on what effectively on a microscopic level from their perspective. Because Martial Sages were so small relative to the monsters that they were fighting.

Each of their attacks was like needles to the serpents.

Extremely powerful needles, making them impossible to defend due to how concentrated the attacks were. However, despite being unable to prevent damage from occurring, the damage itself was minute due to the fact that it affected such a minute part of the serpent’s entire body.

Had Rui been conscious, he would have deployed a more effective strategy to deal with the serpents, allowing him to fall them much easier.

Unfortunately, in his training for the Eye of Prophecy, his conscious mind and thought were shut down, preventing him from relying on his strategic and tactical intelligence to alter his strategy and deploy one that was extremely antithetical to his opponent.

Unfortunately, with only his conscious mind active, his strategic adaptive evolution was deeply hindered. Without this state, he would not be able to train his subconscious precognition to rise to the level of the Eye of Prophecy.

Even as he fought and evaded the serpent’s attacks, he felt that he could detect just the faintest wisps of insights into the beast’s impending attacks. In his current state of mind, his intuition and instincts didn’t just react with Primordial Instinct. They could also, to the dimmest of degrees, foresee.

This was the nascent precognitive ability that needed to train extensively the hard way to eventually elevate to the dimension of prophecy, accelerating his growth by exposing himself to such grave danger that even he would feel some fear.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!

Having reached the front lines of the battle, he had been exposed to much greater conflict than he ever would have had he been in the back simply adaptively evolving to the strategic outlook of the battle.

With each minute evasion, he felt his subconscious mind stimulated, growing more vigorous and active. In normal circumstances, his conscious mind and conscious thought was so domineeringly powerful that it completely seized control of his mind, processing, and decision-making.

Using his subconscious mind to do what he had previously done with his conscious mind felt like the mental equivalent of writing with one’s left hand. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!

It was imperfect.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!

The imperfection led to flawed reactions, causing Rui to be unable to react to the serpent’s strike, blasting into him with astronomical momentum. A creature the size of mountains moving faster than lightning yielded a truly astronomical amount of force.

If not for the flood of materia prima reinforcing defensive cellular contractions, the extraordinarily powerful attack would have vaporized him into a bloody mist. The attack flung him away a great distance, causing a massive crater the size of a country to emerge where he landed.

RUMBLE!!!

Despite his mistake, the other Martial Sages didn’t particularly disdain him for his sloppy weaknesses. If anything, they were rather impressed that he had such control over the highest principles of physics this early into the Sage Realm.

Materia Prima was simply the energy of matter. In order for it to be used, one needed complex mechanism to harness this energy to convert it into Martial Power. Simply leveraging materia prima without a proper mechanism relying on principles of physics to channel the energy would lead to exactly what had happened when he had first tapped into the energy against Master Uma; having one’s body burned.

And yet, Rui’s ability to create new techniques and harness high principles was unlike anything that any of them had ever seen before, allowing him to skip the slow acclimatization phase, leading to most Martial Sages being extremely weak at the start of their journey to the Sage Realm.

STEP

He emerged from his crater, cracking his neck as he brushed off all the ash on his body.

His entranced eyes sharpened.

“More.”

And just like that, he leaped back into the fray, fighting for more as the battle between the Martial Sages raged on. –