The Martial Unity

RUMBLE…

The air was tense.

The atmosphere crackled with anticipation.

In the past year, while human civilization and Martial Sages alike sought to make do with what they could to overcome their problems, one man had secluded himself from the rest of the world to overcome his limits.

In the depths of the secluded jet, Rui sat by himself in an isolated hangar.

Silence and solitude were all he had known for the past year, even as the Martial Sages scrupulously cultivated some coordination and teamwork among themselves. He sat cross-legged on the floor of the jet, immersed in a meditative state of concentration and focus. His Martial Attire was simply and plain white with the crest of the Kandrian Empire and the Water Sect embroidered on it. In the past year, his hair had grown longer, and the deathly glint to his body had grown more intense.

His very existence had seemed to gain an ephemeral depth of power.

RUMBLE…

The world around him quivered a little.

It quivered a little as his body quaked with the gravity of the struggle that unfolded within it each moment.

Each moment, a drop of pluripotent matter tussled with the cells of his body. A toxic addition to his system, one that his body needed to adaptively evolve to the hard way. Cells in his body needed to die, but they refused to die without a fight.

RUMBLE…

Another soft ripple of seismic energy erupted from him, washing over the world as his body quaked with effort in the struggle. It lasted hours.

Each drop of pluripotent matter needed to be exposed to almost all tissues in his body, and each of them eventually made their way to the Primordial Core at the very center of his body. In the past year, he had meticulously formed a core of pluripotent exotic matter at the very epicenter of his body. He had trained the cells in his body to be able to transport and redirect the pluripotent matter throughout the rest of the body. He had integrated into his biochemistry to a remarkable degree. And unlike the Gu poison, which still ran around in his body amok, killing the cancers that he had created to keep it busy, the pluripotent matter simply collected and sat in one place.

What he found to be quite interesting about the exotic form of matter was that, because it was simply a macroscoping quantum wave similar to that of an Einstein-Bose Condensate, it simply had no limits to density theoretically. Thus, despite having accrued a significant amount of matter in his body, it was still a remarkably small point of great density.

It had the potential to be anything.

It gave him the potential to be anything.

To be Water.

He instinctively understood that, despite having yet to harness this powerful form of exotic non-hadronic matter, it opened up paths for him that he previously would have deemed impossible. It allowed him to tap into high principles that would have eluded even his grasp.

Within the depths of his body, he added yet another drop of pluripotent exotic matter to the primordial core embedded at the very epicenter of his being.

“Fuuu…” Rui heaved a deep breath before opening his pitch-black eyes.

In their depths lurked an unparsed power.

He gazed at a floating gray blob before him.

He twirled his fingers, safely storing the rest of the primordial seed samples.

He hadn’t been able to even come close to integrating all the pluripotent matter into his body. He didn’t have the time to integrate all the matter into his body in just the span of a year. As much as he would have loved to spend all the time in the world needed to bury himself into the process, he couldn’t.

STEP

He stood up slowly, gazing at his hands with a soft gaze as he closed his eyes, stirring uncertainly.

RUMBLE…

The world shivered with a hint of amazement as he drew on the pluripotent matter from within the depths of his body. He had already taken the first meaningful step towards harnessing the force of the abyssfeeder within his body.

The limitless power to change and become anything.

A single whisper escaped him.

“I must master this power.”

Unlike the Gu, the power of pluripotent matter was only as strong as what it was exposed to. And, unlike the abyssfeeder, he didn’t have an endless array of samples of different Transcendent exotics stored within his body, locked and ready to serve as the target for transformation of a large amount of primordial seed. Given that each Transcendent-grade esoteric was probably at least as hard to adaptively evolve to as the Gu poison had been. It wasn’t as though he could easily just swallow a bunch of highly toxic and potent matter into his being and expect to be entirely fine.

However, he could already think of avenues of application of the pluripotent matter even without esoteric substances.

“Replicating organic matter.”

One of the hardest parts of healing and regenerating tissue was the fact that there needed to be a corresponding amount of organic matter to generate the needed tissue. After all, one couldn’t simply create new tissue and cells out of thin air; the building blocks of organic life needed to be in place. “I can convert pluripotent matter into organic matter and nutrients and use it as a source of fuel for healing and regeneration.”

Previously, Weaving Blood would use a poison, now replaced by the Gu, to kill cells and then convert those dead cells into nutrients for new cells with autophagy. But now, he could theoretically amplify it even further by simply using the pluripotent exotic matter as a replacement.

Rui’s unfathomable pitch-black eyes stirred at the endless potential that this tactic had.

“It can theoretically give me a level of healing on par with the Tree of Healing, temporarily.”

This alone was worth pursuing the Primordial Seed for, let alone the infinite possibilities that existed before him.

Infinite potential for Water.

“The universe…” A whisper escaped him. “The universe is within my reach.”