The Martial Unity

“What the hell just happened?!”

“Move out of my way!”

“The world is going to end!”

A large crowd of people roared in defiance on the streets outside of a governmental citadel at the very center of the town as they rioted at break of dawn. The radiant warmth and light of the afternoon Sun contrasted sharply with the perilous atmosphere that boiled in the streets of the town as the civilian population had taken to the streets in a violent reaction to the sudden disappearance of night.

One moment, they were all asleep in the drowsy darkness of night.

The very next moment, the darkness disappeared, making way for the Sun in the middle of the sky. The disturbances in the very fabric of space and time and heaven and earth had disrupted their sleep, waking them up with a dreadful panic.

The unfathomable turn of events had shaken the people of human civilization as they experienced a more shocking and unfathomable turn of events than anything that they had ever experienced in the past seventeen years since the Beast Domain.

“WHAT IS HAPPENING?!” one man roared. “HOW CAN THE WORLD TURN UPSIDE-DOWN?!”

“WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO FIX THIS?”

“FIRST IT WAS THE WATER ILLUSION, AND NOW IT’S THIS NONSENSE!”

The Martial Apprentices barricading the people gritted their teeth, trying to rein in the people without harming them inadvertently. It wasn’t that the Martial Artists didn’t understand the sheer raw emotions that the people of human civilization were suffering.

It was too much.

People had suffered too much and gone through too much. On top of that, these people were deeply sleep-deprived, rendering them hardly in the best state of mind to deal with these shocking events.

This unintelligible distortion of the very fabric of reality was something that even they were unable to fathom. Not even the most authoritative of Martial Masters of the nation seemed to have any answers for what had unfolded across human civilization just that day itself.

“Calm down!” The Martial Artists tried to pacify the uprisings and hysteria that had spread across the people in the town. “Have some patience and faith, all will become clear soon enough!”

“FUCK THAT!”

“BREAK PAST THEM!”

“AAAAAHHH!”

Such sights had become all but common across human civilization immediately after the Unfolding as the people of human civilization grew increasingly frayed, fearful, and frustrated with how crazy the world had gotten.

While one might have thought it was fun to live in an exotic world with crazy happenings, it was, in reality, an extraordinarily terrifying thing to live through. The uncertainty of their fate, the uncertainty of their future, and the terror of the unknown gave rise to hysteria that threatened to destroy the very fabric of human civilization.

Different nations experienced it to different extents.

Most nations, even among the powerhouses, experienced the hysteria that they forcefully reigned in with Martial Artists. The leaders of these nations were too busy dealing with the sheer weight of the intel and data that they had collected during and immediately after the Unfolding happened, slowly understanding the sheer horror of what had truly happened.

Ordinarily, such high levels of civilian uprisings would have been untenable.

However, as all polities in the Panama Continent had quickly realized, the Beast Incursion had ended.

This freed up a lot of their Martial firepower that would otherwise be consumed with dealing with the beast tides ravaging their borders, allowing them to stabilize the civil stability of their nations with Martial force for the timebeing. It was the model that most nations followed without giving even a second thought to pacifying the people’s needs.

Ever since the Beast Incursion had commenced, civil liberties and rights had become a concept of the past for most nations. They simply didn’t have the leeway to not dedicate everything that they had towards surviving the Beast Incursion.

The new political structures and institutions that had emerged in the past seventeen years were more draconian and sought to squeeze people of everything that they had to offer just to ensure that everybody survived. Many polities had even gone as far as to mandate reproduction so as to ensure that there would be a constant influx of a new population from which future Martial Artists could rise.

However, not all nations had experienced the civil hysteria that most of human civilization did.

“Heaven and earth may change, but the depths of the soul shan’t,” A Gen Master remarked with a calm voice. “The path to nirvana lies within us and not outside us.”

In a large open lawn in the Gen Temple, a large number of people peacefully meditated with closed eyes and crossed legs. The air was tranquil, in contrast with the maelstrom of hysteria that had spread across most of human civilization in the immediate aftermath of the Unfolding.

The Gen Temple was the only polity that had avoided all civil strife and hysteria, not just the aftermath of the Unfolding but also during the past seventeen years of the Beast Incursion. The Hive and the Kandrian Empire were close contenders, having maintained their own order and civility for different reasons.

The Hive had superhuman social cohesion thanks to their social traits, while the Kandrian Empire maintained its civil order entirely because the citizens had absolute faith in the Empire’s ability to protect them and secure their needs and rights.

The Emperor of Harmony hadn’t disappointed them yet.

The Kandrian Empire was the most powerful nation in the world, with the highest number of Martial Artists and the highest quality of them as well. The citizens knew that there was virtually no chance that the Beast Incursion could ever reach them past the impregnable defenses and invincible power of the Empire.

Even when the Martial Sages departed, the citizens of Kandria were among the very few who hadn’t grown anxious. If anything, the past seventeen years had been a rather exciting time to be a citizen of the Kandrian Empire, thanks to the economic and political institutions that the Emperor of Harmony had instated to allow for upward financial mobility.

–