The Martial Unity

“Exposure…” Rui murmured.

“Yes,” she remarked, shaking her head with an exasperated sigh. “You know, the way that normal people tend to come to love someone. The more you grow alongside her, the more you can grow to love her.”

“The more I grow alongside her…?” Rui murmured.

“Yes,” she remarked. “We are social creatures. When we grow, we grow closer to each other. You said you already love half of her. That means you’re already halfway there, to put it in terms that you will understand. You just need to grow.”

“I see…” Rui’s tone was immersed in thought. “I just need to grow.”

“Thankfully, you’re not particularly short in that regard,” Sage Sera remarked. “You have somehow managed to retain your youth, which means your propensity to change is very high. Your propensity to ’adaptively evolve’ yourself for love.”

Sage Sera inwardly cringed at the conceptualization of love that Rui had, shaking her head with a resigned sigh.

“You are as much of a madman as Damian was. No, you are even more insane in some regards,” she huffed lightly. “It must be a necessity to continue traversing the Martial Path above a certain level.”

“Well… Martial Artists continue sacrificing pieces of our sanity and normality anyway,” Rui replied. “Look at the tilt towards psychopathy in Martial Masters. Isn’t that sacrificing our sanity for power? Although we keep it in check with love, companionship, and bonds with people, it is ultimately still a pull that keeps tugging on us.”

Rui knew that it was an even stronger pull for him.

Because he could read everybody’s soul, they were all infantilized in his mind, where he couldn’t help but psychologically come to view them as lesser.

Thankfully, he had strong bonds.

He had strong memories.

As long as he remembered his mother and the love he had for her, he would never lose his capacity for compassion.

“I suppose that is true,” she heaved a knowing sigh. “The Sage Realm is also quite insane when one truly thinks about it. It requires us to confront ourselves at each moment. Every ugly memory that normal human beings have the privilege to forget, cope with, and hide from themselves. Our darkest sins. Our greatest evils and vices. Our hypocrisies and our irrationalities. We must confront them no matter how much we don’t want to, or else…”

Her expression darkened despite the bright light of the afternoon Sun.

“Or else we will lose our power.”

“I have heard there were some Martial Sages in the past who found it too painful to maintain Enlightenment of Self,” Rui remarked thoughtfully. “The things that they had done proved to be too much for them to constantly confront. They strayed away from the Enlightenment of Self and lost their Martial Soul.”

“…I was not too different,” she remarked with an immersed tone. “I never wanted to become a Martial Sage. I want to be the strongest Martial Master. In some ways, you were more respected as the strongest Martial Master than as the weakest Sage. I was terrified of the Sage Realm, and that made me want to avoid who I was at all costs. But that asshole just had to put me on the verge of death and goad me into the Sage Realm. Tsk…”

She glowered with an angry expression. “The next time I see him, I will bully him so much.”

Rui chuckled at her words. “I will be sure to convey your sentiment when I kill him.”

He heaved a deep sigh after those words.

Sage Sera raised an eyebrow. “So it’s decided then? You will be hunting him?”

Rui nodded with a serious expression. “I take my obligations to my family, especially my oaths, very seriously. The Silas Clan is my blood family, and Matriarch Nephi is my grandmother. He killed my family, and even if I don’t have the kind of bonds with them that I had with my orphanage, it is still a line too far. One of the secondary and admittedly less important reasons that I will be traveling the true world will be to find him and…”

His pitch-black eyes sharpened.

“And kill him, once and for all.”

Sage Sera shook her head.

“He will die because of his greed for power,” she shook her head. “I wonder what it is that he fears so much that made him so desperate for power. That is something that I never learned.”

Rui shrugged.

“Don’t know. Don’t care.”

STEP

He got up, stretching lightly as he threw an appreciative glance at Sage Sera.

“Thank you for the insights,” he smiled at her. “Speaking with you was the right decision. To adaptively evolve to love, I must grow. I must grow with her. And naturally, that also means…”

His expression grew confident.

“The faster I grow stronger, the quicker I can adaptively evolve to fall in love, yes?”

She frowned.

“No wait, that’s not what I meant—”

“As expected of the psychologist,” Rui nodded, immersed in thought. “Truly ingenious insights. Indeed, the answer to all problems is to grow stronger to adaptively evolve!”

“Wait. Stop! That’s not what I sai—!”

WHOOSH

In the blink of an eye, he departed from the makeshift base near the dark elf settlement.

And just like that, Rui was gone.

She heaved an exasperated sigh as she face-palmed.

“Whatever, I’m sure it will work out.”

In reality, the theory of love didn’t matter as much as how one felt about it.

As far as she was concerned, wanting to fall in love with someone as much as Rui did was a form of love.

Rui, on the other hand, grew jubilant about the clarity he had gained as he surged towards the Kandrian Empire at top speed. To adaptively evolve oneself for love was to grow stronger with the person one wanted to come to love.

Indeed, he could not imagine a more perfect solution.

With this, he gained complete clarity on what he needed to.

He would take Amare with him through the true world as he grew stronger and stronger.

As he grew closer and closer towards Project Water.