The Martial Unity

Time slowed down to a crawl as the blood-red Suns in Rui’s eyes remained fixed on Mother Mara, before shifting to the rapidly mobilizing forests around him. He could sense a more visceral desperation in their attacks, increasing the danger that they posed to him as they were willing to sustain some losses if it meant permanently exterminating him.

Then, his attention shifted to his ravaged body, deprived of flesh.

“…”

The gu had already begun going out of control, spreading its black tendrils across his body.

Very soon, it would consume his entire body.

Thankfully, he didn’t need to brainstorm a new solution for this.

He could just borrow one that his enemy had come up with.

He mobilized his extraordinary power into his own body.

Into his own cells.

He manifested trillions of quantum gravitational tweezers, the same kind of instrument that he had used for Amare’s resurrection and his own immortality as he rapidly tinkered within his own genes on the spot even as the Mothers of Nature began unleashing a destructive onslaught upon him in slow motion.

WHOOSH

In the blink of an eye, he tinkered with his cells, causing them to seem ’unalive’ to the gu, immediately abating the poison’s extraordinary rampage within him. It was the solution that Anthea had come up with at the cost of his own life, and spoke to just how impressive the poison was.

Regardless, it allowed him to keep the poison temporarily in check so that it didn’t kill him on the spot, but that wasn’t enough.

There was his failing health in his ravaged condition.

His healing and regeneration had completely halted due to an absence of a sufficient amount of nutrients fueling the creation of new cells.

If he didn’t resolve that, he would die on the spot.

His attention shifted to the countless branches, wood projectiles, roots, leaves, and virtually every other part of a plant or tree converging on him from all directions in slow motion. He could use his teleportation to shift out of the way and avoid all of them once more, but he knew that Mother Mara would not allow him to activate so easily now that she knew he could do that. As a space-time specialist, she had the knowledge needed to intervene.

In terms of raw power, she was stronger than he was at the moment in his condition.

Rui needed a way to deal with not just the attacks converging on him but also fix his health in one fell swoop.

In his normal state of mind, he wouldn’t have even bothered trying to figure out such an absurd and impossible task.

But in his current state of mind, nothing was impossible.

RUMBLE!!!!!

The world shook as he activated the Forge of Creation, enhanced not just by the Prophecy of the Void but also by Gigabrain. The extraordinary system of thought immediately got to work as it sought to construct a technique that accomplished both objectives simultaneously.

It rapidly began constructing a solution even as time continued ticking.

Even if Rui’s cognition had entered a stage where each passing nanosecond was slow and cumbersome, it didn’t mean he had infinite time.

The Mothers of Nature unleashed projectiles at almost relativistic speeds.

Even with his extraordinary cognition, he had barely a minute left before he was to die.

His astronomically colossal cognition churned with great intensity as a solution was rapidly brought to life.

One that dealt with the incoming attack and fixed his dying body as well.

The solution was surprisingly simple.

If he was running low on nutrition, then he simply needed to eat some food.

And the problem would naturally be solved.

Of course, digestion took forever, and eating was also not something that he could do while fighting.

Thus, he created a technique to accelerate his digestion process by many orders of magnitude.

“Alchemical Assimilation.”

It was a technique that seized control of his digestion with a combination of the complete cellular bodily control that the Martial Soul gave him and the quantum-gravitational tweezers to allow him to tinker with chemicals and compounds in order to exponentially catalyze the process.

As for the source of the nutrition, that was all around him.

Flora was a product of biochemistry centered around carbon just as much as he was. He would just have to settle for being a vegetarian for the time being.

RUMBLE!!!!!

Even as the attacks converged on him, his bloody body grew black as he unleashed the gu across the battlefield, in almost a web-like pattern, using the gu like a scalpel rather than a greatsword.

“Web of Death.”

It was an evolved and enhanced version of the Palm of Death, given great range and power, allowing him to dismantle as many detonation systems as possible before they exploded. However, its purpose wasn’t merely defensive.

It also consumed vegetation tissue, separating vast chunks of organic vegetation tissue from the forest and the control of the Mothers of Nature. Then, he activated the Tapestry of Nature and Nature Interfacer to exert command over the organic tissue, commanding it to churn itself into an organic sludge that he could readily consume.

CRACK CRACK!

Rui dislocated his jaw as he opened his mouth, consuming the churned organic matter before activating Alchemical Assimilation to aggressively and rapidly break down everything that entered his digestive system. He used his quantum-gravitational tweezers to almost force reactions to occur, aggressively forcing compounds to split or merge, causing processes that would take hours to take no more than seconds.

And yet, seconds were already too late.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!

RUMBLE!!!!!

The world shook as the remaining of the virtually endless barrage of attacks finally struck him, causing an extraordinary explosion of boundless power to unfold before him. The sheer amount of radiation, power, and energy that was poured into the attack exceeded almost anything that had come before, causing a maelstrom of destruction of horrifying proportions.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMM!!!!!

Heaven and earth shook violently as even the energy absorption systems of the forest struggled to absorb all the power that the Mothers of Nature unleashed upon Rui.