The Martial Unity

Rui was quite excited to work with the negative-energy exotic particle.

“I’ll just call it a negatron.”

A fitting name, as far as he was concerned.

He had teleported to a random place, far away from the lab, while his stealth was maximally active. While the Gajanan Clan had acted in good faith with him thus far, he still did not want to show them what he was about to do. He didn’t want them to fully understand just how miraculous the esoteric matter of the Panama Continent was.

Before that, however, he spent some time making scientific observations as to the impacts different kinds of stimuli had upon the particle, because it did not interact with the electromagnetic force, it was entirely invisible as photons passed right through it, even if they were bent with gravity.

He could, however, detect through his senses of space and time. Its repulsive force was the only trace of its existence and exactly what Rui needed to actually perceive it. He began playing around with some warping in space manipulation, studying how it behaved when subjected to different kinds of gravitic stimuli.

Despite behaving very counter-intuitively and differently from anything Rui was personally familiar with, it still adhered to the General Theory of Relativity and its predictions, meaning he could control it with theory alone.

However, he didn’t want to have to create another system of thought. His Martial Mind was starting to get clogged up, especially with the Tapestry of Nature that he had created less than a year ago. He would much rather simply develop an intuition for handling it like most Martial Artists would.

He tried various basic actions on it, mostly ascertaining that it was stable and not volatile. Negative energy could be quite dangerous, in theory. He wanted to make sure that the worst of what he feared was not going to happen.

The source of power of a Martial Sage was materia prima. The energy of mass, what Rui was worried about, was that negatrons could negate this source with their negative mass and negative energy, which could reduce the amount of net energy that he had at his disposal.

If he wasn’t careful, this could weaken him in combat while he had it on him. That was why he needed to conduct many tests to make sure that there wasn’t anything wrong going on.

From within his Primordial Core, he summoned the substance, extracting it from within his body, bringing it outsid,e and introducing it to the negatron.

His eyes lit up with amazement as the primordial seed turned into a blob of negatrons. “Nice!”

Just as he had expected, the pluripotent exotic matter adopted the wave function of the negatron, becoming exactly identical to it. In his hand, he had what should have been a visible amount of negatrons, if not for the fact that it was entirely invisible.

It was the size of a handful of water, floating about as it banded together, pushed up by the gravity of Gaia. Rui had to exert his space manipulation to keep it in place, but it was otherwise very stable and manageable.

“How do I use this to strengthen my Worm Step?”

That was the big question.

Rui had never been a quantum physicist, so he truly had no idea. His understanding of physics, theoretically, was limited to what he had needed for his research into the physics of combat sports.

However, he was vaguely aware of the idea that exotic matter could use dark energy to keep a wormhole open wider and stronger.

His eyes lit up with a hint of interest. “What if l try to teleport myself with the negatrons at the very epicenter of the wormhole that teleports me?”

As in, he would open the wormhole within a swarm of negatrons and see what would happen.

But the wormhole was normally something that he opened within his body.

“That would mean that the negatrons would need to be within my body too,” he murmured with an uncertain tone.

He wasn’t fond of that idea. ɴᴇᴡ ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀʀᴇ ᴘᴜʙʟɪsʜᴇᴅ ᴏɴ novel[f]ire.net

There was a reason that he didn’t mindlessly dump powerful esoteric substances into his body.

They were unfathomably toxic. So much so that even a powerful Sage like him could die in an instant if he ingested too much. He didn’t know what impact negatrons would have on his body, but thankfully, he had a way of making sure of what the likeliest outcomes were.

He activated the Eye of Prophecy.

His eyes widened as he was confronted with many visions of futures where he ingested negatrons and died on the spot.

Not even his spectacular healing could save him.

A single mistake meant instantaneous death.

In terms of poison intensity, it was second only to the Gu.

However, Rui had needed both Gigabrain and a Transcendent healing fruit combined to deal adaptively evolve to the negatrons in his body.

“Wait, we have a Transcendent healing fruit!” Rui’s eyes lit up with excitement as he took off his backpack, rifling through it. He quickly found the specialized containment unit that kept the fruit in a stasis field so that it didn’t rot, grabbing it hastily.

CLACK

He opened the fruit, gazing at it with a conflicted expression. “I could use this against the Dragon Emperor but…”

He shook his head.

That would be cheating.

He didn’t want to defeat the a member of the top ten most powerful warriors in the world with a temporary external boost. He wanted to kill the Dragon Emperor with his own permanent power.

Using the fruit to help him adaptively evolve to negatron toxicity would improve his power permanently, which would improve his teleportation, he hoped.

He gazed at the negatrons with a hint of hope. “You guys better be worth this, I swear…”

They did not respond.

He heaved a sigh, before gobbling the Transcendent Fruit, feeling a surge of vitality rush through his body, before ingesting the negatrons into his body.

Suddenly, his eyes widened as blood began pouring from them and every other orifice in his body.

THUD

He collapsed to the ground, writhing in agony unlike anything he had ever experienced in a long time.