The Martial Unity

“Gagaga…” she gazed at herself in the mirror’s reflection, tilting her head lightly, wagging her arms vigorously. He was curious to see how much she understood of what she was looking at. A tuft of her hair was messily standing up on her head, courtesy of her simply dragging herself on the floor. She saw it in the mirror, before taking a hand to touch it and push it down.

Rui’s eyes lit up with amazement. “You’re so intelligent, Ria!”

He was certain that babies were not meant to be able to have such a sense of self-awareness this early. “You’re our daughter, after all. You must have inherited some of Papa’s big brain.” He cooed at her, smacking her with kisses as she burst out in laughter at the tickling sensation.

He could sense her delight and joy, indulging himself in her presence.

“Hmm…” he directed a glance around their royal chambers. “You must be getting bored with this place. It’s big, but it can be stuffy if you’ve spent your entire life here. Why don’t we take you out and show you our Empire?”

“Gagaga.”

“Indeed, you make astute points, my precious baby.”

He directed a glance at the sleeping Amare. “Looks like she pushed her Mind and Soul to the limit, she’ll be out for a while. Let’s go, Ria.”

WHOOSH

He teleported her high in the early morning sky above the Kandrian Empire. The fresh, chill morning winds washed by him as he rose high into the sky with his daughter in hand, as the Kandrian Empire stretched from beyond one end of the horizon all the way beyond the other.

 He made sure to quell the powerful winds that blew past them, ensuring they wouldn’t trouble her daughter, while also maintaining the atmospheric pressure at ground level to she wouldn’t experience any discomfort while she appreciated the Empire that she could one day inherit from him.

The dim light of early dawn illuminated the dense countryscape, allowing even her limited eyesight to see cities as a whole from afar. The visage of the Kandrian Empire from this altitude had changed from how it was years ago.

The nation had received a tsunami of development as the vast patches of empty land within it began getting industrial development. Thirteen months had passed since Rui became Emperor of Kandria, and financial markets in the continent and even in the true world had poured capital into Kandria.

Part of it was the whopping success of Project Metrovision, which gave the entire continent confidence in Kandria’s ability to upgrade on a civilizational level both smoothly and quickly. However, the impact wasn’t limited to the Kandrian Empire. It merely led a larger trend that had begun to spread across the entirety of the Panama Continent.

The Martial World fully bowed and knelt before Rui after he crushed three hundred Martial Sages with minimal collateral damage. There were still plenty of recalcitrant Martial Artists, but the overt resistance to the Void Order was completely gone.

A new order of law and accountability was imposed upon Martial Artists, giving financial markets in the continent and around the world confidence in investing large sums of money into the infrastructural development around the continent without having to worry that it would be destroyed by Martial Artists.

The current Kandrian Empire had grown metropolitan and urbanized, as well as much more infrastructurally dense than ever before. On top of that, it had occurred with botanical biotechnology from the elves, allowing such development to co-exist with nature, rather than fight against it, so that he could avoid the mistakes Earth had made when it went through such phases of development.

It was quite impressive by any metric. He expected her to be awed at the towering sight of it thousands of kilometers in the air.

But instead, her lips curled downward as her eyes began watering, and she sniffed.

“Waaaah!” she burst out, crying like a sudden flood. “Waaaah!”

Rui panicked. “Oh shit, we thought you would like it. Never mind, let’s not stay up here.”

WHOOSH

He teleported with her to the ground, activating Phantomind Void, before quickly consoling her. He had forgotten that heights were the only thing that infants had an instinctive fear of. “There there, who’s a good girl~” he patted her on the back, talking to her with an encouraging babying tone.

It took ten minutes before she finally calmed down, returning to her normal self. She wiped her tears, gazing around her as her amber eyes lit up with amazement.

“Gagaga!”

“I know, it’s amazing, isn’t it?”

Rui had taken her to the east coast of the Kandrian Empire, to the port city of Farund. It was one of the cities that had been destroyed on the eastern side by the Suneater and had been reconstructed under Project MetroVision.

It was unrecognizable from how it used to be.

Not a single building was shorter than five storeys, each built from living wood grown from the ground. Their exteriors were of a rough bark, just like normal trees had. They found themselves on a spacious street with a large number of smaller stalls sprawled alongside either edge, selling fish, lobsters, squid, octopus, and clams. Ria’s little eyebrows knitted as the distinct smell of fish that harbors had hit her nose, causing her expression to crumple into a little frown. But she didn’t cry; instead, she shifted her gaze in and about, as if trying to identify what this strange new smell was.

Rui took his daughter with him to one of the stalls selling smoked salmon, a much more palatable smell, bringing Ria closer to it.

“Hahaha, bring your baby daughter to the sea market this early, sir?” The woman at the stall smiled at him courteously. She didn’t recognize Rui nor Ria, thanks to his misdirection. “I just wanted to show the different things she has never seen before,” Rui smiled back, speaking normally, not to give away his identity. “Hohoho, how very diligent of you. She’s too young to try some, but would you like to buy some smoked salmon, sir?”

Rui shrugged. “Sure thing.”