The Martial Unity

Her wise, elderly eyes sharpened a little. “…Your hypothesis about the alien entity being in the Panama Continent, and that all the esoteric matter in the continent is an alien instrument of some sorts appears to have greater credence. I think it is highly unlikely that the fact that the Ieyasu Machine experiences great fear in the Panama Continent is completely unconnected to your hypothesis that the alien entity is within the Panama Continent.”

“You said you found it,” Rui remarked with a serious expression. “I’m assuming you have more than just the entirety of the Panama Continent to point to, right?”

She nodded. “Once we narrowed our search down to the Panama Continent, we did as the hypothesis that you and the Divine Doctor came up with suggested, we began searching underground, and well…”

She featured a map of just the Panama Continent, overlapping the fear response of the Ieyasu machine at each spot of the Panama Continent on top.

It was a bumpy spectrum of yellow and green, showing varying levels of fear across the Panama Continent. However, there was one large spot of yellow at a place that Rui was quite familiar with.

The Beast Domain.

The original territories of the Beast Domain. However, where the Fear spiked the most was actually the epicenter of the Beast Domain. Where the Eldritch Chimera resided in what used to be the most well-preserved Lost City before the final battle destroyed it. Yet, he didn’t seem particularly surprised by this revelation.

“That’s where his Fear maximizes, is it…?” Rui sharpened his gaze. “Come to think of it, he’s never been to the epicenter of the Beast Domain because he broke through to the Sage Realm only after the battle was over and the Beast Incursion was ended.”

Rui shifted his gaze towards the floating head within the Ieyasu machine, dreaming away data as actual experiences. “There’s nothing at the epicenter of the Beast Domain except for ruins,” Rui remarked knowingly. “And if he’s still sensing fear from there, then that leaves only one option…”

He turned towards Mother Maeria and the Divine Doctor with a knowing look. “Downwards, am I right?”

They nodded.

“It was part of the original hypothesis that we came up with together,” the Divine Doctor remarked as he turned towards the data, flipping through the terminals. “So we immediately began searching underground using gravitational and seismic mapping, as well as manual digging to gather thermodynamic, visual, and even chemical data at different points at different depths in the Panama Continent and feeding it to the Ieyasu machine and…”

She paused to display the data, projecting a three-dimensional map of the Panama Continent, featuring not just its surface, but also its depths. The three-dimensional holograph was like a cone whose surface resembled the Panama Continent. It showed reading from feeds of data of not just the surface or even a little underground, but all the way down to the very core.

The results were clear.

“The Ieyasu machine experiences a wide spread of fear underground, which maximizes in the crust of the Panama Continent,” the Divine Doctor explains. “The average fear readings continue to rise the deeper the data we feed the machine, until we hit the crust, where it begins to reduce. It seems that the machine is able to clearly identify more of what it fears at the depths of the Panama Continent. But we’re not able to identify the thing that the machine is identifying and fearing. There are no unique thermodynamic, or pressure, or electromagnetic indicators that consistently correlate with the fear that he feels, which is what makes us suspect that we’re dealing with an extra-causal phenomenon here.”

Rui had to admit that it was a little spooky. Somehow, the Ieyasu Machine consistently showed greater and greater fear with depth, even when it wasn’t strictly aware of where the data was coming from. Just the fact that it experienced greater fear in the Panama Continent, even when it wasn’t aware that the data was from the Panama Continent, was spooky.

Just what was it that was bringing about fear within Tokugawa Ieyasu?

Despite all the insights that they had made, they still didn’t know the full answer to that.

“The spectrum of fear across the depths of the Panama Continent and the parts of Gaia underneath it is not uniform,” Mother Maeria remarked with a serious expression. “Fear increases as we go deeper from the surface to the crust, but then reduces beyond the crust, even if still at heightened levels above that of the surface, as we go through the upper and lower mantles as well as the outer core, and then it maximizes once more once we get to the inner core.”

That was a very strange distribution of fear, but Rui felt like he understood what it meant.

“Fear of the inner core must certainly be because of the negatron core.” He was confident of that. “But fear of the crust…”

He sharpened his eyes.

“That must have something to do with the alien entity we’re looking for. It must also have something to do with the presence of esoteric matter in our continent. I have no doubt about that.”

The crust was where most esoteric matter was thought to be concentrated, after all.

“You said you found the alien virus.” Rui turned towards the Mother and the doctor. “Is that where you think it is? Somewhere in the crust?”

She shook her head. “Actually, we’re referring to the point that evoked maximum fear within the Ieyasu Machine.”

She zoomed into the three-dimensional hologram, heading to the point where the yellow indicators were at the brightest, indicating maximum terror from the Ieyasu machine.

“This point deep underneath the epicenter of the Panama Continent, right outside the inner core, is where fear is maximum.” She pointed to it midair within the hologram. “When you go directly downwards from the epicenter of the Panama Continent all the way to right outside of the inner core, there exists something that evokes an unparalleled amount of fear from the Ieyasu Machine.”

She directed an expression of grave severity towards him.

“That is where we believe that the alien entity must be.”