The Martial Unity

Each of the seven continents had different conditions that created different evolutionary pressures. If Rui had to guess, he would have assumed that Genora had managed to preserve most of the Plant Kingdom, creating evolutionary pressure to form symbiotic relations with trees, such that those who were able to harness their power and preserve them would survive.

This group of humans eventually evolved into the elves, with long ears designed to be receptive to signals from plant-life. The Moridian Continent must have had rapidly oscillating extremes in environment, allowing only the most physiologically adapting humans of each generation to survive, creating the Darwinian pressure that gave rise to homo evosapien.

The Samarkha Continent must have had an absolute decimation of food sources, leading to insular dwarfism, a well-understood evolutionary phenomenon. In ancient Earth, there were cousins of homo sapiens, the homo floresiensis, who were extremely short due to the fact that they didn’t have access to stable food sources.

The ancestors of dwarves also must have been surrounded by materials that were fit for tools, which made it so that he who could create the best tools survived the most and reproduced the most, giving rise to the dwarven race.

The ancestors of giants may very well have had volatile food sources, giving rise to genetic ancestors who had a propensity to simply keep eating as long as they were food, storing that extra organic mass in the form of larger bodies. A combination of the circumstances of the dwarves and the giants must have led to the birth of the techvores. And in Panama, Rui suspected, the evolutionary pressure must have been violence. Against the beasts and monsters of the primordial Beast Domain and against each other. Those who could do violence better survived and reproduced more, creating a martial version of homo sapien.

And Esil, the Martial, must have been the first to harness their innate capacity and propensity for violence with tremendous discipline, allowing them to become the first Martial Artist.

And the rest was history.

Literal history.

The alien virus must have kept pumping the core of Gaia, Earth back then, with negatron matter, making it larger and larger. And once Gaia got above a certain size, the increments were negligible, causing the Age of Tumult to cease, creating a new era of life and prosperity on the surface of Gaia.

If everything had gone according to plan for the alien virus, then it might very well have been that Gaia would have exploded by now. But unfortunately for it, many things had gone wrong for the alien virus in Gaia.

The phenomenon of the Martial Path allowed humanity to conquer most of the Beast Domain until the eldritch chimera woke up from its long sleep and realized that things had gone completely haywire!

Most likely, it was assigned as a guardian of the Panama Continent, assimilating the manifold tree that the alien virus had created into its being. And, in hindsight, Rui was certain that it served a higher power.

It was most likely under the control of the alien virus.

It probably was supposed to keep an eye on the Panama Continent and ensure that nobody discovered the esoteric particle accelerator deep underground that was inflating Gaia to eventually explode. But the Beast Domain under its control had contracted and uncontrolled variables had seized control.

The Martial Transcendents were likely the only reason it didn’t wipe out all of human civilization in one fell swoop. They knew that they were dealing with something much, much more powerful and dangerous.

They couldn’t move easily, especially when the consequences of their actions were erasure from reality, especially when they knew they were needed to protect humanity from the Unfolding. While humanity defended itself from the Beast Incursion, the Sage sieged the Beast Domain and defeated the Eldritch chimera, allowing them to open the manifold and expose Panama to the true world.

And now, nine years after the Unfolding, Rui had located the particle accelerator that the alien virus was using to inflate Gaia and had destroyed it. Or rather, it had sacrificed the chamber of creation to kill him.

After Rui defeated the embodiment of the Noosphere itself, the alien virus must have ‘realized’ that he was an extremely dangerous threat that could threaten its very existence within Gaia. It had made the decision to sacrifice the chamber of creation itself to destroy him.

Still, the fact that it had been so willing to sacrifice the chamber to kill made him reckon with a grim truth.

The alien virus could likely recreate the particle accelerator.

It could likely recreate the chamber of creation.

In other words, it was a permanent, sustained threat to all of Gaia as long as it was left alive. From the very get-go, simply disabling the chamber of creation would not have been enough. It would simply recreate it.

It would simply restart the process.

He needed to annihilate the alien virus itself.

RUMBLE!!!!!!

The world shook as Rui withstood the entirety of the world crushing around him. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!! The sum totality of the weight of the mantle, crust, and Panama continent crushed down on him.

And yet, he withstood.

He withstood every ounce of destruction that the deep biosphere inflicted upon him. The blood-red suns in his eyes blazed with blinding brightness as a single remark escaped him.

“My turn.”

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!! RUMBLE!!!!!

The world shook violently as an extraordinarily potent wave of the Poison of Yin and Yang erupted from the depths of his body, spreading through the mantle of Gaia.

His eyes blazed with a ferocious bloodlust. “I will exterminate the deep biosphere.”

And indeed, they did.

The yin aspect of the poison, the gu, began spewing through cracks and opening in the mantle around him, wiping out any semblance of life it came across while the white blood cells of his Anthean side were honed, veteran reaper microorganisms, killing every single deep biosphere bacterium it ran into.

Each time they killed, they produced more of their own. It was a self-replicating poison that grew stronger and larger the more it killed. Together, the Poison of Yin and Yang began systematically exterminating the deep biosphere as it slowly exterminated the alien virus.

It was a radical option. Even if it was for the greater good, the destruction of the deep biosphere would wreak havoc across Gaia, destroying ecosystems and disrupting important geochemical processes.

But he was in a radical state of mind.

In the Path-possessed trance that captured his mind, he could not stop adaptively evolving to everything in his path.

RUMBLE!!!!!!

The bacterium fought back. They were connected.

The alien virus emergently existed in the systems of interaction and integration between alien esoteric matter and the native deep biosphere. They could leverage the power of esoteric matter to fight back.

And so they did.

RUMBLE!!!!!!

The world shook.

Gaia shook as an all-out microscopic war between the alien virus and the Rui Quarrier erupted with fearsome intensity deep within the depths of the planet.

They waged war for victory.

For survival.

And for the future of Gaia.

RUMBLE!!!!!!