The Martial Unity

The solar system was swept clean by an ocean of water. It was unlike anything anybody had ever seen in their entire lives. The Gaian forces were utterly frozen stiff. The army, stretching out in a dome-like formation around Gaia, was completely stiff, stunned into silence at what they saw.

The elves, the therianthropes, the dwarves, the giants, the tekvores, and even the evolutionaries couldn’t bring themselves to even fathom what they had just borne witness to.

A wave of water came out of nowhere.

Not an illusion that they had grown accustomed to from Rui over the many years.

Not a hallucination.

Not a fun party trick.

But a literal, physical, drinkable wave of water had come out of nowhere and had swept the entire solar system. Including them.

Including Gaia.

They were still wet from what had just happened, so they knew it was not fake. However, while the wave of water protected the forces of Gaia as well as the planet, and even the laminar army, it wreaked havoc upon the wave of alien monsters that had swept their solar systems, sweeping away with them the nebula gas that they came with and pushing them back into the wormholes they came from.

And then, it disappeared.

It was an unfathomable turn of events.

Of course, even in their shock, they understood that this clearly had something to do with the Emperor of Water. Water was so strongly associated with him as a symbol that it was impossible for them not to think of him. They slowly turned towards the distant Martial Artist battalion that had proven instrumental in warding off the nebulars for a few minutes. The Martial Artists couldn’t stop grinning like maniacs.

Their smiles were wide and toothy, almost reaching their ears as their eyes lit up with ecstasy and enthusiasm. The Martial Masters and Martial Sages within Panama had known that he was one of the most promising Transcendent Candidates out of the four there were. If anybody was to break through to the almost mythical Transcendent Realm, it was undoubtedly Rui.

In fact, there were even betting markets that had bet that the next Martial Transcendent was going to be Rui Quarrier. In fact, because Panamic Civilization had grown more sophisticated and complex as a civilization, there was even a complex financial market of derivatives and financial instruments born from the tracked Martial prowess of various Martial Artists, essentially buying ‘stocks’ of Martial Artists that the market was convinced would grow stronger.

And Rui’s ‘stocks’ were considered to be prime investments with very high returns expected.

And they had nailed it, of course. Now that he had become a Martial Transcendent, he was far and away the most powerful pathwalker in the entire world, more powerful than all of them combined. The Martial Artists were especially happy to have regained a Martial Transcendent, making their civilization safer. They hoped that this current one wouldn’t follow the track of the old Martial Transcendents, making them stronger than they ever could have hoped to be. At the same time, he had also saved them from existential destruction from the nebular monster tide. While the Martial Artists mused about what had just happened, the remaining pathwalkers were still mind-boggled. A vast majority of them weren’t enlightened about the rank of power that existed above potential singularity. Except for the top-ten pathwalkers, of course.

“Hm, so this is what lies at the end of the Giant Path,” the Suneater mused. “Fascinating.”

The Suneater simply hovered weightlessly a great distance from Gaia, fighting as far away from the Gaian army as he possibly could to ensure he didn’t do friendly fire.

His body was covered in grave wounds that had already begun healing. He had endured much damage putting himself in harm’s way to protect Gaia from the nebular swarm. If not for the solar system-wide tsunami of water that had swept across the entirety of Sol, he knew he would have died then and there.

He owed Rui an even greater debt than before. More importantly, he was deeply curious about the power that Rui displayed. The Martial Path and the Giant Path shared many commonalities, as he was certain that he was seeing what could be a preview of the power that he himself would gain when he reached that threshold of power.

Mother Maeria, far away in East Genora, was also moved by the tremendous display of power that Rui had shown to all of them. The tree shivered as tremors passed across the ground.

‘So this is the power that I was, and still am, so close to achieving,’ she realized with amazement. ‘To think that Transcendents are this powerful. Indeed, we have much to look forward to.’

She was amazed by the astonishing display of might that Rui showed to all of them. ‘He saved our entire world from complete destruction.’

Of course, even she hadn’t fully understood everything that had happened. In fact, she had been so utterly shocked so many times in the past few hours that she had almost grown numb to it.

First, Rui got into a mysterious fight at the point of maximum fear deep within Gaia, although even this was not completely confirmed. He appeared to have fought the biosphere, resulting in a strange phenomenon that sent shockwaves across the very fabric of reality itself.

Then, the laminars appeared in their giant laminar ship and almost destroyed Gaia with a single attack, wiping half of the solar system with the sheer destruction that they unleashed.

Rui and the Gaian Army fought them hard, only for a new wave of alien monsters to open wormholes across the boundary of the entire solar system and invade their solar systems with an endless tide of creatures that were as large, and even larger, than the Suneater, with corresponding levels of power that were evolved for space war.

And then, Rui achieved Transcendence and wiped them all out with his newfound power.

The sheer sequence of crazy events that had occurred in a very small span of time was unlike anything she had ever thought possible, leaving her reeling to try to process everything that had happened. All she knew was that their world had changed forever, and the future was going to be more different than anything she had ever imagined possible.