The Martial Unity

Once the decision was made, the Panamic Space Organization immediately got to work on fulfilling the Emperor’s order. Indeed, they would capture a planet.

It wasn’t something that the Panamic Space Organization ever thought it would be commanded to do. Of course, in just the span of a month, the entire world as they knew it had changed on a fundamental level. Just some time ago, they believed that if the universe did possess alien life, then it was likely extremely sparse and primitive and far away.

Now, there was a fifty percent chance that planets with the right environments possessed some life, no matter how elementary.

While the other pioneer missions to other star systems had not been as hectic as the missions to Barnard’s Star, Sirius, and Procyon, they had still been very influential and had found many signs of life. Many of the Pioneer ships had collected samples from planets within the Goldilock zones that had biosignatures, such as oxygen, methane, and hydrogen sulphide, to reveal microbes and other forms of micro-life that had evolved in an entirely different model of life compared to that of the microbiology of Gaia.

Even the very concept of DNA was revealed to be a very Gaian phenomenon, as life outside Gaia evolved with different means of storing information. There were microbes that stored information in chromatography and light. There were those who stored information in the resonant frequencies of substances comprising their bodies. There were lifeforms that stored information in the form of other chemical compounds beyond DNA. It showed them what they had already seen with their alien invaders; life could exist in entirely different manners with entirely different structures.

Of course, of them all, the most radically different form of life they had run into was the gargantians, which had become the focus of the Panamic Space Organization and the Panamic Space Force upon the order of the Emperor of Water.

Only the highest echelons of humanity had been informed of what his true intentions were.

“The Gaia Reproduction Plan,” the voice of Princess Ru hung in the air with a hint of incredulity. “Really? Do you really think it’s possible for Gaia to reproduce across the entire cosmos the way that the gargantians do?”

In the Royal Office of Vargard Palace, Princess Ru sat opposite her brother across the table, gazing at him with a raised eyebrow. “I don’t see why not,” Rui replied, skimming through some paperwork as he signed several documents, giving his approval to several permit forms. “The reality is that in order to become stronger, our civilization needs to become bigger. We are reaching diminishing returns in terms of how powerful we can get at the size of our current population and technological level.”

Princess Ru watched her older brother diligently tend to his work as Emperor. In the past six years, she had been surprised just how committed to ruling over the nation Rui had been despite the fact that it wasn’t Martial Art. His enlightenment of Water had allowed him to appreciate Martial Art in things that weren’t Martial Art, allowing him to care only about Martial Art and still be dedicated to ruling over the Kandrian Empire.

And yet, that was the human side to him.

As she sat opposite him, she felt like the world around them seemed to quiver slightly, like the surface of a calm lake and the image that the reflected light created. An image that he could easily dispel by disrupting the surface of the water. An image that she herself was present within, entirely at the mercy of his power to infringe upon reality.

She had been born in an era where Martial Transcendants were scarce. They had not moved a muscle in the Era of Darkness, and they had ceased to exist in the Era of Unfolding that came shortly after. They may as well have been mythologies to her.

And yet, as she beheld the Transcendent presence of her brother, she could feel the sheer amount of extraordinary command he possessed over reality. Command that made him almost invincible in combat and war. It was hard for her to even fathom him losing and being defeated.

“I do not deny that we are approaching a ceiling in terms of how much power we can cultivate with just the size of our civilization,” she remarked knowingly. “Our per capita energy production has stagnated, and the diminishing returns from simply integrating true world technology into our esoteric technology have also grown increasingly less worth investing into. However, what you aren’t taking into account are pathwalkers.”

Her expression grew more pointed.

“Pathwalkers are the key that breaks the scalability of power with volume of civilization.”

Rui turned towards her from a document, closing it, before leaning forward. “Pathwalkers indeed can get stronger even with a lot of limitations. But that’s not universally true, for example…”

He raised three fingers. “Tekvores, elves, therianthropes, and even giants, to an extent, are much more constrained by civilizational volume than Martial Artists are. The power of their pathwalkers is limited to the scale of their civilization. Elves are only as strong as the nature there is. The beasts of therianthropes need a lot of space to grow and be nurtured healthily. Especially since they insist on remaining true to the essence of the species, even if they enhance them. Giants need tremendous amounts of resources. Arguably, even dwarves scale with resources.”

“That is true, she admitted. “But the reality is that there is still plenty of room for them to grow, even if civilization itself has hit a hard limit. For instance, the evolutionaries and the Martial Artists of our civilization are only growing stronger on the whole. We can still have many more breakthroughs with the Enlightenment of Self AI process.”

Rui shook his head. “There is a saturation limit. Martial Artists cannot explode in volume relative to a constrained civilization. If we had a million Martial Sages on Gaia, that would be a catastrophe of unprecedented magnitude. But if you had those same million Martial Sages across a thousand worlds, then that would be more sustainable.”