The Martial Unity

To him, anything that wasn’t hemosapien had the moral worth of cattle. His ideology disgusted her so much that she swore she would destroy it. “Anyway,” she heaved a deep breath, eating some more stew with bread. “Perhaps you could figure out what you want to do with your life over the next few years, freelancing. Or perhaps even partying with your new friends.”

Ria raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think I’m going to be spending any time with them after this mission is over, aunty.”

Runark was secretly delighted to hear that, Arastia sensed. But she didn’t think that was perhaps the most prudent choice for her niece. She was happy that Ria had made some girl friends, or teammates, in the frontier. It was good to have active relations with the same gender while she was still young. Spending too much time with Runark would skew her experiences too much, as far as she was concerned.

“Consider it,” Arastia remarked. “You can also potentially convince your father not to have Sage Sayfeel around.”

Ria’s eyes lit up at those words. That was something that was definitely worth considering. Anything to have genuine freedom would be worth pursuing. Though she knew that her own power would matter more than anything in the world when it came to convincing her father that she didn’t need to be protected.

“Still, it would be nice to have people you can genuinely trust,” she admitted. “Maybe we should consider forming a party with them.”

“Maybe we should,” Runark coughed. “I suppose it would be more fun to have more people.”

Ria had always mourned the loss of her friends after her identity was revealed to her and the people around her. She had never gotten the opportunity to reconnect, and by the time she did, they had already diverged paths too much, and had lived in entirely different worlds by then.

It was difficult to make friends in the frontier because countless different people from different walks of life converged in the frontier. There did not exist a community, at least not yet, built on trust. Such a thing was impossible by nature in the frontier of all places, at least.

“They are competent, at the very least,” Arastia remarked. “They won’t drag even you down. Especially Misha and the evosapien.”

“You know Misha?” Ria raised an eyebrow.

“Not personally, no, but I do keep an eye on the half-bloods,” Arastia remarked knowingly. “They are our bridge with the rest of human civilization. And I am especially paying attention to their paths. And so far, their hemokinetic technology path is quite impressive. Their blood can do things that even my blood can’t because they don’t treat it as an unchanging biological product or something to ‘train,’ they engineer blood. And their prowess helps even purebloods like myself.”

“She was very strong,” Runark murmured. “I’m going to have to find a way to deal with poison more effectively.”

“Your opponent isn’t her,” Arastia reminded him. “She also isn’t the only one who appears to have a deep competency, either.”

She turned towards Ria with a knowing smile. “You lucked out with that Sternon boy. He’s quite competent, from the looks of it. I suppose that is to be expected of all neo-evosapiens.”

Ria nodded. “Still, he was weaker than I expected. For some reason, I don’t really get the hype of the neo-evosapiens. Are they really that strong? Apparently, they were from super-evolved genetic reproductive material, like you hemosapiens, but it just doesn’t feel like that. How weak were they before?”

Arastia burst out laughing at her niece’s casual and inadvertent insult to the neo-evosapiens. Indeed, the generation of miracles of the evolutionaries was impressive. Yet, even they couldn’t compare to the mind-defying prowess of the daughter of the Emperor of Harmony. Arastia had known that Ria would be special ever since she had learned of what her father had done to her to give her extraordinary prowess.

In terms of Martial prowess, Ria had reached a level that only her father had touched before.

And she reached it at the age of eighteen, just two years into the Master Realm.

It was unfathomable in the history of Martial Art, to observe such progression. She was to this era what her father had been to his era as far as shattering the limits went. As far as Arastia was concerned, it was good for her to be exposed to a hemosapien and an evosapien, for their superior individual prowess would allow her to experience some pressure from her peers and make her feel less like a deviant.

On the other hand, she couldn’t help but feel bad for someone like Runark, who, while being a genius himself, paled in comparison to an era-defying singularity of talent like Ria. “I don’t think Papa will appreciate that Sternon was a deserter of the Evolutionary Army,” Ria remarked, slowing down in her chewing as she fell into thought. “But I don’t feel like he’s a bad person. He seemed extremely self-conscious about being rejected.”

“It’s one of the things that deserters of the Evolutionary Army experience the most, unfortunately,” Arastia remarked with a tinge of regret. “Even though they should be welcomed, too many people fear them. For half their species is quite hostile to races.”

“I don’t know why they are allowed to exist, if I’m being honest,” Runark heaved an exasperated sigh. “The Emperor of Water is the strongest, is he not? Why doesn’t he just—I dunno—blow them up?”

“He’s just being lazy,” Ria huffed, furrowing her eyebrows. “I’ll give him an earful about this topic the next time I see him.”

Arastia remained silent on the topic. She understood her elder brother’s rationale much better than the two adolescents before her. Yet, she also disapproved of his decision not to intervene outside the scope that had been carved out before the Era of Expansion.

She thought he was doing a disservice to human civilization by allowing evil ideologies like racial supremacy to survive in the Era of Expansion in the name of liberty.

And yet, she was also mature enough to understand that his eyes went beyond human territory. When he gazed outwards, he saw the entire galaxy, perhaps the entire universe. And as far-sighted as she needed to be in order to wage a civilizational war against the Blood Cult, whatever considerations he had were so vast that she didn’t think she could even comprehend them.

Still, a part of her did find herself agreeing with her niece.