The Martial Unity

It was impossible to discern, at first glance, which way the center of the manifold was. Once they entered the manifold, all sense of direction as to where the edges or the center was was completely gone. They were surrounded by greenery in all directions. On top of that, the light from the blue sun seemed to smoothly enter the manifold as if there wasn’t a manifold in the first place.

On top of that, the part of the planet within the manifold had become its own planet, seemingly. It curved upon itself like it was a world unto itself. It was so remarkably indistinguishable from the real world that Ria finally understood how homo martialus within the Panama Continent hadn’t discovered that they were within the manifold for a long time.

The manifold was really good at covering its tracks from the people inside and outside it. Even with her extraordinary senses and her understanding of the flow of causality, she couldn’t so much as even fathom that they were inside a manifold.

However, the one and only thing that allowed Ria to distinguish the manifold world from the rest of Planet Pinky outside it was the presence of the virus.

It was a chilling sensation.

It was like having the audacity to hide underneath a dragon.

”Truly terrifying.”

Ria’s remarks drew her team’s attention. They couldn’t help but agree, of course.

”It’s eerie how normal the world feels, aside from the abnormalities of Planet Pinky as a whole.” Siliscia closed her eyes. ”The fabric of space and time feels normal. Curved as it should be from the mass of a planet. I can’t detect the four-dimensional manifold even though I know it’s there.”

Her sapphire eyes were grim when they opened. ”One could live their entire life in this place and believe that this is all there is to the universe.”

It was a chilling realization and one that made them feel greater urgency.

”There’s all the time-differential that we need to be aware of,” Misha reminded them, her cybernetic eyes scanning the entire environment. ”…From what I understand from all the explanations, we don’t know whether time is accelerated or decelerated, correct?”

This was certainly one of the hardest parts of the entire operation. Although the nature of the manifold was still a phenomenon beyond the scientific understanding of the science community, there were still some part of it that had been understood after many years of research.

The way the manifold worked was that it had an axis.

An axis that had direction.

A vector.

Depending on the architecture, it could point towards the future or away from it, which determined whether or not time was accelerated or not. The unfortunate part was that it was impossible to determine which way the temporal axis vector pointed.

In other words, they had no idea which way it was. Were they being accelerated through time or slowed down?

”That is why we need to finish this in an hour or two at most.”

Ria’s tone was strict, but none of them objected to it. If they were by chance in a manifold that slowed time down, then an hour within the manifold was a hundred and forty-four hours in the real world.

Days would pass with each hour. They couldn’t afford to spend too much time in the manifold, unfortunately.

”Let’s start,” Ria remarked. ”I will use my long-range sensory techniques. The rest of you stay guard.”

She turned towards Siliscia with a pointed gaze.

”I could use your help. You can harmonize with nature here and help me determine where the manifold tree is. Together, we can find it faster than if we were just alone.”

Siliscia nodded with a serious expression. ”Let’s do it.”

The two of them prepared while the other three stood around them with an alert expression. They had no idea what kind of threats they would face in the manifold, which meant they couldn’t afford to lower their guards.

Siliscia spread her arms while Ria sat down cross-legged, closing her eyes as she began meditating. Her Martial Body was dedicated to sensory prowess. However, the nature of the sensory prowess was different from the kind of sensory prowess that Martial Artists often pursued.

She didn’t pursue range, normally.

Her Martial Body had been designed to sacrifice range for accuracy, precision, and resolution. She wasn’t a spy, so being able to hear what a person was whispering on the other side of the city was not a skill that she particularly needed.

If she were to understand the flow of causality, if she were to manipulate it to her benefit, she would need to be able to truly peer into the nature of the world around her.

In the case of finding the manifold tree, however, she would need range.

”Communion of Heaven and Earth.”

It was an original technique of hers, a technique that sacrificed her vaunted precision and resolution in the perception of causality in exchange for dumb range. The way it worked was by re-applying her cells and how they sensed the truly small.

Normally, the way her bodily sensory apparatus worked was that each cell worked in conjunction with all the other cells around it to gather highly accurate information about the world around it, even for objects smaller than the cells themselves.

A cell by itself could not accurately record causality ongoing at ranges much smaller than the cell.

The question then was how a Martial Artist could directly sense causality at the smallest level if they were made out of cells that were much larger than what they were trying to sense. It was like trying to have an image smaller than a pixel, it simply wasn’t possible because it was lesser than the lowest limit.

The solution was to have a hundred cells collectively gather information on something a hundred times smaller than a cell.

A thousand cells collectively gather information on something that was a thousand times smaller than a cell.

A million cells for something a million times smaller.

Thus, the massive number of cells within her body could significantly bolster the precision of her sensory apparatus if one sacrificed range. Her technique allowed her to pull off the reverse should the situation ever demand it, it allowed her to sacrifice that much vaunted precision and search far and wide.