The Martial Unity

”I’m very strong,” she insisted. ”I’m a Martial Senior. Martial Seniors are very strong.”

Rui chuckled. ”I’m afraid Martial Seniors aren’t as strong as you might think. They used to be strong, once upon a time. But now they’re a dime a dozen.”

”Then how strong do I need to be?” Ria asked with a determined expression.

”Hmm… the Master Realm sounds about right,” Rui remarked with a thoughtful tone. ”When you become a Martial Master, you may go wherever you want and live your life however you please.”

Amare turned towards Rui with knitted eyebrows, as if she didn’t like that. But at the same time, she understood how absurd it was to try and control a Martial Master daughter. It was simply too overbearing. Although the relative power of a Martial Master in civilization had diminished significantly since the Age of Martial Art, they were still far too powerful to try and deprive them of agency.

Besides, as prodigious as their daughter was, even Amare didn’t think that she could become a Martial Master before the age of twenty. By the time she would become a Martial Master, she would be old enough to live her life as she pleased. At that point, there would be no problem even if she wasn’t a Martial Master, although it would certainly be safer if she was.

”Deal!” Ria had gotten up with a confident expression. ”I’m going to become a Martial Master in the blink of an eye, just you watch!”

She rushed away to continue training as her parents simply watched with an amused expression.

Ria smiled as she relived the old memory. She was certain, in hindsight, that her parents were completely caught off-guard when she became a Martial Master at the age of sixteen. And in their defense, it was almost impossible to predict how much easier forming a nascent Martial Mind would become.

The mass production of neural inlays had only been a thing for a few years, and the full extent of its implications on Martial Art weren’t fully visible yet by then. She immediately began grinding on her systems of thought, learning a tremendous amount of mathematics, especially statistics.

Learning that would have taken decades took only months and years. She quickly mastered everything that she needed to know, allowing her to hyper-accelerate through the part of developing a sound foundation of knowledge upon which her system of thought would be built.

Developing Omnivoyance, her primary system of thought, was one of the most difficult things that Ria had ever done. It was an original system of thought, one that she had constructed to suit her Martial Art and Martial Path. To create a system of thought that could see through causality was extremely difficult. Even with modern resources and her neural inlay, she had to struggle hard to come up with the thought protocols that would allow her to discern causality in her environment.

But she trained hard, spending days and weeks at a time in isolated training chambers to develop her system of thought. The only regret that she had in hindsight was that she spent less time with her parents as well in her pursuit of power, even though they tried to make up for that.

But she was too determined in her desire to leave Gaia.

When Runark had learned that she had gotten approval, he immediately booked a spot in the Kandrian manifold, eager to use its accelerated time to grow quicker than he would otherwise so that he would be able to be a Martial Master too by the time she was to leave for the frontier.

Reliving those memories made her realize just how much her motivation had shifted through her life. When she first broke through to the Apprentice Realm as a five-year-old girl, she had done so in order to be with her parents, but when she got older, she sought power to be away from them.

Not them specifically, but the environment that they were in.

Her motivations had completely changed, but the power that her drive yielded was the same.

’At the root of my motivations has always been powerlessness,’ she realized. ’I was powerless in my desire to be with my family, and I was powerless in my desire to be away from my life. And now…’

A deep surge of sorrow emerged in her heart.

’And now I’m powerless in my desire to save my friends and myself.’

It manifested in different ways, but she finally realized that the common thread across all the many motivating drives she had had in her life was powerlessness. Ria hated being powerless. She hated being unable to exert control over aspects of her life. She especially hated being a victim to the flow of events, to the causality of her life.

She sought to control the outcomes of her life and refused to surrender that to anything else, even if it was the flow of causality.

’Is the reason my Martial Path is Martial Causality that I hate being victim to causality?’ she wondered with intrigue.

Her unwillingness to surrender to causality, to the natural flow of events, may have had an impact on her ability to control and manipulate causality. It may not have been the only factor that shaped her into the kind of Martial Artist that she was, but it certainly was one of the main driving factors.

Because of who her family was, she had been jerked around by forces beyond her control, and each time that happened, she sought power to force those forces into submission. That was the common element in every single desire that had ever motivated her to train and become stronger as a Martial Artist.

At the end of the day, Ria Quarrier was someone who hated being subjugated by the shackles of causality. That realization bloomed in the form of an epiphany that allowed her to finally understand the essence of the emotions, instincts, and thoughts that drove her to be the way she was.

It brought her closer to Enlightenment of Self than she had ever been before.