The Martial Unity

The Tide of Samsara was constantly updated from the data of every planetary branch of the virus that it eradicated, allowing it to grow more and more effective at exterminating the virus each time it was confronted with it in an infected world.

The deep biosphere this time, however, was more powerful than one could have ever imagined. Not because this particular branch of the virus had managed to evolve in a way that was particularly powerful, but rather because of an inadvertent interaction between the medium of the virus and the nature of single-celled life in Planet Pinky.

It created a deep biosphere so powerful that it could resist the Tide of Samsara to a much greater extent than any normal branch of the virus could ever hope to.

The struggle was more violent than Ria could have expected. She hid in the cavity opened in the manifold tree’s trunk, holding on to the bodies of her friends tightly. She could feel their cold and their warmth.

She could feel the cold in Siliscia’s and Sternon’s corpses.

She could feel the warmth in Misha and Runark’s corpses.

She held on to them with grim severity as the world shook with extraordinary violence.

RUMBLE!!!!!

The manifold tree miraculously managed to hold on to the bedrock with an extraordinary amount of resilience. It was never uprooted despite the seismic turbulence that it was subject to, ensuring that it always remained standing upright. Within it, Ria managed to keep herself and her friends safe.

In the past, she would have been completely helpless, unable to even understand what was happening.

But not anymore.

With her Martial Soul, her senses had reached a whole other level of efficaciousness. Her brain had entered an extraordinary state of neurocognitive harmony with a tremendous amount of bioelectric flux flowing from one end of her brain to the other. Her capacity to process information had reached extraordinary heights. That, along with her increased control and communication with each and every single cell in her body, and her sensory prowess, had risen astronomically.

Before, the range of her hyper-precise and accurate senses was very limited. They were limited to the range at which Martial Masters typically fought. If she wanted to increase the range of her senses as she had done in order to find the center of the manifold, she would need to sacrifice clarity, precision, and the accuracy of her senses.

Now that she was a Martial Sage, however, she didn’t need to make compromises.

Her sensory prowess was powerful enough by itself to behold the entire manifold in its entirety. She could perceive the center, as well as the edges. She could perceive the gradient of the manifold. The gradient of size, complexity, and even danger from edge to center. She could scale the depths of the manifold, even going so far as to sense the entropy vents at the edge of the manifold.

Normally, she would have needed the quantum entropy sensory technology of the Esoterist in order to achieve a feat like that, but since she had become a Martial Sage, she could directly detect them at all times, making the sensory apparatus of the Stellarch a little redundant.

It meant that, for future operations, she could opt to acquire a stealth ship that didn’t have to waste a lot of internal volume on sensory systems. More than anything, however, she could sense the furious war that had erupted between her father’s Samsara Tide and the virus.

RUMBLE!!!!!

The sheer amount of power that erupted underneath the surface of the planet was so intense that it instantly wiped out most life across the entire manifold, vast enough to fit in the surface of multiple planets in and of itself.

Ria could feel the countless cells of the Antithesis Hive guiding the Anicca Current to attack its respective enemies. The cells of the Antithesis Hive continued growing in number as they divided at a shocking rate, taking in nutrients and the needed chemical compounds from the environment around them.

The Anicca Current, on the other hand, couldn’t be grown as fast as that. The Anicca Current was a soup of highly entropic and chaotic esoteric matter. It was a maelstrom of the very essence of death, and precisely because it was made out of extremely high-grade quasi-Transcendent esoteric matter.

This was the constraint of the Tide of Samsara, and it was the largest reason that the virus had survived this long in the battle.

”The virus is retaliating with highly intense power concentrations,” Ria realized, detecting how the deep biosphere was fighting back.

Typically, whenever an infected world was cleansed with the Tide of Samsara, it relied on a combination of physical force and damage inflicted through esoteric matter. The Tide of Samsara had already hardened itself against both these forms of attack.

This time, however, it didn’t merely face blind physical power.

Nor did it face simplistic utility of esoteric power.

The deep biosphere of the manifold in Planet Pinky was one with highly intelligent and powerful single-celled organisms. Not only did the virus possess intelligence that was the result of an emergent network, but it also possessed the summated intelligence of each and every individual cell, which possessed a sophisticated mind of its own.

It was capable of so much more than merely physical power and esoteric power.

RUMBLE!!!!!

Ria gasped as she felt a tinge of the same kind of power that her father wielded.

The power of Transcendence.

The virus tampered with the information dimension, manipulating the fabric of reality itself to amplify its retaliation against the Tide of Samsara.

It was nowhere to the extent to which her father or a Divine Mother dominated reality, but she could sense that, nonetheless, the cosmic virus of the infected world didn’t play by the same rules as everybody else.

A slight deviation from the laws of reality was all it needed to gain an advantage.

For the first time in history, the Tide of Samsara was pushed back.

RUMBLE!!!!!