The Martial Unity

Chapter 3354: Comparisons of Power

Her words bore heavily on the atmosphere, darkening the mood despite the bright light of the morning Sun peering through the window of the little kitchen within her vast, expansive body.

The air was laced with the odor of boiled leaves from the tea, along with citrus notes from the pine-like wood of Mother Vyia’s true body, while sounds of giant rustling leaves and chirping birds that made their home upon her body cut through the heavy silence in the air.

”...How bad is the situation?” Rui asked with a grave tone.

”Deteriorating with each passing day,” she remarked. ”Your survival of the light elven ambush has moved the Hawk Faction into enhancing their evaluation of your danger level. For even they understand how absurd a feat it is to survive an ambush by the Mothers of Nature in the very core of their territory. However, your sustained survival and well-being were still in question in the past three months. We Mothers of Nature of the dark elves have not shared the fact that my older sister was hiding you to the rest of the world.”

Rui’s pitch-black eyes sharpened with thought. ”So the therianthropes of Kiriket don’t know that I’m alive yet.”

”Correct.” She nodded. ”They think that you’re likely dead. After all, it is difficult to fathom one individual surviving three months within elven territory despite being hunted by all the elves on half of the continent. This has slowed down their political capital temporarily, but they will eventually learn of your return now that you have come back, and the ticking will continue unless you can do something about it.”

Rui heaved a tired sigh. ”You know, pressure does help me grow, but it is also tiring. Especially when I don’t seek it out, I suppose their reasons for fearing and hating me are more valid than those of the light elves, but still...”

He scratched his head.

”...I guess I’m going to have to prepare for yet another fight. I think I will follow Mother Pruschilia’s suggestion and meet the Gajanan Clan and Lord Vakratunda and figure things out from there. If the other factions are beyond reason, then I will have no choice but to fight against them and against the Dragon Emperor.”

He turned towards her with a raised eyebrow.

”How do you think I compare to the Dragon Emperor?”

She shook her head.

”I do not understand Martial Sages well enough to comment. The path that characterizes your race is truly bizarre and beyond our comprehension despite the information exchanges that our civilizations have conducted,” she wisely pointed out her own shortcomings. ”However, your defeat of Anthea and your survival of the ambush by the light elves is proof that you’re in the same order of magnitude, at least. However, it appears that the power that you used against the light elves comes with many caveats and limitations...”

Her eyes sharpened.

”I suspect that you cannot use it in ordinary circumstances.”

Rui’s expression grew complicated.

”Correct. The biggest issue is the collateral damage to people. I used that power in Genora because the light elves had created a powerful isolated environment to protect their people from my embodiment, which inadvertently also protected the dark elves and human beings. But without such a protection, my Martial Embodiment will bring about the death of hundreds of billions, if not trillions.”

Mother Vyia gazed at him with a hint of wariness.

”To harbor the power to genocide half the world or so is one that only the most powerful entities in the world have,” she remarked carefully. ”We elves as a civilization can do so if we detonated all of our explosives at once; the same is true for the most powerful civilizations in the world. But very few individuals possess the power to threaten everybody. It would be you, the giant serpent that wraps itself around the tectonic plate of the Panama Continent, and Ecclestia.”

Rui raised an eyebrow.

She spoke the latter of the three as if it were an incantation.

”Ecclestia?”

”Are you not aware?” Mother Vyia raised an eyebrow. ”We have mentioned it as a part of the information that we have shared with human civilization. Ecclestia is what we call the individual who is widely regarded as the strongest entity in the entire world. She has defeated most of the powerhouses in the world.”

”She, huh?” Rui murmured with clear interest in his eyes.

Mother Vyia smiled at him knowingly. ”Does that surprise you? I suppose human civilization does not regard women as superior and isn’t a matriarchy.”

”We lean more towards patriarchy,” Rui absentmindedly remarked. ”But it is not an institutional, really. We have plenty of female leaders and rulers like Queen Linalia, Bodhisattva Maitreyi, and my grandmother.”

Mother Vyia found that to be interesting. ”Does the Martial Path not favor the male physique over the female?”

”It does,” Rui admitted. ”But not to the extent that the Nature Path favors women over men. There isn’t a single Father of Nature in existence, but there are many, many Martial Sages at all levels. In fact, of the four strongest Martial Sages in existence, two of them are women, so go figure. Not to mention...”

A proud smile emerged on his face.

”My girlfriend was the one who spread Martial Art across the entire continent many eons ago.”

He needed to botch up the timeframe because he hadn’t forgotten that they were pretending that human civilization had gone 187,000 years, instead of 1300 years.

”Curious,” Mother Vyia remarked. ”She did strike me as quite old internally. It seems you have some great immortality techniques.”

She was wrong, technically, but it worked in his favor because she had misinterpreted Amare’s internal age that had been stretched due to the millennia that she had spent trapped in her mind.

”More importantly,” Rui grew curious. ”Tell me more about this Ecclestia.”

He was curious about the person regarded as the strongest being in the true world, as someone who sought strong opponents who could push him to his very limits.