The Martial Unity

Chapter 3467: Studying Up Close

While Amare fell asleep, Rui spread his senses across the entire city, studying its people and everything it had to offer. He had studied the intelligence that he had got from both the dark elves and the true world intelligence organization of human civilization; however, that was limited exclusively to theory and distance data.

Studying them up close allowed Rui to learn things about the Gajanan Clan that could never be learned from reading some third-party documentation of the clan. Especially when it came to the kinds of things that Rui could study the best.

The first thing that he noted was the positivity from the general emotional energy radiating from their minds that his mind sense detected. This was a civilization that was optimistic, positive, and a place where people generally thrived.

It was impossible for civilization to release such energy into the air if it weren’t such a successful civilization. This was the same kind of energy that the people of the Kandrian Empire radiated, and that only happened because they were ruled by none other than the Emperor of Harmony himself, who could bring about prosperity unlike any other ruler that Rui had ever seen.

”This Lord Vakratunda must be a truly extraordinary leader if he’s able to make his people so happy.”

This seemed to connect with the fact that the intelligence reports he had said suggested that the people of the Gajanan Clan worshipped Lord Vakratunda as a living deity among them. These believed him to be the elephant god, son of the destroyer god Lord Maheshwara.

His eyes scanned the room as he spotted several statues of a small humanoid body with an elephant head. What surprised him was that all of them went out of their way to portray the humanoid body as fat. Rui wondered how accurate the depiction was, whether it was perfectly accurate, or whether it was perhaps a playful depiction of the powerful therianthrope leader. It would be hard to believe, but then again, with the amount of power that they possessed, a few dozen kilograms of fat was nothing; it weighed less than a feather, as far as they were concerned.

Rui found it interesting that he wasn’t nearly as beastified as the Dragon Emperor who had completely become a dragon. He only had the head of an elephant, wearing clothes that only covered the bottom half of his body, while all imagery featured him eating some kind of sweet.

A whole plate of it.

It portrayed him as a jolly, happy-go-lucky figure, one who felt like he was very fun to be around. Regardless, such a portrayal, as opposed to a more fierce warmongering depiction, was probably one of the reasons that his people loved and revered him so much, especially if he created prosperity for his people.

It may even have been that he took on a less threatening role for the sake of his people, to become a figure that didn’t inspire any ambition of war but instead one of harmony in fulfillment.

And yet, this nation did not exist in a vacuum. Being a part of the Harmonist Faction meant that they were politically divergent from most of the continent. Rui could even sense that they weren’t under the influence of the Dragon Emperor’s Authority of Alpha.

He found it truly impressive that not only could Lord Vakratunda resist the Authority of the Dragon Emperor, but he could also protect his people from the influence of Lord Shenlong. It spoke to the sheer power that he possessed to shield his people from this power that robbed them of their free will.

Rui knew that quasi-Transcendent beasts and monsters were able to partially resist the Authority of the Eldritch Chimer,a which gave human civilization time to prepare against the destruction that they were going to unleash upon human civilization.

However, he had never seen any beast help other beasts resist, let alone an entire nation’s worth of beasts. For it wasn’t just the therianthropes but also all the elephants within the nation of Minala. It likely meant that Lord Vakratunda was so astronomically above the quasi-Transcendent beast level that it wasn’t even comparable.

This was good news. It meant that the ally that Rui hoped to work together with in a singular attack upon the War Coalition and the Dragon Emperor was extremely strong. This was good because he knew that the moment he tried separating the Dragon Emperor from his army, there would be a flood of dragons that would rampage to return to the side of their liege. He also knew that the Dragon Emperor would not hesitate to jump Rui with an army if he had to.

That was why he needed a powerful set of warriors to keep the most powerful dragon after the Dragon Emperor to actually reach Rui while they battled. Amare was certainly a reassuring block, but it would be highly useful to have other blocks that would allow Rui to fight the Dragon Emperor without having to worry about the possibility of their fight being interfered with.

If he had any hope of winning, then he would need to fight the Dragon Emperor absolutely uninterrupted. He mulled in his thoughts, observing the city from their luxury quarters, as he gathered more data on the Gajanan Clan. The city gave him such a wide space that he almost felt the need to avoid wasting time keeping watch and simply go to sleep and trust these people, but his rationality told him not to trust unknown people.

By the time Amare woke up for her turn to keep watch, he simply crashed like a rock and slept like one, as well. Keeping the stealth technique active for as long as he had was something that had truly exhausted him in every sense of the word, leaving him rather exhausted.

His brain felt like it was melting from the sheer amount of stress that he had put it through.

”Get some rest.” Amare patted him.