The Martial Unity

Chapter 4444: Brewing Conflict

Rui’s expression grew serious. He wasn’t surprised that the Beggar Sage knew. He had the best intelligence network in the entire world, even after all the improvements to surveillance and espionage technology.

”Then, let me tell you this,” Rui spoke with a serious expression. ”If you sell my daughter out...”

A glint of bloodlust emerged in his ethereal eyes.

”I will erase you from this universe.”

His bloodlust was mild, but it was deeply ethereal. Almost as if it was abstract. It didn’t shake heaven and earth, instead reverberating through the very fabric of reality and into the Beggar Sage.

”I’m the Beggar Sage, I’m immortal,” the Beggar Sage declared. ”Even if you kill me, there are millions of me.”

”I didn’t say I would kill you,” Rui calmly clarified. ”I said I would erase you. That entails finding every clone. Every vessel, every record of your mind, memory, and soul, and destroying all of them until nothing of the concept of the Beggar Sage remains.”

”That would take time, even for you, for the Beggar Sage is spread out across the stars,” the beggar grinned. ”Not even you can kill millions of very well hidden clones and vessels across ten thousand stars quickly.”

”And I can assure you, if you were to sell my daughter out, that wouldn’t matter,” Rui remarked. ”I would spend every day for a thousand years just on killing you if I had to.”

”Ah, but you can’t afford to, human civilization is about to enter a war.”

”Trust me, I can handle both,” Rui assured.

”Even if you could, I have leverage.”

His old eyes widened with a glint of madness. ”I can share information that would throw all of human civilization into havoc.”

”And if you sell my daughter out, I don’t care what leverage you hold, your destiny is complete and total extermination,” Rui growled.

The Beggar Sage chuckled, unfazed by Rui’s threats. ”I have no doubt you could live up to those words, unfortunately. But relax...”

He raised his arms in submission. ”I have no intention of selling your daughter out. I would be a fool to pick a fight with you. Some executive from Terrestrike has actually already contacted the Beggar’s Sect and tried to purchase the information. But I had them refuse to sell it.”

”Good, keep it that way,” Rui got up. ”If there’s nothing else—”

”I may keep my mouth shut, but I don’t know about the others,” the Beggar Sage remarked, stopping him before he could teleport.

Rui’s eyes sharpened at those words. ”...What? What others?”

”The other Beggar Sages, of course,” the beggar replied with an uncharacteristically serious tone of voice.

Rui frowned, kneeling back down before the man, staring him straight into the eyes. ”What the hell are you talking about? You mean the clones and vessels? You are all in conjunction with each other, are you not? You are the only Sage who can have clones without facing the civil war problem.”

He remembered the clone that he had made and how he had wanted to kill him. Creating clones was a sure shot way of getting strife.

The Beggar Sage’s expression grew more grim. ”That used to be the case, until recently...”

His sunken eyes were severe. ”Now, however, the Beggar Sages are drifting apart as entities. We are no longer in mental sync with each other. Rui, the Beggar Sect is...”

His tone grew grave. ”...coming apart.”

Rui’s ethereal eyes widened at those words. ”Coming apart? What the hell do you mean? Just give it to me straight.”

The Beggar Sage’s expression tightened. ”Do you remember the tale you shared about how you found the virus and exterminated it in Gaia?”

”...Yeah,” Rui remembered sharing the truth with everyone after the whole ordeal with the laminars and nebulars was over. ”What about it?”

”You described the embodiment of the Noosphere,” the Beggar Sage remarked. ”About how it was the power of perception of countless human beings intervening into the information dimension. It was the power of the collective concentrated into one person.”

Rui understood where this was going as his eyes sharpened. ”And let me guess, you tried tapping into that power because nobody harnesses the power of the collective the way you do.”

”Correct,” the Beggar Sage remarked. ”I thought it was an opportunity to gain even more power, so I began experimenting. In particular, different clones of me tried different experiments to cover more distance. A vast majority of the experiments failed, unfortunately. But there were a handful that were successful, they yielded some results, but...”

He turned towards Rui. ”The Beggar Sages that were exposed to that power began developing an ego. And I don’t mean that in the colloquial sense. I meant that the weight of their individual identity outweighed the collective identity of the ’Beggar Sage’ imprinted on them.”

”Is that how you overcame the civil war problem?” Rui’s ethereal eyes widened. ”You replaced individual identity with a concept?”

The Beggar Sage nodded. ”That’s right. And it is airtight under normal circumstances. Until... they felt the power that comes from harnessing the collective. The way that it works is that there needs to be some sort of totem that collects the power of consciousness, in order to create even a fleeting amount of phenomenological uniformity to tap into Transcendence. The Beggar Sage clones that were successful had used themselves as the totem and the target, endowing themselves with the momentary success. But... as the reality-warping power had a profound impact on their psychology.”

”...Turning themselves into the focus of that much consciousness made the individual that they were larger than the concept of the Beggar Sage,” Rui realized. ”So you’re telling me that there are some Beggar Sages who have gone rogue after just touching the power of Transcendence.”

”It is a corrupting power,” the Beggar Sage turned towards Rui. ”No wonder you need to be clinically insane to be a Martial Transcendent. And that in turn has led to several different Beggar Sage clones gaining their own personal ambition, desire, ego, disrupting the sync. The Beggar’s Sect... has already fragmented into factions. In order for them to cultivate and nurture their power, they need more followers, which means they need to monopolize a greater portion of the Beggar Sect’s HUMINT. Which means...”

Rui’s expression tightened.

”A cold civil war is brewing within the Beggar’s Sect.”