The Martial Unity

Chapter 3487: Heightened Potential for Growth

”Human beings are more malleable and able to change than most species,” Rui remarked, musing in thought. ”Not only as adults, but especially from infancy. A human baby is an absolutely blank slate upon which anything can be written. But the offspring of virtually any other species in the world is simply not so. Their offspring are born with the ability to walk very shortly after birth, and to even engage in nascent communication with others of their species and their mother. They display preprogrammed behaviors from an early age that leave very little room for change compared to human babies.”

”Indeed...” Lord Vakratunda nodded. ”Baby elephants learn to walk almost immediately after birth. They learn to drink, to communicate with their parents, to play, and to have fun from an extremely young age. In comparison, our offspring require months and even years to do those.”

Rui nodded. ”It’s because we are underdeveloped as babies compared to the offspring of other species. Thus, there is less we can inherit and more to grow to be done outside of our mother’s womb. Once upon a time, the evolutionary ancestors of humans were perhaps closer to chimps, and our children were just like them. But eventually, due to our rising intelligence, our brains and heads grew larger relative to our bodies, forcing the females of our species to give birth earlier, leading to offspring with virtually infinite potential.”

It was one of the reasons that each of the human species in the true world was so internally varied and diverse, with none more diverse than the therianthropes. For a species to have this much diversity, it would need to have a profound capacity to grow from a young age.

If not for the fact that human babies had large heads, forcing human women to birth them earlier than was typical among mammals, the human species would have never developed the kind of potential that it had now.

That likely meant that there wouldn’t be enough potential to form a proper path.

”And yet just having potential strewn about in an unfocused manner is not enough, which is why only the species that underwent focused evolution after the Age of Tumult began undergoing very focused evolution to survive the tribulations that came from the Epoch of Evolution,” Rui mused. ”Our potentials became accentuated with themes like that of violence or beasts in our cases.”

The human civilization on the Panama Continent must have undergone extraordinary resource shortages that killed perhaps ninety-nine percent of the human population.

Only the most violent among them would have survived, causing humans to slowly evolve towards homo martialus.

After that, there was an age of constant war and strife across the world with feudal lords, tribes, villages, and small armies constantly fighting each other for resources before they learned to harness esoteric resources, where the most violent forces of human civilization must have survived, causing the potential of human civilizationto be more skewed in favor of violence.

Enough to form a Martial Path.

When Esil spread Martial Art around the world, she created an evolutionary process that reinforced the Martialization of human potential, where only the strongest of men, Martial Artists, got to reproduce, spreading seed that created a whole new generation of people more attuned towards violence.

Although it hadn’t been confirmed officially, Rui was relatively certain that homo martialus in the Panama Continent had the highest propensity for violence by nature and likely had the most civil strife before the Beast Incursion forced everyone to unite.

Especially compared to civilizations like the elves or even the therianthropes and giants.

The only question Rui had was where hybrids fit in this model. Hybrids had hybrid themes that weren’t centered in one direction, but often two or even more directions.

This meant that a unifying theme was perhaps not strictly necessary, but he had also heard that hybrids needed to chart their own path with the paths that they had inherited.

He wasn’t sure yet.

But regardless, it brought up interesting questions for the blood-Martial hybrids. The fact that there could be failed hybrids made him realize that he couldn’t just have martialus and hemosapiens breed mindlessly if he wanted the best outcome for human civilization. He would need to be more targeted in his eugenics to ensure a synergetic combination between the Martial Path and the Blood Path.

He was sure that his father and other specialists and experts had some good ideas in the field; he would certainly need help to ensure that they fused properly.

”...Less than a day left,” Lord Vakratunda remarked, drawing Rui’s attention. ”Are you ready? You have a... difficult task tomorrow.”

Rui nodded. ”I am as prepared as I possibly can be. I will need to get some sleep and a good meal so that I can reset, but aside from that, I’m all but ready. Amare should be ready too; she’s been busy with harnessing the power that she recently got. The same with me, I suppose. How are things on your end?”

”Everything has been in accordance with our schedule, and naturally, not all our movements have gone unnoticed,” he remarked. ”However, we have been subtle enough not to cause any major alarms to ring in the bells of our enemies. Even if they suspect something is up, they won’t be able to imagine what is about to happen in less than a day.”

Rui nodded. ”...Any advice for dealing with the Dragon Emperor?”

Lord Vakratunda paused for a moment, falling into thought. ”Watch out for his instincts. I find them to be even more dangerous than the gamma radiation. It verges on precognition and is extremely difficult to overcome. He will be ready even if he is ambushed. He did not become the most powerful leader on this continent by accident. Whatever thoughts I have about him and how he has ruled over much of this continent, I cannot deny that he obtained all of it by himself, surviving countless attempts on his life and every manner of ambush imaginable, including the kind that you are attempting to do.”