The Martial Unity

Chapter 3788: Ruined Familiarity

”Search for the past...” Rui frowned. ”Is that supposed to be a riddle?”

The Divine Doctor turned away from his terminal towards Rui with a light shrug. ”It’s the truth. She spends time at the site of the subject of her study. In this case, she’s studying a civilization of the deep past. If you can figure out where that past is richest, then... You should be able to find her. Either that or try and win back the Beggar Sage’s friendship.”

Rui fell into thought as he pondered that strange abstract advice. ”A place where she can connect to the primordial civilization the most, wait...”

His eyes lit up. ”Thanks. I think I figured it out.”

WHOOSH

He disappeared in the blink of an eye, leaving the Divine Doctor and Mother Maeria curious about where he had chosen to go.

WHOOSH

He appeared at a very special location.

A place at the very center of the Beast Domain.

A ravaged battleground filled with ruins and rubble, enveloped by the growing darkness of dusk. It was where the Martial Sages of human civilization had defeated the eldritch chimera and had freed Panama from its prison.

It was also formerly a perfectly preserved fossilized lost city.

The largest and most comprehensive of them all.

Shockingly, not even the battle with the Eldritch Chimera had managed to destroy everything. The city was fossilized with powerful quasi-Transcendent esoteric substances, making it extraordinarily resilient.

There were still partially erect structures, and there were human beings that were partially intact.

Rui flinched at all the destruction. Even if he thought it was ultimately inevitable because the death of the eldritch chimera was a necessity for the survival of human civilization, it was still painful that such an exquisitely well-preserved civilization had been destroyed. He was not a man who was unable to appreciate the value of what this lost city could have represented when it came to understanding the primordial civilization, as they had come to call it.

He walked around, directing his senses across the area.

He found that his senses were deeply oppressed due to the high-grade esoteric density disrupting the natural physics that his techniques were based on, limiting his environmental awareness to only what he could see.

STEP

He knelt down at a half-shattered statue of an adolescent boy, studying the intact upperhalf of his body.

He wore a shirt buttoned all the way to his chest, with devices that Rui faintly recognized plugged into his ears, and a rectangular device in his hands.

The fossilized boy gazed at the rectangular object in a manner that was not unfamiliar to Rui. Rui shifted his gaze to the backpack behind him, another thing that was deeply familiar to him, but what was surprising was that the rectangle was open in the middle, which diverged from the technology that he had been familiar with.

The boy’s hair was relatively short and covered with a cap that had several characters and words inscribed on it.

[rŋ

Rui’s eyes sharpened as he studied those characters.

He didn’t recognize most of them, and he was certain that there was no language that looked like that back on Earth. But there were some characters that he did recognize, and even the ones he didn’t recognize were ones that bore an Anglo-Saxon resemblance.

”This...” Rui’s ethereal eyes sharpened. ”Could it actually be...?”

He wasn’t sure.

He had pondered how he had ended up on Earth from Gaia many times. He had considered parallel universes as an explanation, or some intergalactic phenomenon, or, of course, the truly ridiculous theory that there was some connection between Earth and Gaia itself.

He heaved a deep breath, shaking his head.

The mystery of his reincarnation had not grown any less mysterious despite how much more powerful and knowledgeable he had grown over the years. It was truly unfathomable how the memories of John Falken ended up in his infant body in an entirely different world with humans nigh-identical to the ones he had grown up with, but more violent by nature.

He heaved a deep breath, shaking his head before returning his gaze to the environment around him. Now was not the time to immerse himself in this mystery and the mysteries of the primordial civilization. He had come here because, if there was any place one would want to be when studying the primordial civilization, it was at the place where it was most well-preserved.

He walked around, taking in the strangely familiar but also different sites of the remains of the primordial civilization. Technology that was faintly similar, but also pointedly divergent, was one of the reasons he had been hesitant to draw hasty conclusions from the sheer familiarity of what was happening.

CLACK

He paused.

It was faint, but he picked up the sound of a rock moving far away in the distance.

WHOOSH

He moved through the lost city at high speed before eventually happening upon a large camp. A set of tents of varying sizes was erected in a remote area at the outskirts of the Lost City, where the destruction had been minimal.

”Ow...” he heard a woman mutter in pain.

”This is what you get for being too hasty.”

”Help me lift this. I want to get a better look at the inscriptions on this strange pillar.”

”It’s not a pillar,” a male voice retorted. ”According to my research, this was most likely a piece of public infrastructure that was meant to signal to drivers of ancient transportation mobiles to stop or go.”

CLACK

Rui heard another sound as he spotted a group of people sifting through some rubble. He sensed two humans and several Martial Artists, including two Martial Sages, who quickly sensed Rui’s ethereal presence.

”Master, please get behind me!”

”Sir, we have a visitor.”

WHOOSH

Rui teleported before them in the blink of an eye.

His ethereal eyes lit up with interest as he took a good, long look at the two humans, ignoring the Martial Artists.

The man, he recognized instantly.

The Scrier, he had just seen the man in the meeting with the immortal sages. He turned to the young woman beside him with expectant eyes, studying her with great curiosity.

The first thing that stood out to him was how thick the lenses of her glasses were. So much so that they magnified her auburn eyes that brimmed with a strange fusion of deep curiosity and even deeper knowledge and wisdom; her light brown hair was tied up in a bun, while her body was covered in a cloak.