The Martial Unity

Chapter 4144: Pondering Past

The reason for that was that communication between star systems required wormholes to be continuously open. And as dense as information transmission had gotten, it was still an extremely limited throughput from star system to star system, such that only 0.001% of all information in the interweb of one star system could flow to another.

Trying to access information from other star systems was time-consuming and tedious, especially since most of that throughput was used for more important civilizational systems.

Thus, each star system had its own bubble of information, making her feel safer and freer in the frontier.

”Two rooms opposite each other, please,” Ria told the innkeeper, before paying him in alliance credits, acquiring two room passes. Runark was hoping she would go for one room, but alas, she was too level-headed for that.

The rooms weren’t too hospitable, at least not by the standards of Gaian Civilization, but it was good enough for her, comprising a bed, with a joint kitchen and couch, and an attached toilet.

Before changing, she first placed a flux jammer, a special device that increased privacy by manipulating the boundaries of the room she was in with electromagnetic fields. As a Martial Master, walls may as well not exist with how powerful her senses were. She couldn’t relax knowing that countless pathwalkers were easily able to tune into her whenever they wanted.

She quickly changed into more comfortable clothes, falling into her bed with a sigh of relief. She liked it when she was alone on a faraway planet, many light-years away from home. It was so much easier to relax when she was an adventurer in the frontier than when she was at home or anywhere even remotely near it.

To an extent, she felt a little bad and guilty for feeling this way. Her parents had only ever done their best to give her a good life, and their intentions were sincerely for her best. She knew that they loved her from the very bottom of their hearts, of course. And she knew that she was breaking their hearts a little by constantly being so far away from home.

They had gone out of their way to give her a normal childhood, delaying telling her that she was a princess and that they were extremely powerful individuals in human civilization.

And perhaps that was their greatest mistake.

In an attempt to give her a simple and warm childhood, they had made her acclimatized to a life that was the opposite of what would inevitably become her life at some point in time. Their intentions had been good, but it only made her feel like an alien in her later childhood and early adolescence; it made her feel out of place with the entire world.

A jarring transition that made her resent how her life had evolved. But that wasn’t all, for if it had been, maybe she would have been able to take it. What truly made her feel like she didn’t belong on that planet was her extraordinary talent.

It stripped her away from her friends at school, for she was too talented in Martial Art to simply study at school with them. At the same time, when she did enter the Martial Academy, she was too young to be friends with any of the older kids. This would not have been a problem if she had had the opportunity to make friends after school, but once her identity came out, that was completely destroyed as well. No sane parent would allow their child to play with the princess of the Emperor of Water, and those who did only sought to exploit the connection, destroying the innocence of friendship between children.

Runark was the only friend that remained, and her only source of comfort, along with Sage Sayfeel, who was undoubtedly somewhere close by. She had prohibited him from guarding too close to her, because it made her feel like a princess again, but at the same time, she understood that she wasn’t strong enough to protect herself if the enemies of her father learned about her identity.

KNOCK KNOCK

She opened her amber eyes knowingly, unlocking the door with a simple command from her neural inlay. ”Come in.”

CLACK

Runark walked into her room, wearing a t-shirt and shorts, just like her, closing the door behind him. ”You want to get something to eat?

”...not hungry,” Ria remarked absentmindedly, sitting up on her bed.

”I thought you’d be excited for this new round of adventuring,” Runark remarked, sitting next to her. ”Didn’t you want to come back here to get back to adventuring as soon as possible?”

She simply remained silent, her amber eyes lost in thought. Runark heaved a sigh, gently bumping his shoulder against hers. ”Come on. We traveled a long way to get back to doing fun stuff. The last two years have been a blast, haven’t they?”

She heaved a deep breath. ”It has, I just... was reminiscing about a time where I was even happier and...”

Her expression grew a little sullen. ”...it was when I was a little girl, teleporting around Kandria and Panama in the arms of my father.”

She missed how simple life was back then. She would play with her parents all day long and then get tired and go to sleep, only to find herself perfectly tucked in bed the next morning, next to them. It was paradise, as far as she was concerned.

Runark’s expression grew a little serious. ”Hey, I miss my parents, to you know. But I still came along, and I’m glad I did. I feel like we would have never had as much fun if we had remained at home all this time. Gaia Prime is so boring!”

She chuckled at those words. ”True.”

”Right? In comparison, I saw something interesting on the way here:” Runark pulled out a projector. ”A new cosmic anomaly in the interstellar vicinity of human civilization.”

Her eyes lit up at those words.

”Tell me more about it.”