The Martial Unity

She thrashed and struggled.

She fought with everything she had.

But the simple reality was that Rui had calculated well.

When it came to their Verses, she had an edge.

Her Webverse was much stronger than his Martialverse, which suggested to him that she had spent much more time with it than he had. On top of that, despite his recent advancements in proficiency in Martialverse deployment, he was still less skilled at manipulating reality than she was.

However, he had her completely beaten when it came to physicality.

His body, after all these years, had become nothing short of a cosmological artifact of Martial Art. It was a near-perfect machine when it came to adaptively evolving to its opponents. He had incorporated nearly every relevant biotechnological advancement that humanity had made into his body. His primordial core had grown extremely dense and massive, filled with enough pluripotent exotic matter that he could turn into countless exotic substances to create all kinds of effects.

His Corporeal Realm had grown much, much stronger over the years, which, along with his Martial Soul, gave him a quantum level of control over his body. He could freely convert matter into energy without even the slightest inefficiency, and he had even begun to tap into higher forms of energy that greater civilizations could tap into.

The energy of the expansion of the universe.

Dark energy itself.

It was an engineered product of adaptive evolution, the likes of which almost certainly didn't exist anywhere else in the entire galaxy.

That was what he was betting on to carry him to victory.

And his bet paid off.

Bit by bit, he overwhelmed her resistance.

Bit by bit, the Tide of Samsara overran his body.

The Divine Mother sensed this, of course. She kicked and thrashed, so to speak, with her Webverse. And yet, Rui's Martialverse negated her attempts enough for the poison to worm its way through her body, crippling greater and greater functions within her mind.

Her body grew weaker and frailer. Its colors changed from the burned flesh that she had to the myriad of colors that the ever-shifting Anicca Current was of. Very soon, she looked as if her body was cracking, trying to control an exploding rainbow within it.

Soon, the battle was over.

Her body grew limp as her exhausted eyes lost their spirit. She had lost control over most of her body, including her stinger, which she had failed to use to incapacitate Rui, although not for lack of trying.

Her Martialverse sputtered, flickering uncertainly as the final embers of it began going out.

And yet, before the poison could completely consume her life, it froze.

Within her body, it paused just short of completely finishing the job.

Her body hung weightlessly around his arm like it was a hook, her six eyes growing hazy as her consciousness began to dim.

CLICK... CLICK... CLICK...

"Why do you... keep me alive...?"

Rui's ethereal eyes sharpened.

"You tried to seize my daughter."

His voice crackled with anger.

"You sought to extract her secrets, robbing her of her future."

The Divine Mother almost huffed with a hint of amusement. "...You wish to punish... me? But surely... You must know... that what I did..."

Her six eyes grew a little more certain.

"Anybody would do... if they knew... what she was..."

Rui's expression hardened.

"After all..." the Divine Mother continued. "...It's not every day... that one runs into... the key to..."

Her tone grew more intense. "...the Universal Web."

Rui hadn't heard that nomenclature, but he knew what she was referring to. His ethereal eyes grew deeper with thought. The fact that the Divine Mother had come to the same conclusion that he had was... both promising and ominous all at once.

"How... did you... create... such a... treasure?"

She asked with a weak hint of curiosity in her fading clicks.

The faintest of smiles emerged on Rui's face.

"With lots of love."

The Divine Mother huffed at those words as she pondered the countless offspring that she had given birth to. Billions of them had died in the battle between her and Rui. She hadn't felt so much as even the slightest hint fo loss for them despite being their mother.

In comparison, the man who defeated her had had but one offspring and had managed to raise a living treasure.

It made her feel bitter.

One of the points of the mass production of homoarachnoids was to increase the odds of giving birth to a treasure.

Divine Mothers like her did not develop, grow, or evolve their Transcendent power.

No, they were born with it.

It was a cosmic fluke of nature. One among ten trillion. And that only accounted for the living. If one counted how many died in the pursuit of even a single new Divine Mother, then the numbers skyrocketed beyond measure.

The webs of information in their head needed to be aligned in exactly the right way to create phenomenological uniformity.

It could only be done with an unfathomable amount of trial and error.

She envied the paths that the humans had. Paths of power that allowed them to progressively grow stronger and stronger without needing an astronomical amount of sacrifices or resources.

It was a power that she wanted for her civilization even as she slowly passed away.

It was a power that she was certain that her civilization would get its hands on when they learned of the human race.

"Not happening."

Rui activated his Primordial Core, creating an abundance of one specific Transcendent substance.

Time Frost. Known as Chrono-dynamic graviton condensate in the scientific community.

A substance that could freeze time over any object that it physically froze over.

He could learn a lot from her corpse.

But he could learn even more from a mind that was alive.

SPLASH SPLASH SPLASH!

The Transcendent exotic covered her body in a bluish fluid before freezing into a solid crystal of ice.

Within it, her body remained frozen in time.

With the final remaining strength in his Martialverse left, he opened a portal to Gaia, pushing her body through it.

WHOOSH

Just like that, the entire debacle came to an end.