The Martial Unity

"Calm down."

Rui's voice was powerful, permeating through her mind.

Immediately, the surge of anxiety that had emerged within her simply washed away.

Like it was water.

"Seventy-eight Transcendents." Her expression remained severe. "That… that is beyond hope."

"Not quite," Rui replied.

She directed a dubious gaze at him. "Are you telling me you can fight off that many?"

A hint of excitement emerged in the depths of his otherwise calm, wise eyes. "I don't know, actually. When I was a Martial Sage, I took on much greater odds, you know that."

"Yeah, after reaching the peak of power of that Realm, and beyond," she huffed, shaking her head. "Are you anywhere near the peak of the Transcendent Realm?"

"Unfortunately, nowhere even remotely close," Rui remarked. "The reality is that I'm barely one toe into the Realm, in terms of progress. You could even say, with how much there is yet to uncover, that I'm not even a true version of what a Martial Artist of this Realm is supposed to look like at full potential."

"That doesn't inspire confidence in your ability to take on seventy-eight Transcendents, you know?" She heaved a deep breath, trying to regain her composure.

"As I said, you need to calm down," Rui replied with seemingly unwarranted composure. "Seventy-eight Transcendents does not mean that each of those seventy-eight can be immediately mobilized for war. You have experience with human resources."

He turned towards her with a pointed expression. "Can you just have each and every single one of your blood sages across the stars gather in one place for one battle under ordinary circumstances?"

Those words did give her hope and relief. Indeed, the number alone had put her in a fight-or-flight state of mind, but when she thought about it, there was simply no way for all of these Transcendents to come to human civilization to fight Rui all at once.

"They will be tied up," he elaborated with a knowing tone. "Engaged. Bound by…"

He stirred. "…webs. Webs of responsibilities, duties, personal matters. For one, these Divine Mothers are consumed with the duty of reproducing. That alone is a duty that is very time-consuming. I don't know why the Divine Mothers handle reproduction instead of the other females that exist, but if I had to guess, it has something to do with increasing the likelihood of new Divine Mothers emerging from their progeny."

"How do they have Transcendents if they don't have paths?" She frowned.

"Transcendence can occur without Paths, so can the other Realms, theoretically," Rui explained. "But while they have to expend an unfathomable amount of resources and sacrifices to produce even a single being capable of phenomenological uniformity, we pathwalkers can seize that destiny with our own two hands. That's what makes us special. That's why we have produced fifteen Transcendents from just a trillion people, while they have produced, based on what I've got so far, seventy-eight Transcendents from hundreds of quadrillions of homoarachnoids."

"Quadrillions?" Arastia almost had another heart attack as her eyes widened with shock. "How big is this civilization?!"

"Their core territory encompasses a million stars, give or take" he remarked, peering more intently into the mind of the homoarachnoid. "But their domain of influence comprises of more, littered with outpost worlds where they harvest esoteric matter and allow the alien virus to spread to harvest more esoteric matter. I believe that Planet Amadeus III was one of them."

THUD

Arastia fell to her knees with a crushed expression. "A… million? Are you… are you sure about that?"

"Certain," Rui replied, turning towards with a pointed expression. "You need to maintain heart, Arastia. I can't have one of humanity's powerhouses collapse."

"We don't stand even the slightest bit of a chance," she murmured. "They will find us. And they will exterminate our civilization."

He stared at his little sister for several moments before walking over and kneeling beside her.

"We will not only survive, but we will win."

Her eyes widened at those words as she turned towards him with a stunned expression.

"Not only will we win, but we will thrive."

His tone was of unfettered confidence and a calmness that came from certainty.

"War is asymmetric," Rui reminded her. "It is not necessarily true that a larger army will always win."

A faint smile and a hint of nostalgic pride emerged on his face. "I remember when my dad single-handedly took on three Sage-level powerhouses by himself and emerged victorious. That was one hell of a war. Ah, the good old days. Sometimes I consider trying to time-travel with my Transcendent power just to—"

"Not to burst your bubble when you're reminiscing about the past," she interjected with a pointed tone. "But three-to-one odds aren't comparable to a hundred-to-one. They are literally orders of magnitude larger than us."

"And we will win nonetheless." Rui smiled encouragingly. "You have me. And…"

He got up, walking back to the crystal with an expression of interest. "…We have the Dessandrites."

She tilted her head with confusion at him. "Who?"

"No clue," he honestly admitted. "But apparently the homoarachnoids are at war with the dessandrites. It popped up just now because apparently this Divine Mother here spent a lot of time thinking about the Dessandrites, allowing me to run into it sooner than a lot of other information. If they're at war with another alien civilization, then…"

His ethereal eyes grew more lively.

"Then we have an opportunity. We need to find these Dessandrite fellows and see if we can come to a mutually beneficial arrangement. We have bargaining chips that we can offer. The intel from this Divine Mother, potentially other things," he continued with an excited tone. "And, if they're fighting a successful war, from the looks of it, against the homoarachnoids, then they must have their own Transcendents! Ah, I can't wait to see what kind of Transcendents they have. Although I suppose that's not strictly true, with the likes of the laminar integuments, although their technology is extraordinarily advanced that they can manage without Transcendents. But given the information, I think it is fair to conjecture…"

Arastia simply watched helplessly as her elder brother grew more energetic and lively than he had in many years. What was a horrifying crisis of existential proportions was simply a stimulant for the bored Transcendent Emperor.

"A new chapter in humanity's history will commence." Rui's ethereal eyes lit up. "Humanity will soon enter the true galactic community of the Milky Way."