Chapter 4656 A Father-Daughter Outing

Despite the admonishments of her parents, Ria didn’t immediately agree to their words. She was an adult, even if barely. In terms of Martial Art, she was definitely an adult. She could make her own decisions.

Still, their words resonated with her. Her Enlightenment of Self helped her understand that this was a traumatic response. Her weakness and the weakness of those who followed her was what had led to that tragedy. Perhaps she had pushed too far in avoiding both in the pursuit of ensuring something like that had never happened again.

"...I’ll think about it," she replied uncommittedly. "I still think some safety in distance is preferable to their death in proximity, though."

That was the end of that brief conversation. Her parents merely coaxed her, not willing to impose their will on her. It was ultimately a life decision that only she could make for herself.

"Now then," her father shifted gears with a lighter tone and a friendly smile. "Tell me about your adventures in cosmos. I’m sure you have many stories to share. I can’t wait to hear them all."

Her tone grew more enthusiastic as she began listing out what she had been through in the past half year. The planets she had visited, how she identified them, investigated them, before making the dive. The infected worlds she had visited were all different from each other.

She recounted how she visited a planet whose virus had taken a different turn from many others. It turned the entire crust into a dungeon filled with a maze of paths and ’floors’ that she needed to pass through in order to reach the manifold tree. She eagerly described how she dealt with an infected world that was made entirely of water, which piqued her father’s interest the most. She found a strange alien world filled with ascetics who were in harmony with the world, a world which welcomed her despite being an alien. A story that allured Amare the most.

"I wasn’t able to bring myself to destroy that world," she concluded that story with a bittersweet smile. "I don’t develop an attachment to the life forms I run into; I just gather all the data, samples, specimens, and everything needed for research in a clinical manner and then eradicate it. The resources are too valuable. But this time... I liked the natives. So I decided to spare the world and work extra hard to find other worlds."

Rui was glad that she didn’t have any moral qualms about the genocide of an entire tree of life. In truth, they didn’t have that luxury. They needed esoteric matter. The virus was an existential threat to the world. And an infected world they didn’t harvest would become the strength of an external party eventually that may wield that power against them. He didn’t lose even a second, even a nanosecond, of sleep over this issue, but he was pleasantly surprised that his daughter seemed unfazed.

He suspected that it likely had something to do with the fact that she understood that the virus posed an existential threat to her. When one’s life was in danger, any qualms and compunctions melted away. Without that, he suspected her younger heart would have pained at the thought of wiping out entire populations. She didn’t have any exposure to such brutality prior, being the protected princess she had been for most of her life.

He listened as she continued narrating the adventures she had experienced in the depths of the cosmos and in far-away alien lands. He could tell that she enjoyed exploring the cosmos, or perhaps it was the distance from the capital of human civilization that pleased her the most. Wanting to get away from her life as a princess had been the major motivating factor in her departure from Gaia Prime, after all.

"...and that was the nineteenth world I harvested," she remarked after a long story came to a conclusion. "I was actually going to go harvest the twentieth world, but..."

She shook her head. "My instincts tell me that this one is above my pay grade."

Rui raised an eyebrow. Above the pay grade of a Martial Sage who was already as strong as senior Martial Sages? That sounded... interesting.

"When I actually reached the planet, I got the same sense of danger that was the same as when that Divine Mother on Planet Amadeus stood in front of me," she muttered. "I don’t want to experience being crushed a second time, so I decided to skip out on that one and return home."

Her words drew his even more of his interest. A planet that had the same threat-level as a Transcendent was undoubtedly an outlier even among infected worlds. Not even gargantians produced that kind of intense sense of threat, though they weren’t too far behind either.

Great danger also corresponded with great value, which piqued his interest in the destination. But it also gave him an idea.

"Why don’t we go together?" He asked.

The offer appeared to have caught Ria off-guard. She blinked, pondering to herself, before nodding with a more enthused expression. "Ok dad, but aren’t you busy?"

"Terribly busy," he heaved a deep breath. Just the very thought of being reminded of the urgent work that needed to be done right away made him lose any sense of leeway he had. Even as he chatted with his precious baby girl, the Divine Mothers were slowly adapting the principles of the consciousness transfer to their own needs.

In the worst-case scenario, they had days before an imminent invasion. In the best-case scenario, they had weeks. He had a lot of work to do.

He had already sent a message to the aquadites with his offer, having exchanged communication methods with them the last time, although it was cumbersome since he didn’t want to reveal the location of his civilization to them, so ordinary signal-based methods didn’t work.

Then there was the fact that he needed to deal with Divine Mother o-o-o-o. The arakai had learned of her because he had chosen to reveal her existence as a hostage to protect Gaia, but now that meant that the Divine Mothers wanted their sister back.

The same sister who knew that his daughter was the Key.