The Martial Unity

Chapter 3652: Flawed Solution

“Ah,” Mother Maeria’s expression grew knowing. “You mean botanical regolithic manipulation technology. Yes, I am quite adept at it myself. What about it?”

“I have reached a particularly high echelon within its earth-bending,” Rui remarked. “So much so that I can achieve nigh absolute efficiency with it. The Scriptures of Terra is a system of thought that allows me to recognize the most optimal path of action for the manipulation of earth. It allows me to exert force with almost zero energy loss to cause the action I seek to unfold with almost perfect efficiency and very little delay, compared to regular earthbending.”

Rui recalled how he had spent more than a month scanning every single tunnel in the Nest of Terra, searching for the Scriptures of Terra. Each and every single tunnel was a part of the Scriptures of Terra.

The Scriptures of Terra were effectively a map created by the centuries of constant effort and trial and error from the people of the Nest of Terra that, inadvertently, created a map that allowed one to understand the most efficient path of action across countless different areas of bedrock.

Each solution was optimal, through trial and error, and could be correlated with a set of environmental variables. When one conducted a thorough pattern recognition process on the terabytes of data that this represented, one could achieve a model that could ’predict’ what the optimal solution was for a particular set of environmental variables input into the model.

This allowed one’s earthbending to become vastly superior to all others. It was, in fact, what allowed Rui to fight off a Martial Sage underground in his home court as a Martial Master. It was indeed a miraculously powerful system of thought.

Despite that, the Scriptures of Terra had just become an ordinary part of his Martial Art.

Not because it was weak, certainly not.

But because Rui himself had become so absurdly powerful that even something as tremendous as the Scriptures of Terra was now simply a ’normal’ part of his Martial Art.

After all, even if the system of thought was spectacular under normal circumstances, how could it shine in his Martial Mind when it was surrounded by the VOID algorithm, Angel of Laplace, the SOUL System, the Tree of Life, the Tapestry of Nature, and especially the Forge of Creation?

It simply couldn’t. It wasn’t diminished, but it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary by Rui’s standards. So much so that he hadn’t even paid any special attention to it in recent years due to all the other exciting stuff he had gotten his hands on.

That was why Rui had almost overlooked its obvious utility in the situation that they sought.

“The Scriptures of Terra are a massive qualitative upgrade to all earth-bending techniques, including…” his eyes sharpened, “…earth-bending sensory techniques. Including earth-bending sensory techniques specialized for scanning deep underground.”

He wasn’t sure such a technique existed; he would need to visit the library of the Martial Union for the first time in a long time. But even if it didn’t exist, he could create a workable solution with the Forge of Creation quite effectively.

When amplified by the Scriptures of Terra, he would be able to permeate deep into the depths of the continent and gain a fine vision of what the hell was going on in the depths of the Panama Continent without needing to physically transport himself there.

“Even if that was the case, you alone cannot scan the entirety of the Panama Continent,” Mother Maeria remarked knowingly. “Since this technique would be targeting a depth that is at tens of thousands, if not more than a hundred thousand kilometers deep. Which means that the area you cover is going to be extremely narrow because of how focused your technique would have to be since the depths. If you yourself tried to cover the entire continent with a technique of such limited area, it would take even you decades, if not centuries, to manually find what you are looking for.”

Rui winced at those words, nodding. “That is indeed an inescapable flaw.”

“Not to mention, if the virus or the source of Gaia’s size growth is a truly widespread phenomenon, then such a focused sensory solution will not be of use to us. It will be like trying to find a hidden person one molecule at a time.” Mother Maeria shook her head. “The solution has to be a wide-scale solution like flora or fauna technology.”

“I have some mastery of nature manipulation,” Rui offered. “I could use nature to serve as the conduit for my technique for a large scale, allowing me to conduct this scan over truly enormous areas.”

“The biggest problem with that solution is that you will have to apply the Scriptures of Terra over a tremendous amount of area,” the Divine Doctor sharply pointed out the major flaw with his idea. “From what I have understood of the Scriptures is that they apply to the optimal path of action only at one point. If you want to apply to an entire forest, then the information burden will be billions if not trillions of times greater than your normal application of the Scriptures of Terra.”

Rui grimaced at those words.

Even for his mind, that kind of information burden was truly excessive. His mind had indeed grown very powerful over the years, but he wasn’t sure if he could scale up his application of the system of thought to such an extent.

“Another problem is whether you can apply Martial techniques through your nature manipulation,” Mother Maeria remarked knowingly. “You do not have the kind of control over nature as you do over your body. The Martial Path, from everything I understand, is a path of efficiency in violence. Efficiency is the true source of all Martial power. Can you maintain such efficiency even when manipulating nature? Something that is challenging even for elven pathwalkers?”

That was another extremely good counter-argument. Indeed, he had been right to collaborate with these two individuals who helped temper his expectations. Naturally, identifying an alien disease that afflicted Gaia could not possibly be as simple as Rui flexing his Martial Art.

“I have no intention of giving up that easily, though.” Rui’s pitch-black eyes sharpened.

He would find a solution, one way or another.