The Martial Unity

"ARGRHRGRHRHHHHRAGHARHHH!!!" Rui's screams melted into incoherent wails of agony.

Blood began trickling from his eyes, ears, mouth, and nose from the sheer stress that it caused within his body. If not for the Elder Tree, which promptly used the remarkable medical prowess it cto develop from the knowledge and skill it inherited from the Divine Doctor and its own powerful capabilities, Rui would have died very soon.

Yet, nobody who saw his current state could, in good faith, insist that the Elder Tree was doing him any favors.

Death was mercy in comparison to what Rui was being subjected to.

"AAAARGRHRGHRRGWHAGRGAHHHHHRHRHRHGHGGHRRR!!!!!"

A soul-wrenching guttural screech of pure agony erupted from within him even as he processed the information that was thrust into him.

The Elder Tree almost stopped prematurely at several points when it felt like Rui was on the verge of snapping from the sheer information overload. It was extremely cautious and attentive to his mental state, harboring a dim hope that it would be able to stop at the right moment if Rui ever snapped.

Yet, much to its surprise, scream and struggle as he did; his mind never shattered. Even at certain points when any other Senior in his position would have long been turned into a vegetable, Rui gritted his teeth and forged on.

"Rrrrggghhghegrhrhr!!!" His eyes were fierce with pain and determination.

Despair stared him in the eye.

It waited for him to fall to it.

There were very few times that he had cthis close to breaking down in despair and misery.

Not even the Squire evolution process was so soul-wrenching.

It was one of pure physical pain.

It certainly tested mental fortitude. Martial Artists who had managed to retain their senses and sanity from it were undoubtedly cut from those who had suffered permanent mental anguish or the Martial Apprentices who chickened out.

Yet, it didn't even hold a candle to what Rui had subjected himself.

Mental pain was different.

It was not an experiential sensation.

It was suffering.

It was pure, unadulterated, condensed suffering.

The kind that would eventually weather even the hardest of warriors.

Because the experience was mental, the flow of twas different.

It served to prolong the sheer agony that he felt from the experience.

Each moment was its own eternity.

It would stretch out forever.

"AAAAAAAAARGRHRGRHRGARGAHRGRGHRG!!!"

Rui had lost track of time.

His mental fortitude had shocked the Elder Tree, who was surprised he had managed to last as long as he did.

Species after species crashed into his mind.

The Boiling Boar species.

The Roaring Dragon species.

The Killing Kirin species.

One by one, amidst the horrors of the mental agony he experienced, he also stored them within the expanded Mind Palace.

Species by species, and more importantly, world upon world.

He received immense environmental data on how the optimal for each species ought to be, and he instantly stored it in the Mind Palace even as his mind suffered the shock of immense information being poured into it.

Ordinarily, he should have been in joy.

After all, this priceless intelligence was exactly what he had sought from the very beginning.

But alas, the path that he had chosen to go down was anything but joyful.

"AAAAAARGRHRGRHAGRAHRGRHHHHH!!!" An incoherent guttural bellow of suffering escaped him as fires within his eyes began dimming.

The darkness of fear began overcoming them.

His heart rate spiked, palpitating uncertainly.

Pure agony overran every ounce of his mind.

He felt his consciousness dimming, dimming as if it was eroded by the many waves of information that churned away at it.

It was so easy to let go.

It was almost tempting.

Why prolong his suffering when he could let himself go to the comfort of the void?

The pain only grew.

The suffering only grew.

Species upon species.

World after world.

Thousands of them, one after the other.

It was torture.

So easy to let go.

At that moment, he ccloser to letting go than he ever had.

FLASH

His eyes widened as his awareness caught sight of an anomaly within the oceans of information his mind furiously processed.

Something that called out to him.

FLASH

"This…" A quivering whisper escaped him as recognition dawned on him.

It was a pattern.

Not just one pattern.

FLASH FLASH FLASH

Many patterns.

As the Elder Tree kept pouring enormous tsunamis of information into the depths of his mind, even as it overwhelmed him, he began spotting pattern after pattern.

The environments that were most optimal for scaled creatures universally had extrtemperatures.

The environments that were most optimal for particularly larger creatures tended to have a lower temperature.

Creatures with exoskeletons tended to be best suited to environments with particularly high external pressure.

Creatures with internal skeletons tended to be able to have environments with greater gravitational fields.

Size, anatomy, density and mass distribution, diet, physiology, nature of each organ system, biochemistry. Species with similar values in sof these variables each had optimal environments that shared an element of commonality. There were definitive correlations that could be drawn between these variables and their corresponding environment.

He hadn't noticed it initially, processing them one by one, but when he organized and laid them within his Mind Palace, the patterns becincreasingly clear!

For just a moment, the pain disappeared.

The agony abated.

The suffering halted.

They were drowned out.

Drowned out by the sheer magnitude of the epiphany that struck Rui. A revelation that thundered within his mind, drowning out even the enormous ocean of information that converged on him.

A single whisper escaped him.

"These are the patterns of life itself."

Because all life in the world fundamentally emerged from a single common ancestor, patterns spread across it. The last unifying common ancestor, a mere single-celled lifeform, gave birth to several descendants, which in turn reproduced into several more descendants that eventually diverged off into all known life in the entire world, forming branches after branches of new life that all stemmed from a common root.

It was like a tree.

A Tree of Life that encompassed all life in Gaia.