The Martial Unity

'...What in the world?' Rui narrowed his eyes as he approached the giant corpse. It was a giant male corpse that was approaching the size of a small hill, which was absolutely astounding. With just a single glance, his mind had already computed several anomalies besides its size.

'The visual signs of decay don't match the expected smell profile.' Rui immediately noticed.

The flesh had long sung and begun eroding in a sickly green and black, the teeth and the nails had already begun falling out, which indicated several weeks had passed. But the odor was much more tame and not as overwhelming as he would expect from a rotting corpse as large as the one before him.

'That's not all,' Rui sky-walked to get a better perspective. 'Why haven't the scavengers taken to feasting on this body when it had first died?'

Rui instantly noticed that the corpse was not mangled or torn apart like he would have expected from the scavengers. That was an inconsistency.

'They either couldn't or didn't.' Rui concluded, before glancing back at the corpse. 'The question that begs itself the most, however, is what the size of the corpse means.'

Nothing in the intelligence supplied by the Beggar's Sect indicated the existence of a giant human species native to the Great Forest of Hypnonarak.

'No, in the first place, I have never heard of a human variant species at all ever, especially one so big. A species that big would be an existential threat if it had the same psychogenetic traits and the fertility of the human species.' Rui sharply analyzed. 'Furthermore, the Great Forest of Hypnonarak is an artificially created danger zone. If this were a natural native species to the Beast Domain, then it would mean that the Hypnomaster brought it along with him.'

Unless Rui somehow had had a massive blindspot and some just missed all information pertaining to this human species.

'No, that's absurdly unlikely as such a species would be an enormous threat if it were a sized-up version of the human species. There is almost no way I could possibly miss such a thing.' Rui narrowed his eyes. 'Especially given that this man was certainly an intelligent being. If he was a different species, it would mean the entire species was as intelligent as normal humans. They would be an enormous threat'

Rui had already deduced that this man was an intelligent being based on hints of a sophisticated tattoo that was nearly erased. It would mean the species was intelligent if they were a different species. The standard human of this species would be much stronger than Martial Apprentices possibly even Martial Squires, and if such an enormous species had Martial Artists then...

'Then we would be doomed. We aren't doomed, therefore the probability of this being a separate species is extremely low,' Rui mused. 'Thus the next most reasonable conclusion is...'

That this was a person of his own species who had experienced some phenomenon that made him grow much larger. He had already concluded the existence of a connection to the Forest of Giants the moment he laid eyes on the corpse and the probability of that simply rose the more he observed and analyzed the corpse.

'The fact that the Beggar's Sect was unaware of this informs me of a lot.' Rui mused. 'I can safely conclude that this was most certainly an extremely rare fluke phenomenon.'

The Beggar's Sect gathered intelligence from nearly every facet of human civilization which made their intelligence-gathering capabilities remarkably high. Thus Rui could deduce almost as much information from their lack of information on this phenomenon as he would have had they actually possessed knowledge on the absurdity that he was witnessing.

'I can conclude that nobody who has seen it has made it back out of the forest,' Rui deduced. 'If they had, then they would have most likely made a report to somebody. If they were searching for the Hypnomaster and were independent like me, then they would have no reason to return at this point in their journey in the forest.'

That deduction told him much about the limits of raiders and the difficulties that lay ahead. Rui had inferred a lot of information from the fact that this corpse had been rotting for a month and nobody knew about it.

'Still, that doesn't answer what happened to this man for him to become so big.' Rui mused. 'However, the probability that it is connected to the size of the Forest of Giants is high, which...'

Rui quickly accessed the documents that the Beggar's Sect had provided him on the Forest of Giants. The Forest of Giants was as large as it was not due to design from the Hypnomaster, but rather due to a ring section of the forest coming into contact with some powerful esoteric substances deep underground with its roots.

The esoteric substance had apparently caused the massive expansion of life leading to the Forest of Death. The phenomenon was similar to dungeonification, however, it had taken this route instead of dungeonification.

Rui thought back to one of the floors in the Shionel Dungeon where an entire town had been swept up by the dungeonification, wiping out most humans except for a handful who managed to survive the poisoned food of the dungeon warping their bodies and minds.

'Is this a similar case?' Rui narrowed his eyes. 'No, if eating anything in the Forest of Giants caused people to overbloat and die or something like that, then it would be well known to avoid doing such a thing.'

All logical considerations pointed to this event being a fluke or a random event that had caused the expansion and death of the male.

'It was the other way around most likely,' Rui realized. 'This person may very well have undergone mass expansion after death rather than before. If the mass expansion does not increase the amount of organic matter despite increasing mass, then it could explain why scavengers haven't feasted on it, or why its smell profile doesn't match its actual decomposition.'