The Martial Unity

As Rui belatedly realized, the ramifications of defeating the Gatekeeper were far greater than he had imagined.

A new burden fell on his shoulders.

The title of the strongest Martial Senior in the Kandrian Empire.

This wasn't the first time that he had been acknowledged as the strongest of the Realm. He had experienced just this in the Apprentice and Squire Realms as well, but he didn't expect that he would thrust into the pinnacle this early.

He still felt a nagging sense of unworthiness.

It stemmed from the fact that he needed to activate Angel of Laplace before the battle began and stall while he furiously processed the technique.

This was all fine and well in a duel setting, but the fact of the matter was that most of the battles that Rui fought were not duels; they were genuine life-and-death battles. He would not always get the chance to simply activate Angel of Laplace before the battle began.

He also would have undoubtedly lost if the Angel of Laplace had not kickestarted the predictive model to initial completion. The Gatekeeper was so much stronger that even Rui's greatest trump card could only allow him to maintain a stalemate of not dying.

"Tsk," Rui tutted, narrowing his eyes.

He had undoubtedly gotten closer to his goal, but the Angel of Laplace was one of the greatest beasts that he had ever had to tame. Short of the actual VOID algorithm itself, nothing gave him more trouble than the Angel of Laplace did.

The day he mastered it perfectly to be able to use it in combat seamlessly was the day that he would be entirely confident of being regarded as the strongest Martial Senior of Kandria. Until then, he could only strive to be worthy.

It wasn't just the respect and admiration he received from people in his orbit and beyond for defeating the Gatekeeper.

It was also the changes in attitude that people showed him when he got all the high-ranking government officials needed to commence the Coronation Ceremony.

In the eyes of others, he was the de facto third Emperor of Kandria. He was undoubtedly the one who would ascend the throne and gain power that equaled the Martial Union's. He already was one of the most powerful people in human civilization.

He began receiving shows of deep deference from those around him, as he had already ascended the throne.

It was a taste of what the Emperor undoubtedly went through his entire life.

People stopped seeing him for himself and were more prone to see the shadow of the throne and crown when they looked at him.

It was an unpleasant experience.

One that only reaffirmed his determination not to ascend the throne as Emperor.

Once he gained a good grasp of the circumstances that had unfolded in the month that he had been recovering, he immediately secluded himself in returning to his physical peak. While his health was entirely fine, his body lost a bit its habituation to exertion, strain, and stress.

Rather than training his techniques, he simply accustomed his body to getting pushed to the limit comfortably. This process would normally take far longer for humans, but the Martial Body was intended for the purpose of exertion, strain, and stress; thus, Rui expected to reach his peak much sooner.

He didn't intend to depart from the Kandrian Empire before he reached his peak. The Beast Domain was not a place he could afford to be when he was not at his very best.

In addition to nurturing himself back to his physical peak, he continued aggressively researching the Divine Doctor. Naturally, he made sure to keep pretenses up and not let his true intentions be divulged, which wasn't easy, but he had gained more information on where he could find the man.

In the previous nine months, he had leveraged the massive network that he had gained as a result of expanding his faction to learn more about the human sages under the pretense of seeking to reel these extraordinary individuals into his faction to increase his political capital and to use their knowledge to the benefit of the empire.

It was a highly plausible excuse that did not evoke any suspicion because he was not the only one who had sought to achieve just this. Many powerful members of the ruling class of humanity had already tried to win over these incredible human sages.

Almost all of them failed.

Not for lack of trying.

It made sense that Rui was confident that he could succeed where others had failed due to how much power he had amassed across all of humanity.

Regardless, he leveraged his powerful faction to gain potential avenues of pursuit in order to find each of the human sages. While he pretended to care about all of them equally, he had secretly paid attention to the only person on the list of human sages that he cared about.

In regards to the Divine Doctor, there were a handful of potential avenues through which he could get a clearer answer for the location of this particular human sage.

The first was the Beggar Sage, the founder and current leader of the Beggar's Sect.

It was said that, across all of human civilization, the Beggar Sage was the most knowledgeable human of all time. The man was said to know everything that the Beggar's Sect knew.

Rui found this particularly difficult to believe. Anyone who was aware of how the Beggar's Sect worked was aware of the sheer amount of information that this secret organization possessed.

It was unfathomable.

Most estimates Rui had heard put the proportion of humanity that was secretly a part of the Beggar's Sect to be anywhere between six and nineteen percent of humanity. Even the lowest estimate still meant an absurdly large number of spies that fed information to the Beggar's Sect every single day.

Rui was deeply skeptical about whether he could even memorize the net entirety of the Beggar's Sect's information, even with his highly advanced Mind Palace technique.