The Martial Unity

Rui's luxury suite was, well, luxurious. It was the kind that would be used to house extremely important and special guests, after all. One of the things that Rui was pleased about was that the guildmaster did not mess around and rather quickly supplied Rui with all the data that he sought.

He found a box on the table in his suite that contained thick and dense piles of documents and files after he returned from a relaxing tub bath.

He had no interest in beating around the bush.

Immediately diving into the pile, fishing out what served as an index for which files contained what.

"Valley of Prisms…ah, there it is," Rui spotted the document that contained what he was looking for.

The empirical data of ecological and environmental parameters of the Valley of Prisms in the past few decades.

Now, all he needed to do was observe the changes in the Valley of Prisms in that timeframe, subtract the changes that occurred constantly and uniformly, and look for any potentially abrupt disruption during the time period that the Divine Doctor was supposed to have arrived at the Valley of Prisms, according to the Beggar Sage.

The data provided had all kinds of tabular data, graphs, and charts pertaining to things like population count of fauna and flora, food chain demographics, changes in topography, land, and air, as well as fluctuations in evaluated danger level.

Simply glancing through the data confirmed to Rui that there was indeed a constant change.

One that lined up with the Beast Convergence Theory presented by the Ecologer, an immortal sage who had been granted immortality by the Beggar Sage for her extraordinary progress and contributions to ecology.

The data demonstrated a tendency for migration of fauna species towards the center of the Beast Domain. Herbivorous species slowly moved toward the center of the Beast Domain while grazing on lands.

Carnivorous species began hunting for prey in regions closer to the center.

That did not mean their progress was unstopped.

The Beast Domain grew more dangerous the deeper one went in. This was because the threat level of all species rose significantly. Thus, when species of the Beast Domain tried moving deeper, they ran into stronger beasts that were often territorial, which restricted their migration.

There were also often topographical and environmental barriers. A drastic shift in the environment would hamper migration since these species would not be able to sustainably live in such conditions.

Thus, migration efforts were stalled and bounced back.

In the Valley of Prisms, this was exactly why the migration efforts.

That was until Rui reached the year that the Divine Doctor was supposed to have entered the Valley of Prisms.

"Woah…" Rui's eyebrows furrowed as there was a sudden spike in several parameters.

During that year, the Valley of Prisms experienced mass migration from the various species that did live in the valley at the time. They all, rather abruptly, moved away.

"This…" Rui's eyes lit up with interest.

Simultaneously, during that time, flora health began decreasing significantly as plants and trees, esoteric or otherwise, began dying up and even rotting while they were still alive.

This persisted for a brief period before it stopped, and the flora slowly recovered. The fauna also eventually returned.

It was marked as an anomaly whose cause was entirely unknown to this day. Some meta-analyses have been conducted that hypothesized that a powerful monster with potentially poisonous esoteric capabilities had traveled through the forest at the time.

However, Rui disagreed.

"Unique chaos," Rui remarked with delight.

It lined up with the tips that the Beggar Sage had told Rui when looking for the Divine Doctor. He was already very credible due to his position and known capabilities. And the fact that his words appeared to be true lent further credit to them.

This was the easy part since he had the data on the valley during the time period that the Divine Doctor was confirmed to be in the Valley of Prisms.

'The difficult part starts from here on out," Rui narrowed his eyes.

He had no idea where the Divine Doctor had gone. He had no idea how fast he had moved. The only path forward was scouring through all the data and finding patterns similar to what had happened in the Valley of Prisms.

'Thankfully, pattern recognition is my strongest suit,' Rui smiled as he immediately got to work.

The most likely direction that the Divine Doctor would take was probably going to be straight ahead towards the center. The probability that he would take a steep turn to the right or left from the Valley of Prisms was extremely low. Otherwise, he would have directly gone straight to that location rather than going through the Valley of Prisms.

Unfortunately for Rui, the Beast Domain was a more chaotic place than he had expected. The data from the Adventurer's Guild showed how little about the Beast Domain humanity truly understood.

There were many abrupt and colossal data shifts.

There were little to no explanations for most of them. It was so frequent that the data landscape resembled the seismograph readings of an earthquake. It was utterly incomprehensible.

While he could be reasonably certain, based on the overlapping timing, that the Divine Doctor had caused the mass emigration of the Valley of Prisms, he could not ascertain where the Divine Doctor had gone from there on out by looking for statistical anomalies in the ecological and environmental data because there were too many of them.

"Damn, stopped at the second step," Rui cursed.

As far as he could see, there were three possibilities as to where the Divine Doctor had gone on from there out if Rui used the 'chaos' searching method that the Beggar Sage had told him about.

These were three locations that were somewhat close to the Valley of Prisms but deeper into the Beast Domain. Each had its own ecological anomaly shortly after the mass emigration of the Valley of Prism, presenting Rui with three possible paths that the Divine Doctor might have taken.