CHAPTER 2486  EPIPHANY

Rui woke up almost instantly after he closed his eyes.

Or at least, that was what it felt like. "In reality, you have been asleep for three days, Your Highness," the doctor specifically assigned to his care told him. "It appears that your exhaustion from deploying a particularly mentally draining technique persists."

This was the price of the Megamind technique. It exacerbated the need for sleep of the Martial Mind greatly, causing him to sleep days at a time. It was one of the several drawbacks of the powerful technique.

Thankfully, they had rested him in the manifold in order to accelerate his recovery in the real world. It was a new policy that the Martial Union and his father had come up with in order to ensure that Martial Masters and Sages could be restored to their peak condition as quickly as possible.

"Additionally, you have only just gotten better after a long recovery period due to your battle in the war, Your Highness. We recommend not stressing your Body too much in order to minimize the risks of something wrong happening."

The doctor's words reminded Rui that he had only been awake for a day after he had woken up from his battle with Ieyasu.

He had missed the most shocking parts of the war, and had just barely woken up in time to be there for the final battle before the Beast Incursion shook the world. It was truly surreal.

When he read a brief report on what had happened during the period where he was asleep, he was stunned silent. He could have never expected that not only had Prime Minister Edward figured out exactly what he had done, but had also hidden from the powerful prophetic power of the Silas Clan and his grandmother until he was ready to drop the bombshell on the entire world. He also could not have imagined that his father had deployed Master Reina on a super top secret mission that his father had prepared four years in advance as a hidden trump card.

Yet, what shocked him most was Tokugawa Ieyasu's decision to join the Kandrian Empire.

He didn't even have time to process this information for they were beset by two emergencies in rapid succession. First, the final battle with all Sages and second, the Beast Incursion. There was simply no time to focus on anything at all.

He shook his head before opening his royal comms artifact and skimming through the intelligence reports from the Beast Incursion task force, looking for updates into the state of the defensive lines that protected the Kandrian Empire from the frenzied beasts and monsters.

The Kandrian Empire had not suffered a single civilian casualty.

On top of that, it didn't suffer a single Sage-level casualty either. This is the property of Nô-velDrama.Org.

While other Realms had suffered casualties, they were very much within the tolerable margins. Perhaps the only concern was the casualty rate of the Apprentices, but their numbers far outweighed it thanks to Rui's prior breakthroughs.

The battle was on the second shift with an entirely different set of Martial Artists who held the line even better than the previous shift did due to having the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the first shift.

This trend would only continue, causing Martial Artists and all of human civilization to deal with the beast tides better and better than before. This trait was also at the cornerstone of the rise of human civilization to become the most dominant. Frenzied beasts and monsters were incapable of cumulative adaptive evolution as far as their approach and decision-making went.

It was also why Rui was confident that human civilization would be capable of bouncing back once it survived the most immediate short-term emergencies like the beast tides themselves and the astronomical supply chain disruptions.

The success of the Kandrian Empire reduced Rui's immediate urge to return to the battlefield.

"…I have fought enough over the past year," he mused as he thought back to the sheer amount of conflicts he had gotten into. "I have also fulfilled the purpose of getting into all these conflicts.

The biggest reason he got into so many fights and battles was to refine his Martial Art in the crucibles of war. He wanted to fight against the strongest Martial Masters that East Panama had to offer and gain experience from death battles. These yielded the highest quality of experience and would allow him to consolidate all the gains he had made after becoming a Martial Master.

And now, he had perfectly fulfilled that original goal over the past year.

He had fought against many, many powerful Martial Masters, including the very strongest Masters that East Panama had to offer.

His second main goal in the war was to make progress to the Sage Realm by hitting the verge of death without actually dying.

And he had indeed made progress to the Sage Realm doing this.

His battle against Ieyasu was one of the most grueling struggles of his entire life where he truly pushed himself to the absolute limit.

And in the process of unsealing his memories in his dreams and recreating his mother with a powerful predictive and large language model helped him take a firm step in the direction of understanding who he was. Furthermore, fighting Ieyasu and witnessing the VOID algorithm from the outside in another person also taught him more about himself.

The adaptive evolution came from the soul, not the mind.

Together, these helped him gain deeper self-understanding.

Not just that.

All these events had also given him a deep suspicion into what the Enlightenment of Self actually was.

He had asked many Martial Sages on what it truly felt like to have gained the Enlightenment of Self and what the Martial Soul actually was, but they were simply unable to answer that question.

It was like describing the color red to someone who was blind.

It was not possible to convey the experience of the color red to someone through words.

Yet, with these experiences that he had gone through, Rui had felt like he had finally gained a faint insight of what the Enlightenment of Self was from a scientific point of view.

"It might be…" A whisper escaped him as he sharpened his eyes. "A predictive model on the sum totality of one's entire being."

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