Chapter 1959: She Was Wrong

"...now I shall manifest the Tree of Life within the depths of my mind."

Rui walked past Kane with a chilling smile on his face. The promised time had finally arrived. The prospect of finally fulfilling the desire that kept him going was one of the few things that brought life back to his eyes.

He left his quarters, taking high up to the skies as he indulged in the fresh air of the Garden of Salvation.

For a moment, he beheld the biosphere within the Garden of Salvation.

A seemingly endless ocean of life that spread a great stretch beyond what the eye could see.

Within the depths of his mind, he accessed the Garden of Salvation that had firmly become a part of his Mind Palace, wringing out all the relevant patterns from the vast ocean of data that lay deep within his mind.

Attribute by attribute.

Trait by trait.

Species by species.

And the environments that correlated with them.

What followed truly brought thrill to an otherwise dead man.

His eyes lit up with wonder as he began constructing the Tree of Life predictive model—a tapestry to be woven from the countless patterns. He had already begun weaving what was bound to be the largest predictive model he had ever created in his entire life.

No Martial Artist that he had ever seen could compare to the sheer depth of patterns of all life.

He closed his eyes as he wove them.

Thread by thread.

Pattern by pattern.

Ordinarily, forming a predictive model from pre-existing data was an easy and brief process. It used to take some time when he was in a fight because he created predictive models because he needed to gather all the data to draw patterns. When the Angel of Laplace came into the picture, that time was cut extremely short because it would supply him with all the data he needed.

Yet, despite having all the data he needed, it still took time.

Yet, even as it did, the Tree of Life slowly came to be.

With each passing moment, the Tree of Life grew.

With each passing moment, it grew more real.

The essence of the data of billions of species that Rui had inherited from Elder Tree went into its creation. Worthy of a predictive model named after the mythical Yggdrasil, said to encompass all life.

Rui narrowed his eyes as he revved up his effort, exerting the net entirety of his mind, reaching a dimension of cognition that no Martial Senior could even begin to dream of. In the past year, his mind had grown more powerful under tremendous stress and strain. The sheer power of thought he had accomplished had spiked so far above his peers that it was difficult to consider him to be in the same Realm.

His mind had risen to be an aberrant among aberrants.

Now, he exerted the sum totality of his effort, reaching a state of absolute focus and concentration as he wove together a titanic Tree of Life in his Mind Palace.

It helped that in the past year, he had increasingly spent more time in a hyper-focused state. Entering a state of absolute focus became easier and easier; it became second nature.

It needed to.

He spent the entirety of his waking day inheriting the database of the Elder Tree. This was a task that, if he gave anything less than his absolute best, he would fail and suffer tremendous consequences.

And that allowed him to construct the Tree of Life at an astonishing pace.

And soon enough, the decisive moment came.

RUMBLE

The final thread locked into place as the tapestry of the Tree of Life came to life.

It changed everything.

In his mind, an unfathomable depth of understanding of the very fabric of life consumed him. A deep comprehension of the profound relationship between life and heaven and earth sunk into his mind. An otherworldly awareness permeated the sum totality of his existence.

Enlightenment.

Yet, it didn't change him.

No.

It changed the world.

He opened his eyes, beholding the Garden of Salvation.

It was a sight that had become banal and mundane after a year of exposure.

Yet, it wasn't.

It was as though he was now able to see a dimension of the universe that had remained hidden from him his entire life.

"Ah..." A serene whisper escaped Rui. "This..."

This was the Tree of Life.

With every living being he beheld, he was able to see something that wasn't there.

A parallel world around each of them.

Worlds that were most antithetical to each of them.

One that most adaptively evolved against their existence.

He could see exactly what kind of domain would be most antithetical to them, what domain he ought to conjure to adaptively evolve the very root of the world against them. It was as though the very fabric of fundamental reality, the very ontology of the world, had changed such that each being was accompanied by an invisible antithetical parallel world that followed them everywhere they went.

Worlds that he alone was able to see.

Worlds he didn't make an effort to see.

He wasn't exerting himself in the slightest.

Yet, he was able to see nonetheless. His latest and most powerful predictive model had comfortably planted itself in the depths of his mind, spreading its branches and roots across the entirety of his conscious mind and beyond.

Perhaps that was why he was able to see a world antithetical to each and every single living being in his field of sensing.

It was passive.

Certainly not conscious.

It had integrated into his awareness.

Could it even be considered a system of thought?

He didn't know.

A distant memory resurfaced from many years ago.

"You can never know," Master Reina had told him a long time ago. "You can never know when your Martial Mind is complete. No one can."

Yet when he closed his eyes, a single instinct erupted from deep within the depths of his soul.

A single whisper escaped him.

"She was wrong."

At that moment, his mind, heart, soul, and every cell in his body...the sum totality of his being became certain of a single truth.

He had arrived at the cusp of the Master Realm.