He watched the female tekvore erge behind him with teleportation.
He watched her hand pierce his father’s back, erging from the front unimpeded as she ripped his heart out of his chest.
His ethereal eyes grew bloodshot with rage as he watched her take several monts to sneer at his dying father with derisive condescension.
He watched her disappear into thin air, as if she hadn’t ever been there in the first place before Pri Minister Edward roared for help. The response team had been very quick, but... it hadn’t mattered.
Emperor Rael was already dead.
He dismissed the Angel of Laplace as he returned to the present.
re minutes had passed since his passing, at most.
That ant that... it was not too late.
The realization bore heavily on him.
Ti slowed down in his eyes as he pushed his cognition to the limit.
Falling drops of blood froze midair in his eyes as his mind surged with thought, thinking at unfathomable speeds.
A single thought rang in his mind.
’I am able to resurrect him.’
That should have been the end of the decision-making process.
He could resurrect his murdered father and the most important and powerful leader in Panamic Civilization.
He could do it.
And yet, Rui gritted his teeth, clenching his fists with frustration as a profoundly deep conflicted expression erged on his face.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want his father to co back to life.
But whether his father would truly be able to return or not even if he resurrected him.
’By far, the biggest hurdle is... the ntal prison.’
When Rui resurrected Amare, she found herself drowned in a ntal prison of darkness. To be more precise, her conscious mind was imprisoned and isolated by her subconscious mind.
In order to break out of it, she needed the Martial Soul.
After all, the Martial Soul was a state of perfect harmony between the mind and the subconscious mind.
In order to get the Martial Soul, she needed Enlightennt of Self, which, with her many issues relating to identity, took her ten thousand years in ntal ti.
Enlightennt of Self was extrely difficult.
It took Martial Masters decades and centuries to achieve Enlightennt of Self.
It was almost out of reach for normal people.
His father was far from normal, of course.
It was not out of the realm of possibility that his father would achieve Enlightennt of Self.
But that was not the biggest issue.
"The biggest issue is that even if he does achieve Enlightennt of Self, he still won’t have access to a Martial Soul."
The Martial Soul was what allowed soone to break out of their ntal prison upon resurrection, not Enlightennt of Self. The latter required the forr, but it was not the sa thing as the forr.
"Without a Martial Mind, he cannot get a Martial Soul."
His father was not a Martial Artist, so it was entirely out of the question.
It would be utterly impossible for his father to break out of the ntal prison of his own power.
"Then... is it possible for to help him break through?"
His expression grew uncertain and pessimistic.
"I wasn’t able to even when I consulted the Psycher. I don’t think he has a solution either. I wasn’t able to wake her up, even when I used Gigabrain."
Most likely, it was outside the realm of material intervention.
With his recent epiphanies on the nature of consciousness and mind as information phenona occurring in their own layer of reality, he suspected that any solution to this problem would entail information phenona.
But if his most spurious of speculations were correct, then information phenona were... only accessible in the Realm of Transcendence.
Rui was indeed extraordinary.
But he could not replicate the power of Transcendence.
It was utterly beyond him, even if he activated Gigabrain, even if he elevated his mind to extraordinary heights.
Cognition alone was not the key to Transcendence.
And it certainly wasn’t the key to whatever the ’true’ Realm above the Sage Realm was.
Otherwise, NOVA would have been virtually omnipotent.
The organic superintelligence of the flora network of Genora would have been a god in its own right.
But this clearly was not the case.
If Transcendence was the solution to overcoming the ntal prison upon resurrection, then it was absolutely impossible for Rui to achieve. In other words, even if Rui resurrected his father, he would not be able to truly bring him back until he broke through to the Transcendence Realm.
Rui gritted his teeth.
A part of him deeply desired to resurrect his father’s body and to keep him in stasis as they had with Amare after he resurrected her.
And yet...
"That would be nothing short of torture."
ntal ti flowed at an extraordinary rate compared to real ti. It flowed thousands of tis faster.
Amare had experienced more than ten thousand years of life, reliving Esil’s mories until the latter’s identity was completely assimilated into hers. Rui had experienced ninety-three years of Anthea’s life in the span of days.
It was pure torture.
A torture of the worst kind.
Of the mind.
One was frozen, helpless, forced to live through a life where they had no control, no body, no power.
They were re spectators.
How long would it take for Rui to break through to the Transcendent Realm?
Even if it took as little as a decade, which was unfathomably unprecedented, it would still amount to many, many thousands of years.
On top of that, it would be even worse than what Amare and Rui went through.
At least Amare had centuries’ worth of Esil’s mories to parse through.
Rui managed to keep himself anchored with what he loved most: adaptive evolution.
His father would drown in complete darkness.
For many, many millennia.
A shaky breath escaped him.
’I cannot subject my father to that kind of torture.’
It was heinous.
And even if he decided to go through with it, by the ti he broke through to Transcendence and undid death itself, his father would have already been reduced to a vegetable.
His mind would not survive that long.
It wasn’t a matter of willpower or ntal fortitude.
His neuron connections would decay from lack of reinforcent with external stimuli and his mories would eventually fade.
His consciousness would rot.
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