The Martial Unity

Before Rui fully accepted the patronage of the Master, he had several issues to clarify.

"You mentioned something about me being a seed of the Virodhabhasa Faith. Can you please clarify that? I am very paranoid about getting deeply involved with a powerful religion for reasons I'm sure you can understand. I hope you can clarify what this is all about"

"Of course," The Master nodded understandingly. "As you are aware, the Divine Mission of the Virodhabhasa Faith is to find the Virodhabhasa before the occurrence of the Great Catastrophe. However, while the religious zealots of this religion are very motivated, it is quite the tall task to find the so-called religious deity."

Even for the Virodhabhasa Faith, the continent was too large to make such a task anything short of herculean in difficulty.

"Even when we limit our search for our deity to Martial Artists, it is almost impossible to do a comprehensive search through every Martial Artist, for obvious reasons. Martial Artists do not take kindly to being thoroughly scrutinized, and our quite secretive about their Martial Paths and Art. That is why we take a more hands-off approach."

He paused for a moment. "The head of the religion may be a sincere devotee, but he is not stupid. He has created an incentive structure for the many leaders within the religion to find candidates that can potentially be the Virodhabhasa. They are known as Virodhabhasa seeds. The condition for being known as a Virodhabhasa seed is to have a Martial Art that is roughly speaking equally effective and successful against all Martial Artists. The more seeds that a religious leader like myself finds and patrons, the greater the appreciation from the religion."

He grinned. "Of course, that appreciation does manifest in material gains."

Rui understood what was going on.

The religion was essentially leveraging the desire for material gains and other resources of the religion to make the leaders of the religion like Master Deivon actually out effort into finding the Virodhabhasa Faith.

Astral Deity is truly

understood that simple religious devotion was not enough to push the leaders of the religion to their very best to find the Virodhabhasa. He understood that simply faith was ultimately hollow. If he wanted leaders to exert themselves, there needed to be concrete benefits and incentives to get them to go

true for the Martial Artists that were not as religiously motivated, such as Master

that Master Deivon was fulfilling his duty showed that the incentive structure in place

want to know how this affects me. What does it mean

about being restricted by

mean you are halfway to being accepted as the Virodhabhasa. It's not even ten percent of the way. Hell, it's barely one percent of the way, if not being a seed is one billionth of a percent," The man explained. "It just means that your Martial Art is appreciated by the religion as holding a very minute amount of potential of being what the Virodhabhasa Faith is looking for. There are many, many seeds in existence. Thousands in the Apprentice Realm, hundreds in the Squire Realm, and dozens in the Senior Realm. There are too many to make a

about this development. But if even half of what the man was saying was true, then he probably didn't have much

want proof," Rui insisted, narrowing his eyes. "I cannot take your word on

observed the

"You can find proof as well, we have had publicized events

if it could be disproved with contemptuous ease. He intended to fact-check

to be equally effective against all fields, right? Then how do you know that I am, or could be a