The Martial Unity

"I'd like to see a map," Rui told a storekeeper. "Where can I find the Libraries of Gehu?"

The storekeeper rolled out a map, pointing at a spot on it. "About several hours of travel through carriage."

Rui nodded as he quickly scanned the map carefully and thoroughly, before leaving the store empty-handed. It wasn't long before Rui found himself near the Library of Gehu in the town of Veran within the Cerxeun Duchy.

In his time traveling through the Derschek Region, he hadn't been the victim of yet another assassination attempt. It led him to believe that it was most likely closer to a general measure as opposed to someone targeting him.

Or if someone did target him, they were either too weak to deal with the level of power that he had displayed, or their desire to take him out wasn't worth the price. In either case, it led him to believe that he was probably not special in any regard.

However, what truly drew his attention was the volatile atmosphere of the Derschek Region as he traveled through it. It wasn't that this region was impoverished, no. It was just that he got the sense that life was fleeting in this region.

The citizens lived as if they could die any moment anywhere. There was an immense air of wariness from the common folk, and he couldn't blame them.

He saw many corpses on the way to the Library of Gehu. He even witnessed a live murder and plenty of smaller acts of aggression. It was a place that did not convey even a shred of stability.

not drawing attention to themselves. Rui figured most of them were freelancer assassins for hire given how they shadily brooded

hire. He bet that in the Derschek Region, unlike in the Kandrian Empire where common folk were too poor to hire Martial Artists for anything other than the simplest of tasks, even middle-class folks could easily

where nobody was safe. The ordinary conflicts between normal people used to be generally harmless, since ordinary people were too weak to have an impact, were now quite problematic since they could just hire an assassin to take out

of the Silent Shadow turning the Gaha Archipelago into her Shadow Isles, and drawing assassins from across

the rest of the small states and settlements that Rui

arrived

different from what he had pictured. The cluster of libraries was rather wide and expansive with impressively large infrastructure

Beggar's Sect did not use the same cover to hide behind all the time. Evidently, they were also capable of masquerading as a cluster of elite libraries. The impressive establishment was in

endeavor of the Gehu Consortium, a consortium of powerful corporates that each set up a library together within

that the Beggar's Sect also basically controlled the Gehu Consortium, or at least one constituent. which didn't surprise Rui. If it needed to interact with the world, then it could not do so openly,

volume, density, and complexity of the layouts and the assortment of literature meant that

documentation well within the

studying the people who entered and exited the library. Surprisingly, it didn't just comprise of posh upper-class people. He could see

wasn't until he entered and inquired

of charge?" Rui

vast repositories of knowledge. This whole establishment is an endeavor of public charity from the Gehu Consortium to allow anybody of