The Martial Unity

Kane scratched his fuzzy chin as he considered the question. "I dunno, couldn't it just observe the circumstances of whichever living being it was evaluating? If it even did that in the first place."

"I'm only presuming intelligent intervention because it has the least amount of assumptions out of all possibilities and follows the evidence," Rui calmly replied. "In reality, we don't know anything about the Garden of Salvation. Including if it exists or not."

Neither of them had any idea how the Garden of Salvation 'accepted' living beings in need of a safe haven. Or if there was even an intelligent mind that accepted and rejected candidates by going through them.

However, if it existed, considering that those who entered it claimed to have entered it when they were in need of a safe haven the most, then, assuming it wasn't a coincidence, one could infer there was some intelligence that identified living beings who were in need of refuge.

"So how would this intelligence recognize which beings required a safe haven and which didn't?" Rui reiterated his question.

"You don't think what I said earlier, simply analyzing their circumstances, is a good explanation?" Kane raised an eyebrow.

"Anything is possible," Rui answered. "However, not all circumstances are easy to parse. Considering the number of living beings alleged to have been in there, the sheer amount of information that said intelligence would need to process is beyond fathoming. Thus, considering the difficulty, I believe it is unlikely that the intelligence, if it even exists, was manually analyzing each potential candidate for entry into the Garden of Salvation."

"It does sound extraordinarily difficult," Kane admitted. "But what else could it be if not that?"

"It could be something that all living beings in dire circumstances and in need of a safe haven have in common," Rui remarked, narrowing his eyes. "Like fear, for example. If the intelligence measured fear, then it could decide very quickly."

"I suppose that's possible."

"After having established that, let us go back to the Divine Doctor," Rui remarked. "He wanted to enter the Garden of Salvation. If he arrived at the same conclusion that I did, that it was much easier for the Garden of Salvation to judge a candidate's need for a safe haven by emotional parameters such as fear than circumstantial information, then what would someone who wanted to be chosen by the Garden of Salvation need to do?"

"Be fearful? Wait…" Kane's expression grew stunned as he finally caught on to the train of logic. "You think that the Divine Doctor was hoping to find the Garden of Salvation by making it seem like he was in dire need of a safe haven by consuming the fear-hallucinogen and making it seem like he was in extreme fear. That's genius!"

He turned to Rui, marveling at his deductive capabilities. "You figured all of that in a moment?"

"As the Divine Doctor, I suspect…" Rui sharpened his gaze. "If this hypothesis is true, then I suspect that this was his whole plan from the very beginning. He arrived at the Valley of Prisms to gain access to invisibility by bio-engineering the flora of the region and to refine his other chemical weapons. All so that he could enslave the obsidian wyverns for the sake of using them to reduce the flora of the Forest of Fear down to the core esoteric substances responsible for the fear of the forest. And that in turn was to create extraordinarily potent fear-hallucinogens. However…"

Rui closed his eyes. "And even all of that was just a part of his full plan. Even the fear-hallucinogens of the Forest of Fear were ultimately just a tool to get into the Garden of Salvation. That must have been his true goal."

"That's crazy…" Kane murmured, staggered by the depth of the Divine Doctor's plan that Rui had deduced and pieced together.

Yet, it was a sense of deja vu.

He glanced at his best friend with a wry smile.

"The question is whether he succeeded with his plan," Rui remarked, too immersed in his thoughts to notice Kane's pointed stare. "If he failed, then, frankly, we have nothing to go off of. However, if he succeeded, we still have nothing to go off of."

"…Then what now?" Kane stared at Rui.

Rui considered the matter for several moments.

They had finally hit a true snag. Rui had hoped that they could keep following the Divine Doctor by learning of his next location through the memories of the animals of the region he had disrupted, but, alas, that strategy didn't work because finding the Garden of Salvation was basically impossible.

"The location of the Garden of Salvation…" Rui narrowed his eyes.

He knew that it was supposed to be in the northern part of the Beast Domain, on the brink of the Master-level region of the Beast Domain. The reason this was known was that Martial Artists who had left the Garden of Salvation had described environmental parameters that matched up with that particular depth in the Beast Domain.

As one went deeper into the Beast Domain, the very world around them gradually shifted and grew increasingly hostile to all life. The air grew denser and more opaque and resistant to movement while the land beneath them impeded anything that stood atop it with earthquakes, lava, cracks, and ridges.

Martial Masters who had been accepted by the Garden of Salvation insisted that the sky was identical to the region that was considered to be on the brink of the Master-level region. Thus, those who searched for it did so at this particular ring around the northern part of the Beast Domain.

"We'll have to go there ourselves." Rui closed his eyes, heaving a sigh.

"Didn't you say that many people have searched for the Garden of Salvation?" Kane asked.

"Yes." Rui nodded. "And now, we'll be among them."

He got up, patting the dust off himself. "Let's go. We don't have time to waste."

"Huff…" Kane heaved a sigh. "Fun."

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