Published at 11th of July 2026 6:28 am

Chapter 4301: The Problem of Manifolds

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Ria’s amber eyes lit up at those words. She didn’t think she would be able to come to a preliminary agreement with the Esoterist, but she had ultimately managed to prove the worth of her senses to him, as crazy as the sequence of events that followed was. Of course, she didn’t let her jubilation at securing his cooperation in an agreement let her forget that she needed to make sure that she got what she needed from him.

"All of this is contingent on your ability to provide me with a technological solution that can prove, to independent third parties, that a given world is infected," she reminded him. "My goal is to leverage my capacity to sense infected worlds for the good of human civilization, but I can’t do that if I can’t prove that the information I’m selling is verifiably factual."

It was the whole reason she had approached him, after all. Potential infected worlds were identified through anomalies, and they were generally only confirmed through the presence of esoteric matter.

But most infected worlds didn’t make it so easy to identify the infected matter in their depths.

The Psyker turned towards the Esoterist with a curious expression. "Wouldn’t the Samsara Tide interstellar ballistic weapons you have developed work? Couldn’t she just point you towards planets that she has confirmed are infected and then have you exterminate the virus within that world using those weapons like you just did with Planet X-167?"

The Esoterist simply shook his head. "That would only work for the minority of infected worlds that don’t have manifolds. The way the Samsara Tide works is that it simply exterminates all life. The Samsara Tide in my weapons is harvested from the samples that Rui provided, which were programmed to detect deep-biosphere bacteria that served as the apparatus of the virus. But..."

His eyes sharpened.

"Manifolds are the biggest problem," he remarked knowingly, a hint of irritation emerging in his eyes. "Based on the information we have gotten from the laminar integuments. This galaxy appears to be infested with a branch of the virus that has mastered the art of concentrating the infection within a manifold."

He turned towards Ria. "Just like Gaia. I lived in that manifold for two centuries with cutting-edge high-grade esoteric technology, by the standards of those days, of course, and never once detected the manifold."

Ria’s eyes grew curious at those words. "What was it like to live inside a prison your entire life?"

She had been born years after the Unfolding, as it was called in the Kandrian Empire, had occurred. To her, it was merely something to be read about in a book.

He shrugged. "Like living in a normal world. That manifold disguised the section of our reality so perfectly that nobody could even fathom it. You really gotta hand it to the virus for being able to hide itself so well."

"It’s a product of evolutionary biology, but on a cosmic scale," the Psyker remarked with a curious expression. "In our Tree of Life, we have many animals that have mastered the art of hiding. There are insects that are indistinguishable from leaves and twigs. There are creatures that can change their color to match their surroundings, and even esoteric lifeforms that can become completely invisible and impenetrable. The capacity to hide one’s presence is an extremely powerful predictor of survival; many lifeforms evolve it through natural selection. I suspect..."

He turned towards the two of them. "...that early on in the virus’s history, when it was still spreading through the universe and our galaxy, only branches of the virus that could hide themselves well would survive contact with other intelligent life. Over millions, if not billions, of years, it has gone as far as to evolve manifolds that warp reality itself to hide the infection of a planet to make it seem otherwise normal. As far as I’m aware, there are only two solutions to being able to detect an infected world hidden by a manifold, and one of them..."

He directed a pointed gaze towards her.

"...is you."

She raised an eyebrow. "And the other?"

"Martial Transcendents," he replied. "I have reason to believe that the thirteen Transcendents of our civilization, before they disappeared, were aware of the manifold. But not even your father is able to detect the presence of all infected worlds across at least a portion of the cosmos. That’s how elusive manifold-hidden infected worlds are. The infected worlds that we detect, like Planet Amadeus III, and capture are simply their less-evolved cousins. And, just like Darwinian evolution by natural selection in our world, they too will be eliminated from the ’gene pool,’ so to speak, and will not pass on their inferior characteristics to the next generation of viruses."

She turned back towards the Esoterist with a raised eyebrow. "Do you truly have something that can help me prove to third parties that a particular planet is infected? Even if the infection is hidden by a manifold? Or even by other mechanisms? I can’t tell them, ’oh, I have a strong intuition that this world is infected.’"

"No, you cannot," the Esoterist admitted, but shot back with an excited grin. "But what if I told you that manifolds, as extremely good as they are, are hiding infections, are not absolute? What if I told you that there were ways to get in and out of a manifold without necessarily disrupting the manifold?"

Her eyes widened at those words. "...what? Is such a thing possible?"

A smug smile emerged on his face. "It was a conclusion that I came to after researching the Kandrian Manifold from afar with—"

He waved his hand, causing the image of a massive satellite hovering in space to emerge before her. The sheer scale of the satellite was utterly titanic. It stretched ten kilometers. An accompanying diagram of its positioning and alignment illustrated that it was pointed at the Kandrian Empire.

"—Proprietary Quantum Entropy Esoteric Satellite technology, or QEES technology," he remarked smugly. "It can measure quantum entropy across an entire planet using ten quintillion quantum sensors made from a special kind of esoteric matter known as tensor-decay evanescite with special spin properties that—"

"I don’t care for the scientific gibberish," Ria scoffed at him. "Explain in simple words."

She didn’t care to entertain the ramblings of a nerd.

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