His attention shifted to the pyramids. Deep beneath previous excavation attempts, there are preserved technological items uncharacteristic to the era of rest of it. Then he sensed a faint life signature in an underground cave.
## En Sabah Nur
Looking through the ancient tomb with his divine sense, Tao had already pinpointed the unusual presence slumbering deep below.
En Sabah Nur.
He wasn't the vibrant blue of the movies yet. Is it because he's not fully awake? he wondered.
But still bald.
He watched a woman, dressed entirely wrong for the local culture, slip into the entrance. Her face was different from the actress he remembered. Moira.
Watching what he only seen in movies being played out for real was once again giving him a feeling that every person here is a puppet played by threads of fate.
She is not a mutant as in comics. Is it because it was hidden gene? No. This is just plain old human. When he completed his checks, she was already descending into the hole where a bunch of zealots chanted Nur's name. Which meant his awakening was imminent.
The reveal of mutants a decade ago by Magneto and Mystique's stunt caused all sorts of cults to spring up, he thought, plucking the information from her mind. They worship mutants as divine signs or omens of the end. The Ashir En Sabah Nur is one of them.
In the few moments it took to process this, he was already high above the slum cities of Cairo, his mind automatically cataloging the languages washing over him ~ English, Arabic, and dozens of others.
Then, a massive earthquake hit. But it was more than that; he felt spatial laws themselves snap into place.
A few moments later, in the middle of a bustling street, he sensed it: a primordial, destabilizing energy of a great awakening. Psionic energy, but vaster and more raw than any telepath he'd encountered.
Still not fully awake but he is now part of the story of the world now.
The psychic event wasn't just an earthquake; it was a jolt to the fabric of reality itself. Far away, the telepath Jean Grey stirred from her slumber, responding to the same shockwave.
Basically, his thoughts of destroying the modern world are already resonating in his psychic signature, Tao inferred. The Phoenix, being the ultimate authority on that front, is letting Jean know.
He decided then to become a passive observer. Meditated his mind while sorting through the information and events happening outside.
The powerful mutant known as Apocalypse ~ En Sabah Nur, the first of his kind ~ had been unwittingly roused by Moira MacTaggert.
You have to feel for his cultists - they've been waiting centuries for this, only to find out that the 'First Mutant' didn't need blood sacrifices, ancient magics to wake up. He just needed some reflected sunlight. Man just needed a decent tan."
(He was now a shade of blue, as expected. Major villains I know are mostly blue for some reason: Thanos, Conqueror Kang in his armor, Ronan and the Kree, Blastaar, Sinister... and now Apocalypse.)
He rose and walked through the streets of Cairo, his form ancient and humanoid but clad in techno-organic armor that screamed "I'm important," yet he couldn't even get directions to the nearest palace.
The people still looks familiar but in new attire and talking distorted languages. Apparently, five millennia is long enough for a language to "go out of style."
He noticed a young girl, Ororo, using her powers.
Frustrated that no one understood his perfectly accented Ancient Egyptian, he did what any reasonable ancient deity would do: he decapitated a merchant. After turning another man into a permanent piece of street décor (embedded in stone), he decided that if he couldn't have a conversation, he'd just have a monologue. Modern problems required ancient, violent solutions.
Adjusting to the modern world with terrifying speed, Apocalypse began his campaign to cleanse and rebuild it, believing in the brutal philosophy of social Darwinism: only the strong survive. The rest of the population, however, failed his vibe check.
He prepared to assemble his Four Horsemen to aid him in wiping out humanity.
## Destiny
As all this unfolded, Tao, having dialed back his senses to a manageable level, marveled at the sequence of events happening elsewhere. It felt pre-ordained, a testament to this reality's unique storytelling.
Magneto was being reported, authorities starting their hunt. If that earthquake hadn't happened, small events leading to his daughter and wife's death, what reason would Apocalypse have to convince him? Psychic suggestion might work, but En Sabah Nur wasn't as skilled as Charles.
If he didn't settle for the bird-man and chose Caliban to find worthy Horsemen? If he'd gone looking for the famed Mystique? Learned of Xavier's school? He'd be like someone shopping for superhumans.
Regardless, Charles Xavier would try to comfort his friend and end up kidnapped ~ Havok would die, Cyclops would step up. But even if Apocalypse had the patience to complete his transformation in secret, Tao's mind whispered that the Phoenix seed inside Jean Grey meant not all futures favored En Sabah Nur.
< PoV Shift >
## Nina and Magda
Watching the stand-off unfold in Poland, I attempted to spatially travel there. Influencing reality beyond my domain was difficult, but anything on Earth was close enough. The farther I reached, the harder it became to manipulate the resonant laws.
***
I was there seeing their final reunion standing above the skies.
I watched Magneto's daughter Nina and her mother get skewered with an arrow.
I saw him killing the men in anger and hatred. I saw him holding injured bodies closer for hours feeling the cold creeping in his hands.
I can feel his thoughts of accompanying them, but a small desire for the reckoning to those who he saved yesterday kept him away.
I could feel his depth and knowing his life story, I felt something akin to pity.
I waited until their souls began to detach, then safely preserved them in my hands. Let's see how Magneto reacts later. What if the X-Men felt there was someone in the shadows helping them? Would they reach out?
***
A grieving Magneto stopped and gave the bodies a proper burial.
I could have saved the soldiers too... but I only did what interested me.
Time passes faster when there are interesting things to observe.
***
I had indeed resurrected both mother and daughter, taking them from their grave unconscious. But letting them out on their own there would do no good. I made the decision to render them unconscious and protect them within a barrier in my soul realm's artifact.
As Apocalypse began his grand play for Magneto, I grew bored of the theater. Why watch the play when you can own the actors? In a heartbeat, I manifested a mirror-image of the group within the borders of my domain.
I recreated the exact group and confined them within, while leaving the originals to go about their apocalyptic business in the real world.
Watching a 'god' and his 'Horsemen' lose their minds when they realized they were trapped was amusing for a minute, but the screaming was getting tedious. I didn't need a gesture or a spell; in this space, my will is the only law of physics. It was time for a timeout. I decided to cool them off before they broke my furniture. My domain ~ my rules.
## Mutants
Next, I was above the skies of Xavier's school in Westchester County, New York, hidden from plain sight. Seeing there was time before the main events, I immersed myself in my usual hobby.
Yes. Studying interesting abilities and pursuit of unknown.
Right now, floating freely in the air before me was my collection: Apocalypse, Storm, Psylocke, Angel, Magneto, Nina. I watched them with clinical interest.
I had no reason to recreate the other children and adults in the mansion below; they were literally within my domain. The LoHP could make inferences directly.
In the Void, mutants had been too far apart and few in number.
Now, the ones in front of me were confused, struggling, and coordinating to figure out the ghostly entity before them. For them, I was just an unresponsive silhouette.
It was a chaotic theater. Apocalypse attempted to tear through space, only to find the "space" didn't belong to him. Magneto was a broken man, weeping and shouting at the simulacrums of his wife and Nina, convinced this was some cruel psychic torture. I watched their "power expressions" flare and then gutter out like dying candles - I had simply severed their connection to the cosmic and psionic planes.
My domain, my silence.
I sank into their genomes with my Divine Sense, peeling back layers of memory and awakening conditions. I left morality to the philosophers and ethics to the weak; in that moment, I felt a kinship with Nathaniel Essex.
Rest assured, however - no clones were harmed. They were merely... paused for inspection.
## Genetic Structures
Life doesn't follow the same origin story as evolution everywhere. I already figured it out.
LoHP did the heavy lifting. The complex flesh I just house in, is made of such. Being good in flaw identification, I just gave it permutations of structures to analyze what and how emergent complexity arise from small changes.
I can see the unnatural meddling being done in the normal progression of evolution not to mutants, but to all humans to accelerate the process. Time passed as I was fully invested in scientific analysis within my mind lab.
I can now fully analyze the flaws of any human genome and make up their expressions directly after observing the interactions within my scope and knowledge obtained from ~ minds of those in void, HWR, Apocalypse's hands on experience, and the information receiving right now and those from the world.
Mutant ones though? It was exponentially more complex.
## The Mutant Genome
The ultimate purpose of genetic variety like X gene is to unlock the full potential of the minimal existence they have. The way to do that is through aligning their spirit with the body, enabling connection to mystical energies, Psionic energies.
It felt like evolution attempt to jump life levels.
But considering my life level I could achieve it with a thought or just by the soul itself if nature of energies are known. But having a proper physical body, not a mashed up one, can help me integrate better. So little deep dive into mutant genome may resolve it?
For the natural-born mutants, the genome seemed specifically tuned to help form structures necessary for channeling psionic energy or ambient cosmic radiation into external manifestations.
The lower the classification, the more they relied on crude cosmic energy or radiation ~ difficult to control and less versatile. Conversely, those reliant on psionic energy had a larger scope and finer control over their expressions. It was simply an evolutionary split within the mutant species. Those lower on the ladder could only look up to the better ones in a lifetime or hope their children turned out stronger.
I can't help the but notice the small details like while, the mutants as a whole have drawn members from virtually every walk of life; The very first team was largely affluent or middle-class, so is most omega and alpha classifications. It's as if having better energy intake and resources to thrive own earlier did have some impact on birthing the far end of spectrum?
The difference from humans wasn't just genetic. The transformations that granted their abilities were also influencing their souls, shaping them.
Similar to Qi martial artists whose meridians enhanced physical strength, mutants possessed a dantian-like structure composed of multiple nodes that stored converted or refined energy in its most basic form.
So the capacity to exhibit abilities isn't continuous, but exhausting in such delivery. The parallel evolution was fascinating.
## Power Classifications
These physical changes were most observed in those with overt transformations ~ the epsilon, gamma, and beta-level mutants, classifications they themselves had created.
Delta-level mutants, the most common and lowest population at Xavier's school, often had trouble even discovering their powers despite having a clear mutant signature. Epsilon was the highest, the rarest.
For Xavier, Magneto, Jean Grey, Ororo, and Apocalypse, the omega transformations were so extreme it was difficult to find clean patterns connecting them to their base DNA.
That was when I realized their worldviews, their methods of wielding power, and their life traumas significantly impacted the direction and expression of their abilities. Most carried deep ideological struggles within themselves.
It ventures beyond biology. It was as if their souls were transit stations for the release of power. This first-hand experience gave me intricate knowledge about that release.
I had seen enough of the 'how.' Now, I wanted to know the 'why.' I turned my attention towards deepest and fragmented wells of memory in my collection: the ancient En Sabah Nur and the volatile Jean Grey."