They killed a day playing tourist.
He showed them the sights ~ the Brooklyn Bridge, a web of steel and ambition stretched over churning water, and the Empire State Building clawing at a smoggy sky. They weren't impressed. Ziyun summed it up perfectly, staring into a canyon of concrete and glass that echoed with the blare of horns and the smell of exhaust.
"It's so... gray."
Yeah, tell me about it. After the soul-soothing hues of a cultivation world, where even the air shimmered with latent energy, this place was a monument to monotony. A whole planet of mortals, all dressed in beige and hurry. And he knew, with a sinking feeling, it was only going to get more concrete and less color for the next century.
They came down to earth. Central Park was better, a decent facsimile of nature fighting a valiant, losing battle against the city's encroachment. They saw the reserves, but without the thrum of heavenly aura, the trees and rivers all looked stunted, diminished. And when night fell, they watched the city switch on its party lights, a dazzling, artificial constellation.
A literal nuclear apocalypse had loomed on the horizon just hours before, yet people were still drinking and dancing their way through the fear, the bass from a nightclub thumping through their feet.
The women got it fast ~ the glitter was just a thin coat of paint over a deep foundation of struggle. They saw the cracks in the pavement, the hollow eyes of the homeless, the desperate hustle. But what were they going to do, fix all of humanity? Some knots had to be untied by the people themselves.
By evening, they retreated back to the garish lights of Times Square. They hit an arcade, a cacophony of electronic beeps and flashing colors. Watching two legendary cultivators utterly dominate Pac-Man with a god-like focus that could have unraveled celestial formations was probably the highlight of his week.
Games were one thing the cultivation world had completely missed out on. Chess and Go were fun, sure, strategic. But they weren't as viscerally satisfying as seeing virtual points rack up for devouring digital ghosts.
A thought crossed his mind. Should I take a quick trip to the future to bring back some Triple-A titles? Or Make one? or should I just enter their game worlds directly? The latter sounded less like fun and more like work.
His new body, this fragile mortal shell, needed fuel. He found himself living on street cart hot dogs and questionable, oversized pretzels. It was easier than constantly burning his own energy to keep the vessel running.
The girls, of course, didn't get tired. They just... were, their spiritual forms untouched by mundane needs.
They saw the hidden people ~ the Morlocks in the steam-shrouded tunnels, the tagged and the forgotten in the alleyways. They saw how the city treated its poor, the stark divide between the glittering towers and the squalor beneath.
They saw mutants hiding even among the city's elites, their power a secret behind human faces. Here, wealth meant leeway, a buffer against the world's harshness. They also witnessed dark vans and kidnappings in the night, traces of which led back to sterile experimentation centers and grim mental hospitals.
Coming from societies where literal slaves existed and soul-refining techniques were commonplace, the crude science experiments they were conducting here barely registered. Still, the impulse to simply... solve it... itched at him.
But did he need to have a big heart for all of them? The creator and local gods of this reality didn't seem to bother. Struggle was just the default setting for mortal life.
They gave museums a hard pass. Once one has witnessed the rise and fall of empires in the cultivation world, seen history written in blood and qi, the curated relics behind glass feel a bit shallow.
Dinner at a posh place went sideways. Some jackass, liquored up and loud, decided his face and brown complexion ~ adjusted for Cairo's environment ~ were a personal insult. He had already skimmed the surface of the man's mind, a swamp of insecurity and entitlement, but having had a nice day, he decided to let it slide. The man had other plans.
He and his allegedly very supportive young wife started making a scene, her voice a shrill counterpoint to his bluster. He just sighed, the weight of a thousand years of dealing with idiots settling on his shoulders.
"Buddy... you have no idea who you're talking to."
Instead of turning him into a potted plant, which was tempting, he just gave the man's conscience a little nudge. Mid-rant, his eyes glazed over. He had a sudden, profound epiphany about the error of his ways, and he ended up sobbing and buying their entire dinner, plus the most expensive wine on the menu. So, free meal.
It was a big day for the man. He also got to learn, via another subtle psychic push, about his wife's confession regarding her "extra indulgences." After all, he'd paid for them. He helped them solve their marital problems, free of charge.
He had to put a cognitive filter back up after that, as the whole world was now stressing about the mutant apocalypse. His little parlor trick hadn't gone unnoticed by the more sensitive minds in the hotel.
After solving that minor drama, they flew around, their presence nullified once more, watching the world prepare for an end it didn't understand.
They were up talking well past midnight ~ actually, the next morning had already arrived. It was 4 AM, and he ~ the body ~ was beat. Properly, mortally tired. He hadn't just slept in... he couldn't even remember the last time. Months? Years? Cultivators don't have that problem.
For him, the simple, biological process of falling asleep was a novelty. It sounded amazing. The girls vanished back into the ring world with a shake of their heads at his newfound mortal needs, and he checked into a generic, beige-carpeted hotel room that smelled of bleach and air freshener.
Just then, a voice, amplified and echoing with unnatural power, rolled across the city, vibrating through nearby minds which he heard as numerous echoes.
Nothing reached him directly, but the unnatural state of everyone else attracted him and tuned in.
"Hear me, inhabitants of this world. This is a message to every man, woman, and mutant. You have lost your way, but I have returned. The Day of Reckoning is here. Everything you have built will fall! And from the ashes of your world..."
He paused, the hotel keycard in his hand. The script in his head was already fraying. A quick divine sense check confirmed it: Jean and the others were still thousands of miles away. Even with a telekinetic boost, that jet wasn't crossing the Atlantic in five minutes.
I got time.
A barrier of shielding, his divine sense linked to the Library of Heaven's Path, took over his protection. The bed was bliss, the pillows unnervingly soft. He crashed and didn't dream at all. His spirit, too, was asleep.
He woke up at eight to a zap of shock from a mini-formation he'd set up to alarm him ~ a regular alarm wouldn't have phased the deep, mortal sleep he'd fallen into.
Anyway, it seemed events had proceeded, and the rescue team was almost at Cairo. That jet was heavily modified; based on its current trajectory, it was traveling at more than twice the speed of a conventional aircraft.
Returning to his human senses was a jarring transition. Sunlight, sharp and accusing, cut through the gaps in the cheap hotel blinds. He fumbled for the remote, clicking on the TV just to fill the silence. A news anchor's voice, tight with professionally restrained panic, filled the room.
"...continuing chaos in Egypt. Death count rising. What authorities are calling a 'mutant uprising' has plunged the region into..."
He didn't need the TV. He could feel it in his teeth, a low, planetary hum of wrongness. The Earth's magnetic field was being pulled apart like cotton candy. The chaos wasn't just in Cairo anymore. It was a slow, sickening ripple reaching across the globe. After all, the planet's crust was laced with magnetic materials.
He rubbed the grit from his new eyes, a groan escaping his lips. "Well, party's almost in full swing without me."
He took a disgustingly long, mortal minute in the bathroom ~ splashing water on his face, stretching the sleep from this borrowed body. No need to rush into the apocalypse with morning breath.
Blood Qi purified whatever was left of yesterday's food intake. A thought later, the bland hotel room vanished, replaced by the oven-like heat and cacophony of Cairo's edge.
***
His presence was just hidden, not nullified. With another flick of will, the ladies appeared beside him, their spiritual forms solidifying in the dusty air.
"Well, things happened while we were gone, and looks like we missed the grand opening," he explained, pointing at the colossal, half-formed structure dominating the skyline.
His divine sense provided a holistic view of the recent past. So, what had the big blue bastard been doing all this time while he was catching up on his beauty sleep?
Turns out, he was preparing. He'd spent the hours diving into Earth's culture, language, Magneto's deeds and backstory, soaking up mutant history, scientific data retrieved from the labs by Angel and Psylocke, and picking apart Charles Xavier's ideals from his new Horsemen.
He learned every new language and science as it is.
He was smart enough to know that without his direct presence, Xavier's silver tongue could turn his own Horsemen army against him in a second.
He'd even dug up the history of the telepathy-blocking helmet, the one Sebastian Shaw once had, and made sure Magneto got a shiny, restored version.
The pyramid's construction had begun hours ago. It wasn't the instant, movie-magic affair he'd expected. This was a more deliberate, thoughtful act of world-sculpting. And it showed. This wasn't just a big pile of rocks. This wasn't the rushed job from the movie.
The structure was a horrifying fusion of ancient design and alien futurism, possibly the largest thing ever built by hand ~ or by mind, rather. The interior was a labyrinth designed to confuse any intruder. He'd taken precautions, learning from whatever had ended his last attempt.
High above and deep inside, intricate mechanisms to facilitate the consciousness transfer whirred to life, all planned with a chilling precision. The guy believed he was a god, and his temple reflected that delusion perfectly.
The most fascinating part? He wasn't doing the complex math himself. He was using raw psionic will to offload the computational burden onto reality itself ~ projecting a detailed image and forcing the universe to make it true from that rough blueprint.
Magneto stood guard outside like a one-man army, the other Horsemen forming a defensive perimeter. And the death toll… the movie had played it safe. The real math was brutal. This was architectural terraforming, not sacrifice. He wasn't turning people into bricks; he was turning their city into a tomb.
The primary killers were gravity and debris. In the pyramid's immediate footprint, nearly eighteen thousand lives were erased in a heartbeat. Another two thousand perished further out in the chaotic upheaval. It was efficient, cold, and utterly insane.
They stood at the edge of the cataclysm. The air tasted of dust, ozone, and death. Cairo was being unmade, skyscrapers melting and flowing like water into the rising monolith.
Long Yuyin was the first to break the stunned silence. "This is… a bit much, isn't it?"
Ziyun turned to him, her cultivator's sense of righteousness flickering to life. "Why are we just watching?"
"In my defense, I was asleep," he said, throwing his hands up. "And we're guests here. This… this is their pre-ordained catastrophe. It's the stage set for the descent of a cosmic entity that makes the Sage Emperor look like a village elder. If you ask me, it's not a good time to get involved. And honestly, do you genuinely care about them? A bunch of mortals in a strange new world?"
"Calling ourselves righteous cultivators is a joke if we stand by and let this happen," she shot back, her eyes hard. His logic about cosmic deities flew right past her.
"Hey, don't judge the value of life the same way here. In our world, death is the final end of individuality. The death of a mortal shell here is not the end. They can enter an afterlife, be themselves, or become part of something greater, repurposed by the cosmic mechanisms in place. Often, living in the material world is the greatest misery of all."
I should have kept an actor to carry my negativity, like an Evil God in my internal world, he mused. Having to balance both perspectives is making me feel inert.
"Look, Ziyun, he's back onto finding new reasons for being lazy," Xiao Ning said, already taking a step back as if handing the judgment over to her.
"Okay, I won't talk about the grand scheme of the cosmos anymore. Don't worry, it gets better. He fails. And we're not the only spectators." He shifted his perception, following the sensation obtained from the psychic energy in his mind, the world bleaching into the sandy hues of the Duat, then the golden fields of Aaru.
"Look. The Ennead, the Faith Gods of Egypt themselves. Osiris, Taweret, Ammit… they're all waiting, eager for the influx of souls. They aren't lifting a finger. This is a harvest for them. Why should we get the blame when the local pantheon is already counting their blessings?"
"Tao, at least do something," Xiao Ning pleaded, her voice cutting through his excuses. "Instead of explaining why you can't."
He sighed. "Hey.... I'm having second thoughts about showing you everything."
The real, technical reasons flashed through his mind. Now that the event was close at hand, he could feel the probability of events stretching into the future; more often than not, it ended up as the Phoenix awakening. Meaning there was a global great destiny rule manipulation at work.
Besides, rewinding time on this scale would consume a staggering amount of creation energy and risk tearing the continent from the planet. Restoring the rules of reality normally would leave behind twenty thousand empty, breathing husks; he wasn't proficient enough in this reality's consciousness mechanics to put all the shattered mind pieces back together.
"Fine," he relented, the word tasting like dust. "But I'm not announcing our presence with a show. I will save the rest."