## A little push
He didn't even raise his hands, his mind already seeing the vision.
With a thought, he spatially shifted the approaching X-Jet, buying them precious minutes. There was no gap between his will and the act; the future's own inertia groaned in protest as a dozen possible timelines collapsed into the one he had just paved.
***
A swirling blue vortex tore open in front of the young X-Men team. Without a moment to prepare, Beast drove the plane straight into it. One moment they were over the Mediterranean Sea, the next, their jet was screaming into Cairo's airspace, the entire remaining distance instantly crossed.
***
On his side, Tao bought attention back to what's in-front.
Without pause, he unfurled something softer, subtler. A wave of altered intent ~ a confluence of the Life Divine Dao, probability, and soul manipulation ~ washed over the bleeding city.
Seconds passed unnoticed. Then reality accepted the instructions:
It wasn't a flashy miracle. There were no pillars of light or grand symbols. It was a nudge. Luck or destiny, call it what you will. A dying man found one last, impossible breath, and a gaping wound began to close. A crushed leg stopped screaming with pain as bone adjusted back into place.
Coincidences, those tiny stitches in the fabric of fate, began to weave a pattern of survival. A rescuer would suddenly look left instead of right, finding a child buried in rubble.
A rescue doctor's hand would steady, guided by an intuition she couldn't explain. Outside the immediate carnage, hardened hearts inexplicably softened, and people who would have looked away found themselves running towards the chaos to help.
***
Yet, after doing all this, he could feel this act lacked the same decisive weight as shifting the X-Men. Worth of living as common is less in cosmic terms.
Peering into the river of time, he wondered if it would be enough. The ladies beside him stared in astonishment, but he had no time to acknowledge it.
The timeline shivered. The future was in flux once more. Somewhere in the heart of the storm, Apocalypse sensed the changes ~ sudden psionic signatures of mutants ~ and his lackeys spilled out as he hurried his grim procedure.
"Sometimes, I wonder how you just… do that," Xiao Ning murmured, her eyes tracking Magneto as he wrestled with the planet's very magnetic field. "Where are the principles? Can't you just snap your fingers and turn them all off then? Be done with it?"
"It's all just… techniques," he said with a shrug, nodding towards the X-Men now spilling from their miraculously arrived jet. "Improvised tricks for a specific job. And I brought in the cavalry. Remember what our friend Alex said? It's their fight. I've already meddled more than as a polite guest."
***
But his meddling had sped everything up, and that created a new problem. Peering into the psychic currents, he saw the delicate balance. If Night crawler reached Xavier too soon, if he pulled the professor out before Apocalypse's consciousness had fully begun its invasion… the crucial pressure cooker that would force Jean Grey to tap into her potential would never get hot enough as Xavier wouldn't be sensed again.
The Phoenix would remain caged.
Well??
He watched, and saw the change manifest on the psionic plane connecting them. The fight outside dragged on, stretched thin by an unseen hand.
It was as if the idea of trapping Angel simply didn't occur to Nightcrawler immediately. Below, Jean stopped cowering. A spark of fighting spirit, kindled from nowhere, flared within her.
She reached out with her telekinesis, trying to hold onto her assailants, but in her panic, she accidentally crushed the hand of the winged mutant who held Kurt's tail in a vice-like grip.
As the feathered menace cried out and retreated, Nightcrawler teleported deeper into the labyrinth.
He got in the maze.
But now, Angel had fixed his sights solely on Jean. He unleashed a volley of his metallic feathers, only for them to halt mid-air and rain back upon him, the attack turned against its master.
He heard Jean's frantic "sorry" amidst the chaos.
He shook off her telekinetic hold and flew back, but it was too late ~ Kurt had already found his way, arriving just in time.
***
He saw it then: the first of Xavier's hairs fluttering loose from his scalp ~ his sign that the transfer had begun in earnest. Iconic, wasn't it? Cosmic forces set in a way that he remained bald? It might help with his ability without hairs blocking the way.
Nightcrawler teleported in a panic and snatched Charles away a moment later than intended, but just in time.
It was a fascinating glimpse into how this universe worked. It seemed that for a preset, monumental destiny, the cosmic script had some flexibility.
The forces at work designing the pathways would bend and twist the simplest events, allowing for fluctuations and coincidences, all to ensure the most probable flow of minor events ~ in this case, a setup for a psychic battle ~ that helped facilitate the same outcome before switching to big changes that would eventually lead to the same result.
***
The battle raged outside. They watched with detached curiosity. These mutants had powers rivaling Gold or Silver-rank in cultivation terms, but they were housed in fragile bodies with the reaction speeds of, at most, trained mortals. It was a fascinating, lethal contradiction.
Then, it happened. Magneto remembered his friend and switched sides. Apocalypse was pinned. And on the astral plane, the main event began.
***
His divine sense pierced the psychic storm effortlessly. He wasn't there for the physical brawl afterall. He was there for the unveiling.
Upto now, he could see it all ~ the psionic energy, - its intimate dance with the mutant genome, the fluid shift between the astral and the real. But manipulate it directly? He couldn't. It was a grade of energy qualitatively above his divine dao, yet paradoxically easier for the natives to wield.
A frustrating, fascinating paradox.
As Apocalypse confronted the fledgling Phoenix in Xavier's mind, Jean broke. And it was magnificent. This wasn't the true, cosmic Phoenix, not yet ~ he could feel the distinction ~ but a brilliant, terrifying echo of it.
A raging fire taking the form of a phoenix, a single spark stolen from a star. It was more than enough to scour Apocalypse from existence, unweaving the very threads of his being.
The resulting psychic shockwave was a formidable ripple, jolting the infinite layers of the astral plane as if a great bell had been struck, its peal echoing into the unknown.
## Conclusion
And in that sublime moment of destructive rebirth, he felt it. A flicker of attention. Not from Jean. From the presence behind the flame. Something ancient and vast, and utterly alien to his understanding, noted the divine sense he had focused on its host.
The sensation was as subtle and undeniable as a single, cold drop of water falling in the absolute dark.
It was gone in a nanosecond.
He didn't flinch. He just filed the experience away. A new, second critical data point. In his internal world, a perfect, frozen snapshot of that roaring phoenix eruption now existed, confined within a barrier of creation energy, waiting for his study.
"Seen enough?" Xiao Ning asked, her voice tinged with a cultivator's boredom.
To them, who had slain primordial beasts and even seen my real phoenix spiritual beast, this was just another felled. They couldn't perceive the sublime, terrifying quality of the energy that had just been unleashed.
"For now," he said, turning from the smoldering ruins. "The main event is over. The rest is just cleanup." He glanced back at the monstrous, half-built pyramid.
"And he really was annoyingly dramatic. He could have built his doom-fortress in the empty desert. This was just a tantrum, and now he's back to his eternal nap."
***
Below, the X-Men celebrated in the dust, hugging and cheering. They had no idea of the twenty thousand souls who had been the price of their stage, nor of the cosmic transaction that had just taken place in the spaces between moments.
And the mess, of course, was far from over. Erik's little planetary hissy-fit had left the Earth in the cosmic equivalent of the ICU. He'd yanked on the magnetic field so hard he'd given the tectonic plates a migraine. Dormant volcanoes were stretching, ready to wake up grumpy. And the punchline?
Nobody was going to hold him accountable.
Oh, he'd feel guilty, sure. But he didn't get the sense Magneto would strong-arm the world into giving him Genosha just yet. Though, after today's light show, the UN would probably be so terrified they'd offer him an island chain just to make him go away.
Then there was the global nuclear hangover. Most of the world's launched missiles had already turned on each other or burned up on re-entry ~ which was good, except there is a good chance they'd spiked the upper atmosphere with a radioactive cocktail destined to rain down slowly on everyone.
Since this was the Marvel Universe, radiation was less a death sentence and more a box of spiked chocolates ~ you might get cancer, you might get superpowers, you might just get a really weird tan.
A few hundred warheads that managed a stable orbit were having their communications restored and were in the process of de-orbiting, but what was causing panic in command centers worldwide was the rest.
The twenty thousand he had subtly… adjusted - those refusing those physics principles of orbital motion.
They were now circling little too perfectly, a silent, impossible constellation defying every law of ballistics, and causing absolute bedlam among every military on the planet.
His doing, essentially. A little experiment for a rainy day.
***
## A little Trip
They lingered just long enough to see the changes the event brought forth. Observers like the local pantheons were now feasting on deceased souls, some helping them to the afterlife, some judging them. The magicians who came had left after staying in the mirror dimension all the while. The peeping eyes from different realms were gone.
The show was over.
With the Earth-bound drama winding down, and with the ladies pestering him about the "island idea," they decided to get some air.
The best air.
No air.
While the world below was losing its collective mind, his group took a little trip. To the Moon. Ziyun had been itching to see the stars up close ever since his briefing on local universal laws, and the barren rock next door seemed like a good start.
It was different here than back home. Space was degenerated into such lowest layers that even fundamental forces arising from basic symmetries of rules can affect them. In a cultivation world, the void between stars is a lethal maelstrom of chaotic energy that would shred any but the most powerful immortals.
Here? It was… quiet. Peaceful, in a sterile, infinite kind of way. A bit of vacuum and cosmic radiation was a gentle breeze against their spiritual bodies.
They popped over to the Moon and found a nice, pre-built spot with a life-support bubble big enough for a city. No grumpy Watcher in sight, which was a bonus.
Time was spent exploring the dark night. His companions were meditating after a while, trying to perceive the laws of reality like him.
## Training Exercise
While the others went sightseeing across the lunar plains, he got to work early. He summoned the dormant forms of Nina and Magda. With the Phoenix data fresh in his mind, he had new insights into the marriage of flesh and cosmic power.
This wasn't just about resurrection; it was refinement he was after.
The Life Divine Dao, far more suited to this than raw heavenly energy, flowed from his own astral core. But only the intent behind it flowed over to reality, letting it instead perform the operation like an experienced surgeon.
For Nina, the process was elegant. He teased out the latent potential in her blood, the empathic connection to life that was her birthright, and wove it together with the magnetic resonance of her lineage.
He didn't think Mutant Polaris was going to be present in the current timeline or even the multiverse cycle. Nina wouldn't just be a beast-controller; she would be an Omega-level empath and magnetokineticist.
She had the one thing her father always craved ~ a boundless capacity to feel for others.
It would be… interesting to see how that turned out.
***
But Magda was a blank canvas. No X-gene, not even a dormant one. She'd asked for the power to never be powerless again, to protect her family.
Not offense, not to run, but to aid. To survive.
Sifting through the genetic memories he'd plundered, he found a template.
Precognition.
Not to the level of 'Destiny' or Irene Adler, nor the level of warping probability as in Quicksilver's field or the Scarlet Witch. The memory of X-gene manipulation and soul compatibility was limited. But it was enough to derive much more theoretically.
> Theoretical in the sense that he was also learning.
He crafted a minor astral layer that would physically linger around her and psionically compute the most probabilistic scenarios based on people's minds ~ a limited precognition within short time and space, enough to give her an edge. He built in a threshold for ambiguity, too; life still needed its surprises.
But it felt incomplete. Protection. Steel body? Super strength? Regeneration? Atomizing? Morphing? Some energy manipulation? It all felt too much for her. He looked around and saw his girls at the edge of the creation-barrier.
He had the answer.
She needed a shield. Drawing on the fundamental physics of this reality, he wove a capacity for personal force field generation into her very being, making a few changes to the created strand of X-gene. He made use of the same previous astral layers to form a defense against both physical and energy attacks ~ enough.
The genome accepted it, her soul resonating with the new potential. The final exploration and tweaking, he left to her.
An adult deserved to discover her own limits.
Watching the new energy pathways settle, feeling the psionic currents begin to flow, he had a thought. Looking back at his own first life, he wondered what it would have been like if humanity had ever unlocked these evolutionary layers.
The concepts were always there, hiding in plain sight. Not even specifically the mutant kind, just simple ones, - those that make life easier. Nature just never felt the need, and for the most part, humanity was blind to the door, let alone the key.