He didn't perceive time as a single river. To his divine senses, it was a jungle ~ dense, alive, and gloriously tangled. The branch he currently stood on had split from the main trunk days ago, a defiant shoot of new growth in the multiverse's endless undergrowth. And now, from that very branch, a dozen new possibilities were stretching into the unknown.
He was simply about to harvest a few.
Tao's gaze fell to the objects nestled in his palm. Sleek, dark, and cold ~ twenty thousand seeds of apocalypse.
"Goodbye," he murmured ~ a farewell to them, to the old timeline, to the version of himself who had initially triggered the launch.
Then… he simply let go.
But he didn't detonate them. That would be so… mortal. So utterly inefficient. Fission? A paltry one percent conversion of matter to energy.
*I didn't come here to make a bomb.*
He released the fundamental field that bound their very atoms together.
It began not with a bang, but with a sound like a great, deep bell being struck somewhere in the abyss ~ a resonant thrum that vibrated in the bones, not the ears. The metal of the warheads didn't shatter. It melted, flowing like liquid mercury before evaporating into a shimmering, primordial haze. A scientist might call it a quark-gluon plasma.
*I call it cleaning up.*
He held that contained sun in his palm for a single, stretched heartbeat, feeling the universe's raw fury dance obediently within his will. Then, with a thought, he detached. His astral soul slipped free of its flesh-and-blood anchor, leaving the mortal shell behind. The control was lost.
"...."
Back in his spiritual form, floating in the heat of a newborn star, surrounded by temperatures that could vaporize continents… and he just felt mildly annoyed. The light, the force, the heat ~ it all washed against his soul and meant nothing.
*I watched in slow motion as my discarded body was unmade into pure plasma, erased before the physical shockwave could even touch it. But outside my little bubble, hell was being born.*
***
The violent energy created massive bubbles that expanded and collapsed in a catastrophic rhythm. The underwater un-making triggered a multi-stage cataclysm: an instant flash that reached the surface, a supersonic shockwave tearing through water and air, and the birth of a colossal, but a single order 9 quake through oceanic surrounding.
It would barely be of any effect near coastal areas so far from origin aside from radio active contamination in ocean, but the expected was achieved, large scale displacement of mass down to the oceanic base and about a mile up, displacement in timeline and events due to cause and effect related to me.
The mutants in the immediate vicinity had seconds. Just the blink of an eye between the flash and the blast of waves.
And they used them.
Cyclops fired a concussive beam ~ not at me, but against the incoming blast wave, a desperate bid to counter its force. Storm summoned headwinds from a clear sky, trying to hold back the radioactive surge. And Jean Grey… her eyes were locked on my position, swaying in the air as she pushed with her mind, throwing up a massive telekinetic barrier against the ocean itself.
In pocket dimensions, I sensed magicians lurching into action, peering through mirrors, ready to sling spells and open portals. *This won't affect us,* their confidence whispered.
Nice confidence.
But they had no idea this was just the opening act.
***
## Travelling back
*I let my astral self observe the carnage for a few more seconds ~ watching the shockwave begin to tear the ocean and the air apart * ~ before I jumped back to the observed past.
The world lurched.
Sun-warmed spray kissed his face again; the Pacific was calm. The sound of deep ocean is still the same. He was back in his past physical body a little bit away from his previous future position.
The ocean settled as if nothing had happened. So did the rest of the world. He sensed no anomalies from his jump in the immediate future aside from the distant rumbling of energy tide aiming at him. The warheads were back in orbit, a silent constellation of death waiting for his command.
But this time, he had made a single, critical change: he hadn't retrieved the orbiting warheads. That moment of inaction was a new variable.
The causal weight of his previous presence… simply vanished for the conflicting future - an hour and a half down the branch.
Now the past is about to influence the future.
He glanced forward, to a further corner of his previous world - line.
***
## Erasure
A bright light flashed. That's all they would remember.
It was over in a moment. I saw the segments of lives, the moments of heroism, that were now erased. I marked them as data points. No empathy, no lingering guilt.
Maybe because I knew I was just acting like a gardener, pruning one future to make room for another. The process of time travel was instinctual, a simple function of my higher being.
I didn't travel *through* time. I followed the thread of my own existence, a glowing pathway only I could see, and re-attached to a point in the world-line's past.
The past didn't resist. For an atemporal like him ~ a being who is the stream, not just floating in it ~ reentry is seamless. No paradox, no ghost. It took a heartbeat. Or none at all.
***
The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic.
From the point in space where his past self had been standing, reality itself began to unravel. Numerous futures were annihilated. The first thing to twist and spark into pure, blinding energy wasn't from when he just returned, but the physical existence that had been holding the spatial fold before the process of return point.
Because that is the origin of missing causal influence. In numerous futures, the timeline disintegration soon swallowed the torrent of the expanding nuclear shockwave before it could even reach the surface.
But the displacement of water was massive in some futures and those excess conflicted mass churned into energy. In others the spatial compression, its containment gone, was released in a titanic shockwave that simultaneously disintegrated space-time before the paltry nuclear followed up.
A wave of annihilation radiated outwards, a destructive paradox sweeping through the local zone ~ the air, the water, the very fabric of adjacent dimensions ~ as the "future" of his non-interference overlapped and violently conflicted with the "past" where he had acted.
" Yes it was not a water spray nor radiation sprinklings that X men expected which came to them. But an unraveling."
Disintegration, pure and total: flesh of nearby beings to vapor, water to steam, dimensions to tatters. The wave didn't propagate linearly ~ it looped, devouring future-echoes and past-shadows in a screaming feedback - but only those selectively in contrast with current one.
If Tao hadn't stabilized this would be an instant incursion.
"Yes. Playing with fire indeed."
Quicksilver felt it first. A flicker of movement ~ a silver streak against the blue ~ caught my attention. Quicksilver. The young Pietro Maximoff, moving so fast that light itself seemed to crawl. He was a blur across the waves, scooping mutants from the X-Jet, frantically ferrying them away in desperate, looping sprints feeling a danger that is orders of magnitude greater than what has been occured.
*Land's too far,* I thought, noting the strain in his labored breaths, the way his lungs fought for air between strides. He glanced back once, inside his visor, his eyes wide with that feral mix of speedster arrogance and raw, animal fear.
His blur stuttered mid-stride, the annihilation nipping at his heels. He poured on speed, a silver comet arcing toward tomorrow, but the wave was everywhere-time: behind him the past, ahead the future it poisoned. Pietro's scream cut short as the paradox claimed him ~ body unmade, speed reduced to stasis.
The X-Jet, inbound, crumpled like foil in the ripple; Magneto's magnetic field barrier crumbled under deteriorating energy. Nightcrawler was wiped from his Brimstone dimension. In mirror-realms, an Elder magician's cloak billowed in a void-wind, his wards shattering like cheap glass. Those silent in other dimensions who came to see the action also followed.
Everything was spaghettified. They weren't supposed to be here, not with the foreign timestamp branded on their being. Even the last creature who put up resistance - Erased, not dead ~ retconned from the script.
" It was the curse of time"
***
## Feedback
The process isn't a complete erasure but a selective reset.
Traveling immaterially through a complete timestream ~ unlike the severed threads managed by a Loom ~ meant conflicts like this didn't nullify entire realities as a whole. The information streams are what get changed. Reality is still there, drawn from multiversal energy waiting for a new future not in conflict with its past.
But the backlash contained itself. Tao's thread-weaving was surgical; no universal purge, just a local scar on Earth and its dimensional folds. Not even affecting most of its parts.
The hour's events hadn't rippled far ~ New York still choked on traffic, the Amazon on rain. Much of the world un informed. Only those informed were reset back to what they were supposed to.
Information streams rewired around the wound, futures branching anew. The numerous severed timeline's mass-energy? Most of it dissipated back into the universe balance sheet devoid of action. But a portion of it converted ~ single divergences collapsing into one staggering pulse ~ and hurled itself back at the source.
Why and to where?
That "somewhere" was him. More specifically, it targeted the timeline anchor position he held, homing in on the conflicted aura he deliberately carried. He hadn't harmonized that dissonance because that was the mechanism of extraction; he had to let it seek the one position where the aura remained in conflict with its surroundings ~ like an angry beast pouncing on its prey, growling, "I almost missed you."
Otherwise, the power would simply dissipate into the past and the hollow structure of the universe, rendering his previous actions meaningless. He felt the recoil the moment he first detached. He could have redirected it or even smoothed the impact to make it seamless, but he chose to let it proceed.
The influx hit like a starbirth: timelines' ghosts slamming home, aborted possibilities igniting in his core. The power was staggering. Even with his law field absorbing 99.9999% of the impact and shunting it harmlessly into his simulated domain, the residual shockwave vibrated through his physical being, a profound jolt that spoke of cosmic temporal and spatial forces.
He didn't absorb it. He prevented the impact from traversing the past. Like an immovable stone that prevents the erasure of entire realities upstream.
With it also came its own set of beings looking for prey. Time eaters, small four-dimensional beings that devour temporal energy. Scaring them off only needed raising a finger - killing a few.
***
While managing the influx, I can't absorb this energy for my own, he realized, the concept clear in his mind. It has to be in record with the surroundings in some form. A possibility has been lost, and every flux existence from that lost branch has turned back into energy, returning to their current world line.
He clamped down, halting the wave's upstream creep. A temporal storm of potential now raged in his domain, vast as the energy the star would produce in a few months' time, half of it deferred to the future paving the present to exist. His mind performed a near-instant calculation.
If those original warheads had been enough to transmute matter from the seabed, two and a half miles below, into a perfect, one-meter diameter cylinder to the ocean surface, the temporal potential he now held… even with half of it deferred into the future, contained sufficient energy to reproduce that feat more than a billion times over ~ meaning he could create a cylinder nearly 100 miles in diameter.
That too with excess energy to create matter rather than transmuting it all the way, from existing energy.
***
The difference was due to the energy levels, both in quality and quantity. The field collapse is lower in quality than law energy associated with space-time.
He conjured an equivalent energy sphere of his own divine dao energy for comparison. It took only 9 strands of annihilating faith potential, or 23 strands of five-elemental potential, to match the output for the transmutation.
That's me, he thought, a wave of sobering realization washing over him. I myself carry enough potential to do the same for a few dozen million miles of chaos land, if I overdraw every last bit.
Here he was acting the villain with mortals. Acting like one these days, he had almost forgotten what he was carrying.
A walking cataclysm, playing human. He reeled back, fully embodied now, allotting a splinter of his consciousness to cage the roar.
The energies waited. Like an obedient clay?
Of course not. It felt like Rage.
Holding this much foreign energy without freezing, or even absorbing chaos it into his inner world, its potential was a strain on his law field ~ much like a button cell containing a nuclear power plant's yearly output.
After the quick thought, he allotted a dedicated part of his consciousness to do exactly that ~ to manage, contain, and transform the roaring power.
***
What was the goal all the while? To create some land? A field test? Learning about magic and expecting anomalies? All of them. He knew what to expect before he started pulling the warheads down. Future is an open book.
Of course. Crafting an island of this scale wasn't merely an act of terraforming; it was a statement, an Art. An anchor against the void he'd torn. The X-Men's past ghosts demanded it ~ a monument forged from their ash.
***