In the void,
Jonathan Kent knelt on a shattered river of stars.
His breathing was heavy. Sweat slid down his forehead, only to evaporate into crimson mist the moment it fell into the darkness. The whispers in his ears were like countless ants crawling inside his skull.
Impossible to resist.
Like rot clinging to the bone.
Hearing it felt like someone was prying open his skull with a rusted scalpel, a dull and grinding pain.
"Get out!"
At his roar, light flared as if it meant to illuminate the space around him. And yet it still could not pierce the layered darkness and pull him out of this accursed place back into reality.
A sense of helplessness washed over him.
"Someone, help me…"
Jonathan wanted to cry for help.
But no answer came.
Only the sound of his own heartbeat echoed through the emptiness.
"Why reject an opportunity like this? Is it because you're too stupid to awaken a superhuman mind?"
The voice mocked him. Jonathan clenched his teeth, his nails digging deep into his palms.
"Clark Kent is strong, isn't he? He's the all-powerful Superman in your eyes."
The unseen voice suddenly softened, like a kind old man.
And yet, when its final syllables dragged out, Jonathan could hear the screams of countless drowned souls woven into them, like cries trapped inside coral reefs, drifting through billions of years of seawater.
"But even the strongest life must die in the end."
At that moment, a chaotic symphony of madness seemed to explode inside Jonathan's ears.
The noise was indescribable.
Countless illusions appeared around him.
They flickered before his eyes, completely filling the space around him. Jonathan tried to dodge, but one of the illusions swallowed him whole, and in an instant, it felt as if he had stepped into another world.
What he saw filled him with terror.
He saw Kryptonite chains driven through his father Clark's collarbones, suspending him from the rusting remains of a satellite. Lex Luthor, dressed in a presidential uniform, slowly carved the S emblem off his blue suit with a surgical blade.
"Look closely, citizens."
Facing the live cameras, he raised the blood-soaked piece of cloth, his voice dripping with contempt.
"The so-called god is nothing more than a lump of meat that bleeds."
Beneath the roaring crowd,
Jonathan stood in the square below, trying to rush forward, only to have soldiers force his head down and make him watch. The scene shattered under his furious roar.
"Do you see now?"
The voice returned.
"You're trying to corrupt my mind!"
Jonathan turned and ran, only to crash straight into another scene. On the scorched soil of the farm, half a Kryptonian crystal jutted out of the ground. Lois's rotting fingers were still pressed against an alarm button.
A hulking black alien approached slowly, its shadow stretching over a brand-new baby stroller. The crying inside stopped at once.
"Ian!"
Jonathan charged forward.
His hands closed around nothing but a phantom.
He saw the stroller burned black, while the massive alien held Clark's severed head in one hand. Jordan lay dead in the grass not far from their mother.
"Fake! All of this is fake! You won't trick me! Stop it!"
Unable to accept what he was seeing, Jonathan stumbled backward, falling into a tangled mass of overlapping visions.
"Why should it stop? This isn't fearmongering. This is fate. Countless possible fates."
The voice laughed softly as more horrifying images surged toward him like a flood.
Superman, impaled through the chest by some monstrous creature and utterly destroyed.
Superman, remade into a war machine by a hideous green brute.
Superman, killing Lois with his own hands.
Each vision was worse than the last.
Jonathan fled in every direction.
But there was nowhere to escape.
He was forced to watch one nightmare after another.
"No…"
At last, Jonathan could not hold on. His will was breaking, and he sank to the ground. He saw Clark walking toward him with glowing red eyes, as if the next second he would tear Jonathan's head clean off.
"They are all possible futures."
The voice returned, drifting and shapeless, as the discordant chorus faded away. The Superman before him dissolved like smoke, and all at once, the scene was flooded with warmth and light.
The sunset turned the Kent family barn gold.
In the distance, Sam Lane's Ferrari rolled up the driveway, absurd birthday balloons tied to the roof. They read: Happy 100th Birthday to Me.
Grandma Martha was sitting up there, smiling cheerfully.
"Look at your dad. How much did he embezzle this time?"
Clark sat in a rocking chair on the porch, gray beginning to show at his temples, but his smile was as warm as ever. A photo album lay open across his knees while Lois leaned against his shoulder, tapping one photo with her finger. Both of them laughed at the same time.
In the yard, an adult Jordan and Ian were repairing the talking Hellcat.
It had been painted red and blue, with a crooked S on the hood.
"Can you stop using heat vision to weld screws?"
Jordan complained.
"Last time you melted straight through the fuel tank!"
"No, your nephew did that, not me. If you don't believe me, I'll go home and beat him up later. He'll definitely confess."
Ian looked exactly the way Jonathan remembered him.
Always passing the blame.
He would not even spare his own son. The Hellcat's radio suddenly switched on and began playing country music. The two young men froze for a second, then both looked toward Jonathan, who was sitting on the ground.
"What are you waiting for? Come help us lift this thing."
The scene was full of laughter.
Jonathan felt warmth return to him.
And just as his thoughts started to blur,
the voice pressed close to his ear.
"This is the future you want, isn't it? And we can help you reach it."
Its tone was full of temptation, as if adding the final weight needed to tip the scale.
"And it won't just be for you."
The whisper wrapped itself around Jonathan's reason like a poisonous snake.
"It will be for your family."
A person's mental defenses could really collapse in an instant.
After all, every member of the Kent family was defined by their devotion to family. Jonathan lowered his head.
All around him, the light that had fought so hard to break through the darkness began to die.
Just like the light fading from Jonathan's own eyes.
"What do I have to do?"
The seventeen-year-old boy asked in a hoarse voice.
Then it seemed as if he saw countless strange shadows reflected in his vision. He screamed, yet the next moment he shot upright in his bed, jolted awake.
Cold sweat soaked through his sleep shirt and even into the mattress.
His heart pounded so hard it felt like it would burst out of his chest.
"What did I dream about?!"
Back in reality, Jonathan could no longer remember what he had seen. He clawed at the memory, but all that remained were scattered fragments, not enough to piece together even a single complete thought.
"There was something there. Something important."
His subconscious was screaming a warning at him, yet whatever had happened in that dream felt as though some force had dug it out of his mind.
"What is…"
Jonathan frowned and sucked in a sharp breath.
He got out of bed.
Something slid off his blanket and hit the floor.
"Hm?"
At the same time,
Clark also jerked awake from the couch downstairs.
At that moment, his super hearing caught a sound coming from the second floor, something that should not have been there. It was not Ian's sleep muttering. It was not Jordan unconsciously triggering super speed in his sleep while gripping a certain body part again. It was a wet, sticky sound, as if something were chewing.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
In an instant, Clark was outside Jonathan's door.
He knocked normally.
"Jonathan, are you all right?" Clark Kent asked in the tone of an ordinary father, even though he could have seen exactly what was happening inside if he wanted to.
"I'm fine. I just had a nightmare. I can't remember what it was, but it must've been pretty bad."
Jonathan was changing his sheets and clothes inside.
He still could not recall the dream, and even the fragments he had remembered upon waking were fading. That happened with dreams all the time, so he did not find it strange.
"You weren't peeking in, were you?"
Jonathan could imagine his father standing in the hallway, brow furrowed, super hearing tracking every shift in his heartbeat, breathing, and blood flow.
"Only if I needed to. Want some hot chocolate?"
Clark stayed outside the door.
"No thanks. I'm cutting weight, remember? You of all people should know body composition matters for football."
Jonathan walked over to his desk.
Sitting there was the book he had just picked up from the floor.
Maybe Clark really had not peeked.
Otherwise, Jonathan thought he probably would have asked about the creepy thing on the desk. Or maybe only he could see it?
Jonathan frowned.
"Fine. If you need anything, just call me."
His father's voice was so gentle it almost hurt. The footsteps gradually receded, the wooden floor creaking softly.
It sounded a little deliberate.
But Jonathan did not think much of it. His attention was fixed entirely on the strange book that had appeared.
He swore he had never bought anything like it. The patterns on the cover were eerie enough to make his skin crawl.
Calling it a book was generous.
It looked more like an old leather notebook, thin, with completely blank pages. Turning on his desk lamp, Jonathan finally made out the title on the cover.
"Death Note?"
He quietly read the crude lettering aloud.
The words looked like childlike scribbles, or perhaps the attempt of someone who had never truly learned to write.
"The handwriting's worse than Ian's chicken scratch."
Muttering to himself, Jonathan loosened his grip on the notebook. That was when he realized he had not seen it properly at first. The book was not entirely blank. On the very first page there was a single line.
We can help you conquer death.
The dark red letters were just as crooked and ugly as before.
The lamp flickered.
Then, in the next instant,
I can help you conquer death.
The line of text seemed to have changed.
Jonathan did not know if it was real or if his half-asleep brain was playing tricks on him.
"Who put this in my room? Jordan? Ian? It's not even April Fool's…"
Wrapped in the stillness of midnight, Jonathan once again lifted the strange notebook to examine it. He had the distinct feeling that something was watching him.
Yet when he glanced around, there was nothing.
The room was empty. The closet doors were shut. The curtains did not stir. Even the shadows lay perfectly still against the floorboards. And still, that sense of being watched lingered.
As though something stood right in front of him, refusing to be seen.
It made Jonathan's skin crawl. He quickly dropped the notebook back onto the desk.
"Creepy…"
He decided that tomorrow, he would take the notebook outside and throw it away.
As he lay back down, he scanned the room one last time, making sure there was no figure lurking anywhere.
The feeling of being watched gradually weakened, and Jonathan finally drifted back to sleep.
Outside the window, moonlight broke through the clouds, splashing the wooden desk in pale fragments.
The black notebook lay there quietly.
Countless dark red tendrils began to slowly unfurl from it.
They twisted in a way that did not quite belong to reality, existing only in some unseen layer of the world, impossible for ordinary vision to perceive.
Information was being sensed. Read. Collected.
The air in the room began to tremble. The shadows on the walls writhed like living things. The folds in the bedsheets deepened without cause.
Yet Jonathan merely turned over in his sleep.
He noticed none of it.
Clark did not appear either.
And then,
Guten Abend, gute Nacht...
A famous German lullaby suddenly floated in through the window from the Hellcat's radio outside.
It did not disturb anyone's sleep.
But at that exact moment,
the tendrils extending from the black notebook recoiled, as if startled, and withdrew back into the book.
As if nothing had happened.
The room returned to peace and silence.
Perhaps they were afraid of being noticed.
Perhaps they did not wish to be seen.
For one world to erode another, it had to happen in silence.
So this power, still too weak to fully emerge, could only retreat into the notebook it used as a shell to hide itself.
The behavior was unmistakably strange.
As if some hidden evil, unwilling to reveal its true form, had wrapped itself in an outer shell that seemed almost harmless in order to conceal its far darker, deeper, more twisted nature.
…
Nightmare World.
Marvel Universe.
Ian slowly opened his eyes.
Once more, he had crossed from one universe into another, leaving the DC Universe he loved and arriving in the Marvel Universe that very likely loved him right back.
"They lock my invincibility to this world, but don't stop me from smuggling things over? That's basically a confession."
Ian's dark-romance logic was still alive and well. He lowered his head to look at the strange book in his hands.
The moment it entered this world, its title twisted and changed.
From Ian's Magic Book,
to Ian's Most Beloved Magic Book.
It had not even been with Ian for long.
But clearly it had already learned the essentials.
Faced with such brazen plagiarism, Ian naturally had to criticize it first, then offer a little encouragement.
He figured the book's name change was probably related to the same phenomenon that had made the bull demon head think Ian had a universe growing inside him during its first smuggling trip. Demons were way too prone to misunderstanding that kind of thing.
"Relax. I'm not a dimensional demon god. Don't be scared. I usually don't eat books. I actually cherish them."
The moment Ian finished reassuring it, two glowing hearts popped out of the book's surface.
They swelled right out from the smiley face's eye sockets on the cover.
Ian had to use all his strength to push them back in.
"Damn it. Another one secretly in love with me."
Ian had no time to keep wrestling with the book, because the moment he looked up, he saw Galactus.
The once sky-piercing cosmic being had finally collapsed completely.
The heavens had once again turned into a mass of storm clouds, like a curtain soaked in cheap dye. The Galactus who had taken forever to fall before now lay flat against the earth.
And he was being dismantled.
Ian had always thought very few people truly realized that Galactus was made of flesh and blood, a kind of cosmic humanoid lifeform, not some giant naturally born in that massive armor.
Now, countless soldiers and researchers crawled over his body like ants.
There were tens of thousands of them, maybe even hundreds of thousands. Ian had never seen so many living people in this world before. They were using plasma cutters, quantum separators, and other things that screamed black technology to peel apart Galactus's armor piece by piece. Even the most advanced scientists in the DC Universe probably would not know what half those tools were.
"Plasma cutter. Supernatural separator…"
As for why Ian recognized some of them, the answer was simple.
He did not.
He was just making up names based on appearance.
Pure nonsense.
Still, the fact remained that a bunch of revived scientists were now using technology to dismember Galactus, and that really did go beyond Ian's understanding of science.
"As expected of Tony, the divine machine god."
Ian sincerely praised him.
He had already reached the outer zone of where Galactus had fallen. It was obvious that some form of "patchwork corpse alliance" had helped slow the impact. Otherwise, with Galactus's head alone large enough to cover the entire city center, the whole city and the surrounding area should have been flattened.
But the damage zone was surprisingly limited.
Someone had definitely intervened.
"And this is while Uncle Galactus was half-starved, right?"
Ian did a flip in the air. Not some legendary celestial distance, but at least six hundred feet.
He landed on the roof of a broken building at the edge of downtown.
Looking ahead, the being who had once worn nebulae on his head and stepped across galaxies now looked like a gutted whale stretched across the ruins of a city. His silver-purple armor had been dismantled to pieces, exposing pale skin beneath.
Yes, skin.
At the torn seams where the armor had been peeled back, Ian could see faint blue blood vessels still twitching.
One research team had even put up a temporary tent and was holding what looked like an academic conference around an exposed nerve ending.
Ian thought those people were the real lunatics.
"Gwen, Gwen, come rate me! How many points do I get for being Spider-Man?"
Ian spotted an old acquaintance, so he launched himself forward and dropped toward Galactus's head.
At that moment,
Gwen, who was holding something in her hand, seemed just about to lose her footing and fall.
"I got you!"
Ian was thrilled.
Because he had done what Peter Parker apparently never could.
"Has Peter Parker been cloned yet? I could teach him. Full package. Guaranteed results."
Ian grabbed Gwen by the back of the neck and hauled her back up onto Galactus's head.
"My god, why is it you again…" Gwen looked exhausted, though at least her spine was intact.
Ian still counted that as a win.
"What, I save you and instead of thanking me and naming me the new Spider-Man, you insult me and call me crazy?"
Ian's eyes widened with genuine hurt.
Gwen smacked at his hand, trying to get free, but Ian kept holding on. She could feel it. Every single time they met, his strength seemed to have grown explosively.
"You're the one who showed me your psychiatric diagnosis."
She rolled her eyes.
"Oh. Right."
Ian immediately stopped feeling wronged.
His emotional burden had clearly transferred to Gwen instead. The girl, still held like a cat by the neck, looked utterly done with life.
"And you didn't save me," Gwen added. "There's a good chance I was trying to jump off on purpose and die."
It took a particular state of mind to say something like that so casually.
Maybe she was just concerned with efficiency.
She pointed toward several massive box-shaped machines in the distance. Inside them, new bodies were being printed nonstop. Flesh, bone, uniforms, all fully assembled in five seconds.
"Oh. Fair enough."
Ian finally understood. He looked at Gwen's hand and saw the special glove she was wearing, one that allowed her to grip a golden Infinity Stone, the Mind Stone.
"You stole that off Uncle Galactus?"
Ian looked around. Galactus's head was intact, and he saw no obvious place where a gem had been pried out.
There were only two openings in the giant face they stood on.
His nostrils.
His mouth did not even count.
Because Galactus's mouth was closed tight.
"We recovered it," Gwen corrected him. "Now put me down. This glove's running out of power."
The glove indeed looked close to cracking.
"Oh, okay."
Ian was not the type to intentionally be a burden.
He carried Gwen to the edge of Galactus's head, then lightly let go.
Gwen dropped straight down and landed in a way no proper Spider story would ever allow.
Face-first.
It was not stylish enough.
"This thing doesn't break, right?"
A nearby staff member rushed over and collected the Mind Stone in a container.
At the same time, a few seconds later, one of the printing machines chimed and opened. A fresh Gwen stepped out, dusted off a perfectly clean uniform, and rubbed the back of her neck, which no longer hurt.
"You have to be kidding me. Have you ever actually been a superhero?" she demanded, glaring at Ian. "What kind of rescue move was that? You've seen a superhero save someone by grabbing them like that?"
She was clearly not happy.
"Well, that's how my dad grabs me. He's the strongest superhero where I'm from. So naturally I learned from him."
Ian's super brain always came up with the most reasonable explanations.
"…"
Gwen opened her mouth, then closed it again.
A rich kid showing off with cars, schools, powers, she had seen that before.
But a rich kid using a superhero father as the basis for his rescue technique?
That was a new category.
"I refuse to believe your dad taught you to rescue people like that." In the end, she could only judge the move professionally and conclude it was absolutely not standard.
"You don't have a bio-electric aura. You wouldn't understand." Ian shrugged. "Besides, my dad didn't teach me. I was just deeply affected by it."
"You could also call it a childhood scar. A childhood without trauma isn't complete, just like old people without any regrets about how they raised their kids are more likely to get dementia."
"See? Win-win. I get a complete childhood, and my dad gets a perfect old age."
"If he reflects hard enough on raising me, maybe he can fend off dementia entirely."
Ever since wearing Batman's suit, Ian had become more and more influenced by Batman's style of reasoning. Nobody else could understand his profound strategic thinking.
Gwen stared at him, eyes widening more and more.
The logic almost sounded like it held together.
But the more she thought about it, the weirder it became.
"What are you even talking about…"
Unlike Madison, Gwen was not easily persuaded. She simply found herself unable to properly organize a rebuttal. Deep down, she knew Ian's logic was seriously wrong.
Exactly how wrong?
That was something she'd need Tony to analyze.
Only Tony could clearly explain what kind of absurdity this was.
Only Tony's real intelligence could deal with this bizarre boy.
Actually, now that she thought about it, Tony sometimes got silenced by him too.
Though that was surely only because Tony's processing power was divided.
Now that some of it was freed up, he would definitely handle Ian just fine.
Gwen's faith in the wisdom of the machine god Tony remained absolute.
"The corpses you asked for are ready. You can go see Tony now."
She did not want Ian disrupting anything. In a little while, she still had to help recover the final Infinity Stone.
Today was the most important day this universe would ever face.
If Tony had not said what he did before, Gwen honestly would have preferred to lock Ian up or at least lure him somewhere else. The moment was too important. She did not want any unpredictable variable ruining it.
Higher than me, higher than you, higher than this base, higher than... everything.
To this day, neither Gwen nor Betty had understood what Tony had meant by those words.
"So which is it? Sentry? Or Omni-Man?"
Ian had no interest in dissecting a god. He cared much more about new powers. The moment Gwen mentioned corpses, his eyes lit up like light bulbs.
"Both."
Gwen wheeled over a bicycle from a nearby crate. It was hard to believe that a place advanced enough to dismantle Galactus still used such primitive transportation.
No matter.
Ian did not care about that right now.
"Good! Good! As expected of my teacher Tony, divine machine god!"
He was so excited he practically glowed.
His choice of title made Gwen blink in confusion, as though she had missed something critical.
She almost asked.
But ultimately, she didn't.
"Wait a second."
Even with Omni-Man and Sentry already occupying his thoughts, Ian had not forgotten why he came in the first place.
Right in front of Gwen, he dove headfirst into one of Galactus's nostrils.
Some time later,
"What were you doing in there?"
Gwen watched him emerge with a huge grin on his face.
"High-end exploration always starts by entering the most primitive cave. Don't ask. Just know it isn't suitable for girls."
Ian wiped his hands with a tissue.
He had just gone to pay his respects to Galactus's super brain.
His verdict was that it was still not as good as his own.
You have come into contact with an unknown transcendent substance. A new class template has been unlocked. By fulfilling the required acquisition conditions, you may obtain a corrected transcendent class: Entropy Lord.
That, of course, had been Ian's true purpose.
The result had exceeded even his expectations.
He had not even released his Rise of Sentry comic involving Galactus yet, and still the class template had unlocked so smoothly.
Strange?
Ian looked down at his class panel.
Writer Lv2 [3/20]
Maybe it was not actually that strange after all.
(End of Chapter)
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