At the Ancient One's suggestion, Drex Valen ultimately chose the largest ownerless dinsion available.
The Dark Dinsion.
He had never beco a dinsional lord before, so he had no real experience to draw on. The result was that the new kid on the block was guided, step by step, by the Sorcerer Supre herself.
The ownerless Dark Dinsion accepted Drex at terrifying speed, almost as if it was afraid he might change his mind.
And then, in that instant, Drex understood sothing.
If he abandoned his physical body entirely and fused with this dinsion, he could beco a single-universe-level powerhouse.
Single-universe level?
Drex dismissed the thought imdiately.
That was nothing.
He ignored the Dark Dinsion's appetite for his body and instead rged his own power into it, rewriting the dinsion's very nature.
In the face of Drex's overwhelming strength, the Dark Dinsion had no way to resist.
It was reshaped completely into his image.
The Dark Dinsion beca a black hole dinsion.
Countless black holes blood across that new realm.
There was no light there, and yet everything remained perfectly visible.
That was the nature of a dinsion ruled by a lord. Within a dinsional space, its master could be all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful. Logic could be bent. Paradoxes could be made to stand. Even perpetual motion was not impossible.
Making a lightless realm visible to living beings was hardly difficult.
After becoming the lord of the black hole dinsion, Drex imdiately branded his collectible girls with its mark.
From now on, if anything happened, he could pull them directly into the black hole dinsion to keep them safe.
No more worrying about Abraxas.
If that monster wanted them, let him try crossing the Multiverse and finding the black hole dinsion drifting outside it.
With this new realm, Drex could finally see the Multiverse from a higher-dinsional perspective.
And from that vantage point, he saw sothing larger.
The super-universe.
In Marvel's cosmology, a super-universe is ford from two or more Multiverses.
Once he beca a dinsional lord, Drex gained a clear realization.
He could use the black hole dinsion to rapidly locate other dinsions.
Most of them, of course, already had owners.
"That can wait," he muttered.
Inside the black hole dinsion, Drex already possessed power that was faintly approaching the multiversal level.
But close was not enough.
He was still missing that final step.
For now, it was only an approximation.
With the black hole dinsion's support, he absorbed the Phoenix Force and the Dragon Force that remained in his body.
He had needed them before.
Now he did not.
They would serve better as nourishnt for the black hole dinsion.
Drex looked out over the silent realm.
It was powerful.
It was perfect.
And it was completely lifeless.
"Strong as this place is," he said, "it has no life."
Life required souls.
And for dinsional lords, souls were valuable currency.
Second only to dinsional fragnts and ownerless dinsions.
That was especially true in Marvel.
Souls that died naturally were difficult for dinsional lords to seize, because the Five Cosmic Entities always had Death to contend with.
That was why dinsional lords spread belief, granted power, and branded others with their marks.
They needed souls.
And not only from Death.
All the hell dinsions, large and small, collected souls too.
Kamar-Taj's sorcerers had long since been branded by a wide variety of dinsional lords. Every ti they borrowed a lord's power, the mark deepened. When they died, their souls would be divided among those powers.
Then there were the afterlives.
Asgard's realm of the honorable dead took its share.
Hades took his.
The countless other gods and death deities across the cosmos took theirs.
And beyond them, certain dinsional lords had their own faithful, whose souls were not even considered part of hell's total.
Most profitable of all was Heaven.
The dinsion tied most closely to Earth.
It had harvested a staggering number of souls over ti, and in doing so, its power had grown accordingly.
Even within their own dinsion, dinsional lords could not create souls from nothing.
But Drex had found a workaround.
He went to the movie universe.
More specifically, to the planet where Red Skull guarded the Soul Stone.
"Are you here for the Soul Stone?"
Red Skull greeted him at once.
As a proper guardian, and one who had been stuck there for a very long ti, he clearly wanted relief as soon as possible.
Drex walked straight toward the stone.
If this had been the comic universe, he might have shown so caution.
But in the movie universe, the Infinity Stones were no longer a threat to him.
The Soul Stone possessed the power to steal, manipulate, alter, and even create souls.
It could command the souls of the living, and even the dead could be bent to its will.
The stone was also dangerous in another way.
It possessed a degree of self-awareness and carried a hungry soul of its own.
Ironically, it was also the entrance to a small universe of haunting beauty.
Drex had already obtained the Power Stone, Mind Stone, Space Stone, and Reality Stone.
The Soul Stone was the only one he had not yet taken.
With his current strength, he simply shattered the stone's protective asures by force and took control of the orange gem.
The Soul Stone was unhappy.
Very unhappy.
It tried to seize Drex's soul and swallow him.
But then it discovered sothing far worse.
Drex was not rely resisting.
He was absorbing it.
Three-quarters into that process, the Soul Stone broke.
Not physically.
ntally.
Its resistance collapsed.
It yielded.
Drex returned the stolen power to it, then carried the Soul Stone back to the black hole dinsion.
Only to find that, once inside, the Soul Stone had lost all its power and beco nothing more than an ordinary gemstone.
"Annoying."
Drex left again, returning to the movie universe.
And sure enough, on the planet where Red Skull stood watch, another Soul Stone had appeared.
The one in Drex's hand remained a completely normal stone.
He looked at it, then looked at the new one.
"Single-universe Infinity Stones really are a pain."
He took the second Soul Stone as well.
Red Skull, watching this entire sequence unfold, looked utterly stunned.
There were two Soul Stones?
Since it was clearly impossible to take the Soul Stone back to the black hole dinsion and use it there, Drex changed approach.
He used the Soul Stone's power to create souls.
A large batch of souls ford at once.
And imdiately, sothing else responded.
Death.
A black vortex opened.
Endless deathly energy spilled out from within.
This was the deathly sanctuary of Marvel's cosmos.
The voice of Death itself whispered into Drex's ear.
The language was unfamiliar.
Old.
Ancient.
It ca from the edge of the Dead Sea, from the boundary where all things end.
Every syllable carried enough power to make a soul tremble.
Unfortunately for Death, Drex had already beco a dinsional lord.
A single-universe death goddess was no longer enough to shake him.
User Comments
0 comments from readers