A week had passed since the moment Jack's soul was pulled into the Underworld, and the outside world was in a state of quiet, panicked chaos. The news had broken: Jack Hou, the enigmatic guardian of the Golden Peach, was gone. Not turned to marble this time, but fallen, his dozens of clones collapsing simultaneously all over the globe, their vital signs so faint they were barely registered by even the most advanced medical equipment.
In the Golden Peach, the people did not panic. They protected their own. Residents gently picked up the fallen clones from the streets, from the parks, from the rooftops, and brought them into their homes, into their apartments. The guardian had fallen, so now it was their turn to be the guardians.
Aunty Vivi was one of them. She had brought a clone into her small apartment above her tailor shop. She sat by his bedside, gently patting his head. She looked over at the faded photographs on her wall, at a young boy with a familiar, mischievous glint in his eyes. "When will you get up?" she whispered to the unconscious clone, her voice thick with emotion. "If he were still with me, he would be your age." She wiped a tear from her eye, stood, and walked back to her shop to continue her work, a silent, lonely vigil.
In Mario's Pizzeria, another clone lay on a cot in the back room. Mario, his hands covered in flour, was tossing a pizza. "Eyy, Antonio!" he called out to his young son. "Don't touch Jack Hou's face like that! Your hands are full of flour!" Antonio just giggled, poking the clone's cheek with a doughy finger.
But outside the sanctuary of the Golden Peach, the mood was far less gentle.
In a VIP room at Metro-General Hospital, Natalie Beckman sat, her head lowered, her hand clasped around the still, unresponsive hand of J. The room was a fortress, with four of the elite God Tree guards standing silent sentinels inside, and another eight stationed in the hallway outside.
The door opened. It was Doctor Stephen Strange.
"The scans can't penetrate his body," he said, his voice a low, frustrated thing. "None of our equipment can do anything for him. We can't even administer an IV, since no kind of needle can pierce his skin." He looked at Natalie, his expression a mixture of professional sympathy and profound, medical bewilderment. "All we can do is wait."
"Thanks, doctor," Natalie said without looking up.
As the moments ticked by, a message alert pinged on her phone. She read it. It was an intelligence report detailing the retrieval of Jack's clones around the world. Some governments were trying to take them, and some had succeeded.
A wave of pure, unadulterated fury washed over her. She smashed her phone against the wall, the device shattering into a hundred pieces. "These pests," she hissed, her voice a low, dangerous thing. "How dare they touch Jack Hou's body."
She snapped her fingers. One of the guards immediately handed her a new, secure phone. She dialed a number and walked out of the room. Four of the guards from the hallway fell in line behind her as she walked. The phone connected.
"Forward the meeting," she said, her voice as cold and sharp as a shard of glass. "We're doing it tonight."
She hung up.
…
While the outside world was in a full-blown panic over his sudden, global collapse, Jack Hou was just entering the second trial.
He didn't drift into it. He landed, hard, on a rough, uneven surface. He groaned, the psychic whiplash a thousand times worse than his crash landing at the Xavier Mansion. "Aarrgghh… what now?"
He pushed himself up. He was in the mangled terrain of his own soulscape again, but this time, it was different. He felt as if a million unseen, unheard eyes were watching him from every single grain of sand, every shard of ice, every molecule of the impossible air.
The hundreds of blurry figures appeared once more. But Jack, having already endured their first assault, just looked around and smiled, a tired, defiant expression on his face.
"What now?" he called out to the silent, shimmering crowd. "Wanna inflict another 171 lifetimes of pain on me? Too bad. I've already been through it."
But then, a single figure, a man in a kingly, armored silhouette, stepped forward. "YOU TYRANT!"
The word was a key. It unlocked a door in his soul, and the memory that poured out was not one of helplessness or victimization. It was a memory of power. And of woe.
He was a king in a strange, war-torn world. He felt the weight of a heavy, iron crown, the responsibility of a people constantly caught in the crossfire. His territory was a buffer state, a perpetual battlefield for two larger, warring nations. They would fight on his land, and when their wars ended, they would leave behind nothing but plague, famine, and scorched earth.
He remembered the moment he decided he had had enough.
He felt the fire of a righteous fury as he invaded the first of the neighboring nations. He felt his gifted body, his unnatural strength, his judgment eyes that could see the sins, the gifts, and the talents of all people. He remembered nurturing these talents, winning the hearts of his soldiers, his people. He remembered his brutal, but effective, method of war: never leave a battle half-finished. Only all-out, decisive victory.
But then… he remembered the silence after the final war was won. He remembered missing the bloody battlefield, the thrill of the fight. He remembered, slowly, surely, becoming the very thing he had fought against. A tyrant.
The memories filled him, every single, excruciating detail. And this time, it was different. He didn't just see the events. He felt the consequences. He felt the searing pain of a sword wound in a soldier he had sent to his death. He felt the heart-wrenching grief of a mother whose son had died for his ambition. He felt the cold, gnawing hunger of a child in a village his army had stripped bare. Every single drop of pain, both emotional and physical, that he had caused in that lifetime, he now felt as his own.
Jack was brought to his knees, a scream of pure, empathetic agony tearing from his soul. This single memory, this single lifetime of woe, was more painful, more devastating, than all 171 of the previous trial's memories combined.
…
A sleek, silent Quinjet, its black paint absorbing the moonlight, landed softly on the shores of Krakoa. Natalie Beckman stepped out, her face a mask of grim determination.
The island itself seemed to sense her arrival. The ground trembled, and a massive, humanoid form made of a thousand blooming flowers rose from the earth. "Natalie!" Krakoa's voice was a chorus of rustling leaves and panicked whispers. "Master… Master has been unconscious for a week!"
Natalie walked forward and placed a calming hand on one of its vine-like arms. "I know, Krakoa," she said, her voice a steady, reassuring anchor. "We need to be calm. For your master, and for his teachings."
Krakoa's trembling form stilled, its chaotic energy coming back under control.
"Where is your brother, Wudao?" Natalie asked.
"Little brother is keeping Master's body safe," Krakoa replied. "He is keeping an eye on him."
"Good," Natalie said. Her expression turned to one of pure, strategic focus. "Two hours from now, all of the mutant leaders will be here. We are going to discuss your territory."
Krakoa's flowery form tilted in confusion. "Didn't we have several months before that was supposed to happen?"
"We need to stabilize the situation," Natalie explained, her voice sharp and decisive. "We have to take this chance, this… power vacuum… and strengthen ourselves first. We cannot let ourselves be vulnerable again."
Krakoa's form seemed to stand a little taller, a new, determined energy flowing through it. "Yes. Master always said, 'Know your way out before you go in.' Let us think of the possible outcomes, and the minimum outcome we can accept."
Natalie pulled a data pad from her coat. "Way ahead of you," she said, a faint, predatory smile on her lips. "Come. Let me brief you on the meeting."
They both walked into the heart of the living island, two allies preparing for a possibility war of words that would decide the future of their kind.
…
The first memory was a torrent, the ones that followed were a flood. The shrouded hood silhouette stepped forward, its voice a chorus of a million screams. "YOU WERE A MONSTER!"
The world twisted, and Jack was a spymaster in a city of glass and secrets. He felt the exhilarating, god-like power of being able to wear any face, to walk in any shoes. He remembered using this gift for a "just" cause, overthrowing a corrupt council by becoming its members and exposing their crimes from within.
But after the victory, the paranoia had set in. He saw conspiracies in every shadow. He started replacing key figures—generals, advisors, merchants—not with clones, but with himself.
He created a kingdom of puppets, a web of lies where he was the only real person. But the memory he was forced to feel was not his own satisfaction. It was the suffocating, soul-crushing terror of the populace.
He felt the chilling fear of a wife kissing her husband, uncertain if the man behind the eyes was the one she loved or the silent spymaster who ruled their lives. He felt the woe of a city where truth had died, where every relationship was poisoned by the possibility of his presence.
The memory shattered, only to be replaced by another. A figure in simple, earth-stained robes stepped forward. "YOU WERE A FALSE SAVIOR!"
This memory was the most insidious. He was a healer in a plague-ridden land. He felt the cool, life-giving energy flow from his hands, the profound joy of mending broken bones, of closing wounds, of chasing the fever from a dying child.
The people revered him. They built a temple in his name. But then, a king tried to weaponize his gift, to force him to heal only his soldiers. He refused. He rebelled. He won. But in his victory, he became the sole arbiter of life and death. He created a new kingdom, a theocracy built around his healing touch. And he became a tyrant not of the sword, but of salvation.
He felt the cold, hard judgment in his own heart as he withheld his healing from a village that questioned his divine right, letting them succumb to a simple, curable illness as an example. He was forced to feel the desperate, pleading prayers of the dying, the agonizing grief of the families he had condemned, the woe of a people trapped by their own hope in him.
Another figure, this one massive and built of stone, lumbered forward. "YOU WERE A SELFISH CREATOR!"
He was an architect, a geokinetic who could shape mountains with his will. He remembered the awe of the people as he raised cities from the barren earth, carved bridges across impossible chasms. He was a builder of wonders.
But his ambition became a cancer. He decided to build a monument to his own genius, a tower that would pierce the very heavens. The project consumed everything. He felt the grinding of stone dust in a thousand pairs of lungs.
He felt the snap of a breaking bone as a worker fell from a scaffold. He felt the hollow, gnawing ache of starvation in the belly of a child whose family's last grain had been seized for the "greater good" of his project. The woe was not of a single death, but of a generation of lives sacrificed for a single, egotistical monument of stone and misery.
With every memory, a piece of Jack's soul was flayed away. This was not the sharp, clean pain of a sword. It was the crushing, empathetic agony of a million lives he had ruined. The hate he had received in his powerless lives was a shield; the woe he had caused in his powerful lives was a poison that rotted him from the inside out.
He lay on the shifting, impossible ground of his soulscape, his spiritual form flickering like a candle in a hurricane. He was a broken, twitching thing, drowned in a sea of his own making. He couldn't even move.
From the swirling chaos of his tormented soul, the silhouette of the Monkey King emerged. It strode through the sea of Jack's self-inflicted misery and knelt beside his half-dead, flickering form.
"What now… you prick?" Jack rasped, his voice a broken, defiant whisper.
The Monkey King laughed, a cold, mocking sound. "Kekekeke. Still think you're a king worthy of a throne, do you?"
A slow, weak, but utterly triumphant grin spread across Jack's face. "Kekekeke… I get it now," he said. "You're not me. You're not even the real Wukong."
The silhouette, for the first time, seemed to falter. "What are you talking about? All of those memories are real."
"I know that, alright," Jack said, his voice gaining a strange, new strength. "I'm talking about you. You're not the real Monkey King, because you yourself told me this: 'The mountain bears no name, yet all know its peak. The wind has no master, yet it carves the stone. Do not wear the crown, little monkey. Forge your own. For a true king… needs no throne.'"
He pushed himself up, his gaze locking with the silhouette's shadowed eyes.
"And you, out of all beings, should know," he said, his voice a low, powerful thing, "that I… never… need… a… throne."
The words were a key. A final, absolute truth.
One by one, the shimmering, accusatory figures of his past lives—the king, the spymaster, the healer, the architect, and the others—stopped their assault. They turned, their forms softening into rivers of pure, golden light, and began to flow into Jack, not as a punishment, but as a homecoming.
The Monkey King silhouette watched, a look of pure, dawning horror on its shadowy face. "No," it whispered. "No!" It stood, its form flickering violently, and let out a final, desperate roar.
"YOU WERE TRASH!"
A final memory, this one familiar, washed over Jack. He was a gangster in the back alleys of Chinatown. He felt the sting of a punch, the cold satisfaction of a deal well made, the loyalty of his brothers, the grief of a friend lost.
He saw the filth, the violence, the desperation. But this time, there was no woe. He had already lived this life. He had already learned from it. The good, the bad, the ugly—it was all just… him. The memory washed over him, not as a flood, but as a gentle, familiar rain.
As the last of his past lives flowed into him, a final, brilliant piece of the puzzle clicked into place. 341. Plus one. He now remembered them all, all 342 lives.
He stood, no longer a broken, flickering thing, but a being of pure, solidified light. He walked, step by step, toward the now-trembling silhouette of the Monkey King.
He hugged him.
"Thank you," Jack said, his voice a quiet, genuine thing.
The Monkey King's form softened. The arrogant, prideful warrior was gone, replaced by a simple, smiling monkey. "Heh," it said, its voice now warm and familiar. "Congratulations."
Then, it snapped its fingers.
Jack's hug was suddenly empty. He was alone, standing in a silent, endless, and perfectly white void.
**A/N**
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**A/N**