Chapter 433: Reincarnators?
"Are you sure you heard right?" Ethan asked Strange, a little surprised.
"Reincarnators... I'm sure I heard it right. Is there a problem?"
Strange frowned, as if trying to remember.
Then he said with complete certainty, "What's wrong? I'm sure I heard right. In countless futures I observed, a huge crowd of people invaded Hell's Kitchen, and every one of them called themselves Reincarnators."
"Reincarnators... is there something special about them?" Strange's question carried both curiosity and confusion. He turned to Ethan, his eyes searching.
To him, it was just one of many variables in the future. But Ethan's reaction made him realize that the word "Reincarnator" might hide a deeper meaning.
When Ethan heard Strange's description, his face turned grave. He slowly closed his eyes and took a deep breath, as if trying hard to calm the turmoil inside.
But when Ethan opened his eyes again, he didn't answer Strange's question. In near silence, he slowly turned and climbed the stairs to the floor above.
Every step was unusually heavy, as if he were carrying a tremendous weight.
Strange watched Ethan's back, full of questions.
Ethan walked into his room. The door closed softly with a click that sounded especially loud in the quiet room.
He went straight to the slightly worn sofa and sat down. It sank a little under him with a faint creak. His eyes were empty and deep, as if they could see through every inch of the room to some distant shore.
His right hand reached for the lighter on the coffee table without thinking. His fingers ran over its cold metal surface, as if looking for some small comfort. With a soft click, a flame leapt up and lit the cigarette between his fingers. Through the drifting smoke, his face turned hazy and mysterious.
"Heh. Never thought I'd run into 'old acquaintances' here," he murmured, his tone partly wry, partly resigned. Smoke slipped slowly from the corner of his mouth and tangled with his words.
Ethan was no stranger to the concept of Reincarnators. In his previous life, he'd lost himself countless times in novels about them. The Reincarnators in those stories traveled between worlds, constantly pushing their limits for the sake of survival and power, exploring the mysteries of life.
Do you want to understand the meaning of life? Do you want to truly... live? That classic line had echoed in his mind countless times, stoking his curiosity and longing for the unknown.
Especially the novel hailed as the founding work of the Reincarnator genre. Its Chu Xuan had left a deep mark on him.
Chu Xuan was a man so calm he was almost cruel, so rational he was awe-inspiring. Time and again he turned danger into safety through intelligence and strategy, and Ethan had been captivated. He'd fantasized countless times about becoming a Reincarnator like that, traveling through countless worlds and living different lives.
But now that it was really happening right in front of him, now that Reincarnators were going to show up in a place called Hell's Kitchen, Ethan's feelings were complicated. He knew what Reincarnators really were: tools in the service of the Lord God's space, with only one mission, to plunder and destroy.
So to Ethan, these Reincarnators were plunderers and destroyers. Compared to Marvel's villains, they were even more hateful, even more brutal.
"This planet really is a total mess." Ethan shook his head.
He didn't understand what had happened to this Marvel Universe he lived in.
A mere Earth, an almost insignificant blue planet in the vast universe, was about to face an unprecedented catastrophe.
Clouds of war gathered. Not only were the ancient and powerful Celestials stirring, but mysterious Reincarnators from different times and spaces were eager to try their luck too, as though Earth hid some treasure capable of overturning the order of the universe.
I really don't get why they're so fixated on this little Earth, Ethan grumbled to himself, his face full of helplessness and confusion. One little Earth isn't nearly enough for all these heavyweight powers to fight over.
Sometimes Ethan really missed Thanos. The guy had brought chaos, sure, but by comparison he was "simple."
Next to these complicated, unfathomably powerful opponents, Thanos's invasion was practically cute. At least back then they could rely on knowing the plot to find a way to deal with it.
"You really don't know what you've got till it's gone," Ethan sighed, full of nostalgia for the old days.
This Marvel Universe was no longer the world Ethan knew, full of heroism and justice.
The plot knowledge he'd once been so proud of was now as useless as scrap paper.
Ethan also knew that moving Hell's Kitchen into the dimensional space wasn't the best solution.
Fortunately, Tony had firmly shot that plan down.
Strictly speaking, it hadn't been shot down so much as replaced.
Tony's idea was revolutionary and forward-thinking. Instead of passively waiting for the enemy to attack Earth, they'd take the initiative: create a dimensional space identical to the real Big Apple and move the battlefield there, protecting Earth from the ravages of war.
It was a classic case of luring the enemy into a trap of their own design.
Of course, how to draw these powerful enemies into the carefully prepared dimensional space was the next problem they had to solve.
After heated discussion and planning, they decided that at the very least, the Big Apple inside the dimensional space had to look identical to the outside world. That would confuse the enemy as much as possible.
And so the outside world saw this: countless construction crews and trucks pouring into Hell's Kitchen like a tide, busily building this false dimensional space.
Ethan, as one of the plan's key executors, had been completely drained, body and mind, these past two days.
Building Hell's Kitchen alone in a dimensional space had already been hard enough. Now he had to replicate the entire Big Apple in a short time.
It was a massive project. Even working overtime nonstop, he couldn't finish it alone. Fortunately, Tony's Stark Industries and the mutants were helping.
Ethan was getting something out of it, though. As he kept creating the Big Apple inside the dimensional space, he could feel his Authority over creation steadily growing.
He'd never imagined that a dimensional space he'd made on a sixth-sense hunch would turn out to matter so much.
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