If he wanted to, Stav could have buried Drex Valen under money.
Instead, he chose something else.
"A Texas oil field in North America?!"
Urd blurted it out, hardly believing the extra condition Stav had put on the table.
As long as Drex developed an effective cancer treatment, Stav would hand over an oil field in Texas.
That was real industry. Real assets.
For countless people, owning an oil field was the kind of dream that meant a lifetime of security for themselves and their descendants. New energy sources were rising fast and beginning to threaten the old order, but oil still mattered. A lot.
Drex knew enough about the petroleum industry to understand exactly what Stav was offering.
Texas in North America, the Middle East in Asia, the North Sea in Britain, the Caspian Sea in Central Asia, and Siberia. Those five major oil-producing regions accounted for roughly seventy percent of the world's total oil output and about a quarter of global energy supply.
They were the lifeblood of the modern industrial world.
The largest resource system on the planet. The system that fed the energy and chemical foundations of modern society. The system that let nations sit on mountains of wealth and burn through it. It controlled war, politics, economics, and industry. It had mattered in the past, and it still mattered now.
OPEC, oil futures, the petroleum industry, and most of the petrochemical sector all rested on it. More than a billion people in the world lived directly on oil. Even more survived through ethylene and petrochemical production. Automobiles, plastics, aerospace... the world itself could practically be called an oil-based civilization.
And that made it one of the greatest enemies of Drex's new energy technologies, because he did not accept outside investment. He had his own monopoly in mind.
Stav's offer was really an invitation.
An invitation for Drex, the most valuable and most monopolistic force in the new energy market, to join the oil empire.
Drex's magnetic beam fusion reactor no longer depended on palladium. Compared to the newer element reactors, its power output might not have been as flashy, but it completely outclassed the old palladium cold-fusion system in every other respect.
Since Tony Stark had disappeared and been confirmed dead, and Obadiah had taken over Stark Industries, a lot of oil tycoons had tried to invest in fusion reactor research. They claimed to support the development of new energy.
What they really wanted was to turn new energy into the next oil.
After all, the most profitable business in the world was monopoly.
Drex's magnetic beam fusion reactor wasn't nearly as universally welcomed as his earlier inventions. In the United States, where public education was atrociously low, most people believed the lies spread by capital interests that new energy caused cancer and all kinds of diseases. That made them hostile toward Drex's reactor.
But at the same time, plenty of people came to him with what they called "good intentions," carrying absurd sums of money. If Drex nodded even once, Blade Tech Industries would become a monster on the scale of Umbrella Corporation, maybe even standing above it and above the law itself.
Unfortunately for them, Drex Valen was far too proud for that.
The education he had received in his previous life only made him even more contemptuous of kneeling to capital.
So what if they resisted new energy? If they did not want it, he would sell it to another country.
Even if ninety-nine percent of the world was capitalist, there was always one country that wasn't.
"Oil..." Drex said with a quiet sigh.
He could overturn the entire petroleum order if he wanted to, strip oil of its role as an energy source, and leave it only as a chemical feedstock. But even that wasn't irreplaceable.
Seawater could be transformed through magnetized water materials. With enough energy behind it, it could be shaped into an ideal light-industry material.
Solidified plastified water could also replace plastics and ethylene, taking over the role of petrochemical materials.
But as he had already recognized, doing that would be the same as challenging finance and capital head-on.
He could withstand that. The system itself could not.
If the financial world collapsed, tens of billions of people would be affected.
That was the limit of the era.
And the tragedy of genius that saw too far ahead was this: they could not force an age to change, and the age would not allow itself to be changed by them.
"Accept it," Drex said.
After all, he had already planned to release a cancer treatment anyway.
Stav finally let out a breath of relief.
What worried him now was whether he would survive long enough to see the drug developed. For that reason, he had no choice but to submit to conventional treatment and buy himself more time.
Drex had no intention of giving him an immediate answer either. He planned to drag things out a little longer.
Kamar-Taj.
Morgan sat with her eyes closed, practicing the magic of Kamar-Taj, specifically the white magic of the Vishanti.
Everything else came with a price.
As the child of a dimensional god, using any other kind of magic was basically an invitation to every other dimensional power in existence. It was the same as hanging a glowing sign in the void that said: there is a delicious coordinate right here.
If another dimensional being discovered her, it would never let go of a perfect vessel like Morgan, someone who could host its power at any moment. She would become a disposable tool.
For the sake of her own life, once the Ancient One had explained the stakes, Morgan had no intention of touching any other magic.
Unfortunately, she had underestimated just how tempting the child of a dimensional god really was.
One day, while Morgan was doing her usual routine and holding the Book of Vishanti to study white magic, she accidentally tripped over a book.
Morgan blinked in surprise and got back to her feet.
She had heard the Ancient One say that the books in Kamar-Taj's library all contained their own mysterious power. This book had actually tripped her?
She picked it up and opened it without thinking.
The pages were blank at first.
Then lines of English appeared, revealing information on how to resist dimensional gods, along with knowledge about magic, symbols, and more.
Morgan stared in shock.
There was a book this powerful in Kamar-Taj's library?
She read it with complete absorption.
It was only when a sharp shout rang in her ear that she snapped back to reality. Then she saw the Ancient One closing the book in her hands.
"That is the Darkhold," the Ancient One said coldly. "Where did you get it?"
She had only stepped out briefly to speak with Odin, and when she returned, something felt wrong. The next thing she knew, Morgan was holding the Darkhold.
Where had it come from?
Tens of billions of years ago, one of the ancient gods had already fallen into demonic corruption. Cthon, fleeing the devouring hunger of the God-Eaters, was forced to flee into another dimension. Before escaping, he wrote down all of his crimes and spells on indestructible parchment. Those writings were later compiled into a volume known as the Darkhold.
Before Cthon departed, he left the Darkhold on Earth as a conduit through which he could influence the world and release his power.
The Darkhold had once been the origin of spellbooks like the Necronomicon. It could also ensure that any language it was written in could be fully understood by the reader.
But the Darkhold's dark magic was deeply corruptive, and its little servants would actively tempt people into using the spells recorded within it. Many who used it found their souls claimed by Cthon in the end.