The Collector was immortal for a reason.
Long ago, he lost a wager with Death herself and was forbidden from ever entering her realm. For millions of years, he lived alongside his wife and children on Cygnus X-1, drifting through eternity while trying to keep himself sane.
Then another three billion years passed.
Eventually, his wife grew tired of immortality and abandoned it willingly.
The Collector never recovered from that loss.
To preserve his sanity, he developed a hobby.
Collecting.
Artifacts.
Creatures.
Relics.
Civilizations.
Anything rare.
Anything unique.
Anything he believed should belong to him.
Over enough time, the hobby became obsession.
And obsession became identity.
Drex Valen had always been cautious because he still wasn't entirely sure what kind of Marvel universe he was standing in.
Comic universe?
Movie universe?
Some hybrid nightmare?
That uncertainty kept him restrained for a long time.
Back on Earth, at least there had been people like the Ancient One and Odin keeping watch over reality. The planet was practically a beginner-safe zone by cosmic standards.
But after awakening his Doomsday evolution and becoming something closer to a Doomsday Superman…
Drex had stopped hesitating.
The moment he gained that power, he immediately headed into the universe.
Phoenix-force mutations and dragon-force abilities were impressive, but neither gave him the same overwhelming sense of security as the Doomsday adaptation did.
That evolution felt absolute.
"Let's visit Knowhere."
Drex leaned back in his chair thoughtfully.
"Might as well see it for ourselves."
The Collector probably hadn't acquired the Orb yet.
Which was fine.
Drex's real objective was obtaining Kree scientists and advancing his own missing genetic engineering technologies.
If he possessed something like Clark's Kryptonian archive ship, packed with knowledge from a hundred thousand worlds, he wouldn't need to chase other civilizations' science in the first place.
Of course, he still possessed the Codex.
If he wanted, he could mass-produce Kryptonians endlessly.
But Drex had no interest in turning the entire universe into New Krypton.
Kryptonians were dangerous.
All it would take was one lunatic like Lex Luthor getting hold of Kryptonian DNA and suddenly another Doomsday would crawl into existence.
Drex didn't fear Doomsday.
That didn't make the creature any less annoying.
"Can we fight people on Knowhere?"
Esdeath asked immediately, sounding genuinely interested.
Drex gave her a flat look.
"No. Try not to solve every problem with violence."
Then he paused.
"Although if somebody starts trouble first, feel free."
That answer seemed to satisfy her.
Using the star charts, Drex guided the ship through more than a dozen spatial nodes in succession before finally reaching the region where Knowhere drifted.
Distance from Earth:
Over eighty thousand light-years.
Ahead of them, the darkness of space gave way to an immense cloud-like nebula glowing under distant starlight. Colors shimmered across its surface in impossible gradients, like liquid rainbows stretched across the void.
Beautiful.
Alien.
Dreamlike.
And at the center of it all floated something so enormous it made planets seem insignificant.
A severed head.
Or what remained of one.
Time had eroded away most recognizable features. The eye sockets were hollow caverns large enough to swallow cities whole.
At this point, calling it a skull was more accurate than calling it a head.
Everyone aboard the ship froze.
Even with Kryptonian senses and superhuman minds, the sheer scale of it hit like a physical force.
The realism of seeing it in person sent chills crawling down their spines.
Only Drex remained calm.
Compared to some of the things he'd witnessed in the DC universe, this barely cracked the top ten.
Still, Tifa Lockhart and Lyra Yan looked completely overwhelmed.
"Drex… what is that?"
"The head of a Celestial."
"…A what?"
"A species of absurdly powerful lifeforms."
Drex folded his arms as he explained.
"Think of beings like Pangu, Fuxi, primordial creator gods from mythology. Celestials can seed life across planets. To lesser civilizations, they're basically creators."
That only made Tifa and Lyra more stunned.
Esdeath, meanwhile, focused on something entirely different.
"I want to know what killed it."
Her eyes gleamed.
A creator god.
Now that sounded interesting.
Drex was about to pilot the ship into Knowhere when his body suddenly seized.
Pain.
Violent and immediate.
His expression changed instantly.
He knew this feeling.
Another mutation.
Far-off starlight pierced through his biofield, bypassing its filtration systems completely and sinking directly into his cells.
Then the transformation began.
Every nerve in his body screamed.
It felt like staying awake for three straight days, then being dragged into a marathon while every muscle tore itself apart from the inside.
Power surged through him in tidal waves.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Each surge slammed upward toward some unreachable threshold before collapsing back, only to rise stronger the next moment.
His blood boiled.
Muscles swelled violently.
Bones cracked and shifted.
Drex could barely hear anything over the roar inside his own body, but even through the haze he saw his hands deforming. Veins bulged beneath rapidly expanding muscle tissue, dark and thick like cables carrying molten fire.
He wanted to move.
To destroy something.
To tear reality apart with his bare hands.
The instinct became overwhelming.
Then suddenly—
Silence.
The power receded.
The mutation stabilized.
Drex opened his eyes slowly and sat upright.
Lyra Yan immediately moved closer.
"Drex?"
"I'm fine."
He exhaled slowly.
"Just developed another mutation."
The ability was actually useful.
More useful than he initially expected.
If this had happened before his Doomsday evolution, it probably would've been a massive turning point.
Because what he had just developed…
…was essentially Magic Superman.
Extreme resistance to magic.
Extreme resistance to mental attacks, soul manipulation, and psychic influence.
And absurd talent for learning mystical arts.
Drex rolled his shoulders.
"Not bad."
At minimum, it meant the Mind Stone and Soul Stone had become even less threatening to him.
Between the Phoenix Force, dragon-force abilities, and now this…
His defenses against metaphysical attacks were becoming ridiculous.
Esdeath looked openly jealous.
"You got stronger again."
Drex snorted.
"The process feels terrible every time."
There really wasn't a better way to describe it.
The weakness.
The loss of control.
The sensation of his body rewriting itself while he could do nothing except endure it.
No sane person would voluntarily experience something like that.
Still…
Power was power.
And Drex Valen had never been the type to refuse more of it.