Knowhere.
One of the most infamous lawless territories in the universe.
On the surface, it looked completely unregulated. Intergalactic fugitives, pirates, bounty hunters, and Ravagers all walked openly through its streets without fear of arrest. No government claimed authority here. No empire enforced its laws.
At least, not officially.
But true chaos could never sustain itself for long.
The Collector, Taneleer Tivan, had established rules of his own.
Money ruled everything.
If you had enough credits, you could do almost anything in Knowhere. Blow up a building in the middle of a crowded district? Fine. Just pay the damages afterward and nobody would care.
Drex Valen's ship entered through the gigantic eye socket of the Celestial skull.
Many years ago, Tivan had discovered the remains and immediately moved to occupy and excavate them.
Celestial bone.
Brain tissue.
Spinal fluid.
Every fragment harvested from the corpse sold for astronomical prices across galactic black markets.
Most of the skull had already been hollowed out through centuries of mining and expansion. Commerce followed naturally after that, and wherever commerce gathered, criminals inevitably arrived as well.
Now the entire place existed as a tangled knot of merchants, mercenaries, smugglers, fugitives, and opportunists.
As the ship drifted deeper into Knowhere, Drex and the others saw countless mining platforms attached directly to the Celestial remains. Dense swarms of automated mining drones crawled across the skull like metallic insects.
"They're mining a god's headā¦"
Lyra Yan sounded genuinely disturbed.
Drex shrugged.
"Think of it as excavating the corpse of Pangu or Taiyi. Same concept."
That immediately helped her understand.
In fact, it made her curious enough that she wanted to try digging around herself.
"What kind of things can they even find in there?" she asked.
"Probably not Mako energy," Tifa Lockhart added curiously.
"Not that kind of resource," Drex replied. "But Celestial remains definitely contain valuable materials."
The ship finally settled onto a docking platform with a metallic clang.
The moment they disembarked, Drex led the group straight toward the slave district.
Not long afterward, they left disappointed.
Drex had assumed money could buy almost anything in the cosmos.
Reality disagreed.
"Kree scientists cost that much?"
He looked genuinely stunned.
Their asking prices were absurd.
The Orb itself was only worth a few billion credits on the open market, yet some Kree scientists were being sold for nearly a billion each.
For the first time since arriving in space, Drex suddenly felt poor.
Ridiculous.
At this point he was half-tempted to return to Earth, mobilize the Burning Legion, and invade the Kree Empire directly.
Why buy scientists when you could just conquer them?
Of course, he wasn't actually serious.
Mostly.
Since he couldn't acquire the scientists, Drex decided to simply wander Knowhere and spend credits freely instead.
That turned out to be a terrible financial decision.
Esdeath, Tifa Lockhart, and Lyra Yan enjoyed themselves immensely.
Drex became progressively more irritated.
Why were entertainment products more expensive than scientific databases?
The galaxy's priorities were clearly broken.
Still, he took it well enough.
Credits could always be earned again.
Making the women around him happy mattered more than hoarding money.
While wandering the markets, Drex overheard news about Thanos and the Black Order.
They had recently attacked the Chitauri homeworld and crushed it with overwhelming force. The Chitauri had already become one of Thanos' subordinate races.
And according to the timeline, this had only happened recently.
"Hm. Timeline still lines up, more or less."
Drex thought it over.
Back on Earth, it was only 2005. Tony Stark still technically had three years left before becoming Iron Man.
Except now Tony already possessed nanotech armor more advanced than even the Bleeding Edge suit.
If the Chitauri still planned to invade Earth in the futureā¦
That invasion was going to end very badly for them.
Humanity had already been hardened by Drex's repeated global crisis drills. Add in the growing armies of War Machines and Iron Monger units, and Earth was no longer the soft target it used to be.
After purchasing an alarming quantity of largely useless entertainment junk, Drex finally returned to the ship with the others.
Next destination:
The Orb.
Since he was already out in space, returning empty-handed would be embarrassing.
And conveniently enough, Drex still remembered exactly where the Orb was hidden.
The Guardians of the Galaxy probably didn't even exist yet.
Which meant nobody would stop him from taking the Power Stone first.
"I remember the Orb being on Moragā¦"
Drex checked the star charts. Morag's coordinates immediately appeared, confirming the planet wasn't completely forgotten.
Morag.
A planet orbited by three natural moons.
Long ago, it had once been a flourishing civilization with interstellar exploration and colonization capabilities. Then, for reasons unknown, the entire civilization abruptly collapsed.
Now the world was little more than a dead ruin drifting through space.
Drex piloted the ship through more than a hundred consecutive spatial nodes before finally reaching the system.
Back on Knowhere, barely an hour had passed.
Kryptonians were terrifyingly efficient astronauts.
Most alien species would require weeks for a journey like this.
Drex and the others completed it in under sixty minutes.
At this point, even the sensation of spatial-node traversal had become entertainment.
The near-death pressure during each jump no longer frightened Esdeath or the others. If anything, they'd started treating it like foreplay.
Morag itself was bleak and desolate.
Violent winds screamed across the planet's surface beneath skies choked with storm clouds and constant lightning. Massive canyons split the terrain apart, while underground water pressure occasionally erupted upward in colossal geysers before collapsing into torrential rain.
The buried temple could easily have sunk beneath the crust ages ago.
As the ship entered the atmosphere, Drex activated the scanning systems and began constructing a planetary projection model.
"We're supposed to find a temple in this?"
Lyra Yan looked skeptical.
Morag was a geological nightmare.
Deep fissures scarred the landscape everywhere, accompanied by constant tectonic instability and explosive subterranean floods.
"No problem," Drex said casually. "Kryptonians are basically living super-scanners."
Activating his enhanced vision, he swept across the planet.
It didn't take long.
"Found it."
The ship hovered briefly before descending toward a relatively stable landing area.
Ahead of them stood the ruins of an ancient structure.
Most of the outer architecture had eroded beyond recognition, but enough remained to hint at the civilization's former grandeur.
A forgotten world.
A forgotten people.
And buried beneath their ruinsā¦
ā¦the Power Stone.
Drex exited the ship alongside Tifa, Esdeath, and Lyra before leading them into the temple itself.
The deeper they went, the stranger the place became.
Outside, the world had decayed into ruin.
Inside, the temple remained astonishingly intact.
Aside from a thin layer of dust, it was as though time itself had frozen.
At the very end of the structure stood an enormous stone door sealed shut. Intricate hollow carvings spread across both the walls and the gate itself, while faint streams of energy flowed continuously through the grooves.
Morag had been abandoned for untold ages.
Yet the temple's energy systems were somehow still operational.
That alone was unsettling.
...
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