Days as a Spiritual Mentor in American Comics Chapter 6062 - 5078: Fate of the Fighter (24)

In front of the lab bench, Reed said with a touch of emotion, "Communication between the Multiverse really is a good thing. I never imagined I’d be able to sit down and talk calmly with the Scarlet Witch."

"You haven’t met the Witch of this cosmos?" Wanda looked up and asked.

"Saw her from far away once," Reed said. "She looked like she’d gone insane, her mental state was pretty unstable, and I didn’t dare get close. Other people at most would just lock me up; she would actually kill me."

Wanda lowered her gaze. The power of Scarlet churned constantly in her palm as she said, "If I have time, I’ll go find her and send her to Battleworld. There are a lot of people there who’ve been through similar things. They can comfort each other, and while they’re at it, they can help me look after the kids."

Reed withdrew his gaze and went back to the readings on the instruments in front of him. He kept silently thinking, occasionally scribbling on paper, as if he were calculating something.

"Is it helping?" About half an hour later, Wanda spoke up.

Propping his head with one hand, Reed looked at what he’d written and said, "This is a very peculiar Energy. It’s the opposite side of the cosmos."

"What do you mean?"

"To be precise, it’s the opposite side of the cosmos’s existing rules." Reed ran his fingers over the paper. "Every rule you know—gravity, temperature, mathematics—they all count as cosmic order. And the Strength you wield is used to break that order."

"Break it?"

"Exactly." Reed nodded. "You return these orders to a state of pure Chaos, so for now I’ll call it Chaotic Power."

"No need to ’call it.’ That Strength is literally named Chaotic Power." Wanda paused before adding, "It used to be called Chaotic Power, the Strength wielded by the Great Shadow Xeseon. But after I started using it, I renamed it the power of Scarlet."

"That’s exactly what’s strange about it." Reed stressed. "Your Strength doesn’t just break order—it can reshape it."

Before Wanda could ask, Reed continued, "What you call ’Word Spirit Ability’ is: first you destroy the rules, then you rewrite them. That way you can change reality at the level of rules."

"For example, someone falls from the rooftop, but you don’t want them to die. The moment the words leave your mouth, you alter their gravity parameters and write new ones. So when they hit the ground, it’s roughly equivalent to being immune to gravity, and naturally they don’t die from the fall."

Reed let out a soft sigh. "For most living beings, the cosmos’s rules are in ’read-only’ mode. They can understand and explore them—for instance, the Human race can derive the formula for gravity through research—but they can’t change it. You, on the other hand, can use your Strength to partially and finitely modify some of the cosmos’s rules. That is precisely where your power lies."

Wanda nodded. "All right, I get that. But will this be useful to our research?"

"Of course. You can practically change anything—no limit on entries or quantity. That means your permissions are infinitely close to those of the Universe administrators. And yet you’re still restrained by Sentinels."

Wanda’s expression turned a bit Shocker-like. "You’re saying the Sentinel Robots’ permissions are higher than the Universe administrators’?"

Reed nodded slightly. His face didn’t show much gravity, as if he’d expected this all along. He said, "The existence that granted the Sentinel Robots the Spiritual Ability of ’restraining Mutants’ must be above the administrators. It can deny an administrator’s applications to modify cosmic rules—that’s crucial."

Wanda looked at him, and Reed went on, "This means there’s no need for us to waste time dealing with administrators like Eternity. They have no way to grant anything permissions that high."

"So it’s the Creator God?"

"Maybe." Reed said, "It’s just that I’ve never seen the Creator God. Maybe one day when I was staring into the starry sky of the cosmos, I did see it, but I don’t really remember."

"Then shouldn’t we first find someone who’s seen the Creator God?" Wanda thought for a moment. "At the very least, we need to figure out why it wanted to do this in the first place, right?"

"It’s not that simple." Reed said. "What do you think the Creator God is? God?"

"Isn’t it?" Wanda said. "The kind of deity that created an entire cosmos—an all-knowing, Omnipotent existence. Maybe it’s not called God, but there has to be some kind of god like that."

Reed shook his head. "The cosmos isn’t necessarily something deliberately created by some existence. Even if it was, that something may not have a Personality. It could just be a natural phenomenon operating according to certain laws."

"But it’s not operating quite right." Wanda said. "What we experience and what our formulas say don’t match. So what exactly is wrong?"

"We shouldn’t try to question God, ma’am." Reed said. "Because it’s pointless. If God wants the cosmos to run this way, it must have its reasons. Even if we find it, it may not answer. Even if it answers, it may not change anything. And even if it changes something, it may not make things better."

"So are we just going to swallow it like this?" Wanda finally couldn’t keep the emotion out of her voice; she was about to explode.

"I’m saying we can just change it directly," Reed said. "Why do you care how God sees it or what he thinks? Once you realize something’s wrong, you figure out a way to fix it. If he won’t allow it, then kill him. There’s no need to argue with him."

Wanda was completely stunned. She’d come to this cosmos’s Reed purely because he’d seen a lot of the bigger picture—but this bigger picture he’d seen was a bit too big.

"If we go digging into God’s secrets, there are two possible outcomes. First, we look everywhere and discover there is no God, everything’s just an automatic program, and that automatic program is malfunctioning—then you can only find a way to correct it yourself. Second, there is a God, but he won’t let you change anything, and we still have to find a way to change it ourselves. So we might as well just change it from the start."

Wanda thought about it; it did kind of make sense. But she still asked, "What if God is actually willing to change it?"

"Have you read the Bible?" Reed asked.

Wanda opened her mouth. "I flipped through a few pages when I was working at a church... uh, at my son’s school book club I learned a few verses, but overall... no, I haven’t really read it."

"God doesn’t have a great temper," Reed said. "Especially the God in the Old Testament. If we just show up in front of him like this, he’ll definitely fly into a Thunderous rage and then stage another world-destroying flood."

Wanda nodded slightly, then said, "But could it be that the Bible is just made-up nonsense?"

"Could be," Reed didn’t deny it. "But do you dare bet on that?"

Wanda fell silent. That really wasn’t something you could gamble on. After all that effort to find God, only to discover he’s a cranky old man who not only refuses to patch the program’s bugs but plans to wipe out the source of the problem altogether—that’d be game over.

"But if we modify things without permission, won’t he come after us anyway?" Wanda was a bit worried again. It wasn’t that she didn’t dare to change it; she just wanted to find a method subtle enough to solve the problem perfectly, with no one the wiser.

"No matter what method you use to modify it, he’ll definitely come after you," Reed said. "So don’t bother with scruples. Just change it."

Wanda was full of question marks. Since you’ll get caught if you commit a crime anyway, you might as well commit the biggest crime of all—is that really how it works?

But after thinking it through, she realized you couldn’t really compare it like that. From a Superhero’s point of view, they just refused to accept a tragic fate. Once any form of life appears in this world, it has only one unchanging, eternal task: survival. What they were doing wasn’t wrong, and it certainly wasn’t a crime.

"First you have to give up your illusions, ma’am," Reed went on. "One individual can empathize with another individual, but one group isn’t necessarily capable of Empathy with another group. And don’t even start with carbon-based life and the rules of the cosmos mutually understanding or empathizing with each other—that’s absolutely impossible."

"From the perspective of order, the more stable everything is, the better. As long as it can keep functioning steadily, there’s no need to change anything. But from our perspective, certain things absolutely have to be changed. That’s an irreconcilable contradiction."

"For us, the act of modifying these things is already difficult enough. If we waste more time trying to cover our tracks, things will only get worse for us. Better to move quickly and cleanly, strike directly, win or lose in one go, and never regret the move once it’s made."

Wanda gazed at Reed, feeling a kind of calm authority in his words, as if this was the true Mr. Fantastic, Reed Richards. He wasn’t a Madman; he just saw too far ahead.

Wanda’s lips moved, but she still didn’t ask the question that came to mind—she didn’t want to make herself sound stupid. There was no way something like this would be free of danger; there was a ninety-nine percent chance they’d die, and even that remaining one percent didn’t necessarily lead to some warm, happy ending. But this was the Fighter’s fate.

"My only worry is whether this might end up destroying the cosmos," Wanda twisted her fingers tightly together. She swallowed. "Maybe other people don’t want to resist. Maybe they think the current way of living is acceptable. Do we have the right to make decisions for them?"

"If people could bear it, you wouldn’t have come here, would you?" Reed asked, looking into her eyes.

Wanda slowly lowered her gaze, but her heaving chest showed she was far from calm. Then she heard Reed say, "When you can stand on the shore and see raging waves, it means a storm has already risen in the Deep Sea."

"I’ve always been an oddball, studying all sorts of things that most people think are vague and unreal. But when someone actually starts seriously discussing fate with me, I know the storm has already begun to blow."

Reed looked into Wanda’s eyes and said, "Someone like you, who’s always been chasing a stable life, still couldn’t help but come to a Madman like me who’s tried to destroy the cosmos multiple times to seek answers. That proves that most people already can’t endure it anymore."

Wanda drifted a little, realizing Reed was right. Before she saw the Sentinel Robots, she’d never thought there was anything wrong with the way the cosmos ran. She hadn’t panicked immediately even when she saw the Sentinel Robots restraining Mutants. It wasn’t until she took action herself, until she herself was restrained, that the uncontrollable sense of insecurity pushed her to come here.

And there were others—those with even less confidence, those nowhere near as powerful as the Scarlet Witch—those with more fighting spirit than her, who’d been resisting their own tragic fate all along. They had probably started rebelling earlier than she had.

She wasn’t beginning some brand new Chapter; she was just joining a different kind of lineup. She was abandoning stability, giving up illusions, and, alongside others, firing at fate.