American comics: Starting with Luke the Maker

When Bruce's eyes opened again, he found that he had left the mental world and returned to the Batcave in the real world.

He looked at the time in the monitoring room and found that after experiencing so much in the mental world, it felt like a long time had passed, but time in the real world seemed to have frozen. It only started flowing again after he came out. From entering to exiting, and then Stephen taking action to solve the problem, it only took ten seconds in total.

“Felt like a long time passed?” Seeing the look of surprise on Bruce's face, Stephen guessed with experience. “The world of spirits is like that. The flow of time inside has no meaning of comparison with the flow of time in the real material universe.”

Bruce nodded, unsure what to say for a moment. He just felt all kinds of awkwardness in his body, from his physical state to his emotions. But when he really tried to find the source, it became vague again.

He felt his body become heavy, a feeling very similar to being seriously ill, resting in bed for a long time, and then feeling the heaviness and discomfort during the recovery period when he got out of bed to rehabilitate. An action that used to be easy to perform now felt noticeably difficult.

At the same time, the heaviness of his body was exchanged for a feeling of lightness in his mental state, as if a smaller soul had been stuffed into his trained and powerful body, and the burden immediately appeared.

Bruce speculated that this was a side effect of the surgery, and he needed to adapt to it slowly.

“Here, take this.” Stephen tossed Bruce a golden, hollow sphere made of what seemed to be an unknown metal. Bruce relied on his reflexes to catch it in his hand and examined it closely.

It was an ordinary sphere, with some kind of light seemingly bound inside, reflecting a golden, sunlight-like color along the sphere's patterns.

The moment he held the sphere, Bruce's body trembled, and a familiar feeling of limb extension emerged from the depths of his heart. The sphere in his hand was like an object he had lost long ago but was still incomparably familiar with. This made him involuntarily look at Stephen, wanting to get an answer from him.

“This is?” Bruce instinctively felt that it was very important to him.

“A fragment of your soul. Or rather, the materialized and excised portion of your bright personality,” Stephen explained. “Although it has been cut out, if you wear it often, you will be subtly influenced by it, giving you a better chance to recover your previous mental state as soon as possible.”

Hearing this, Bruce's grip on the sphere tightened. A fragment of his soul? Could such an illusory thing really be materialized? And it actually appeared in front of him?

Was Stephen exaggerating, using a metaphorical expression, or was he serious? Even if Bruce wasn't a mage or a supernatural ability user, he could understand how much trouble a soul fragment could bring him if it fell into the hands of certain people.

Although Stephen had completely cut it out, feeling that vague connection, Bruce already treated it as a weakness.

“The other one is your dark personality. I can't give that to you. It's infected with the abyss. In any case, there's no need to come into contact with it, and it's dangerous. Your current state is like a blank sheet of paper. The dark personality's ability to infect you is much stronger and more obvious than it is.” Stephen waved his hand, and a black sphere, identical in style to the one in Bruce's hand except for the color, floated in his outstretched palm.

“What do you plan to do with it?” Bruce thought for a moment and asked. After all, it was one of his split personalities, and as its former owner, it was such a sensitive thing, so he had to ask some questions clearly.

If he hadn't felt the abyss power exposed by the young Wayne in the mental world and sensed the great danger from it, he would definitely have snatched it from Stephen. Anyway, after experiencing so much, he had some initial trust in Stephen, but that trust wasn't enough for him to let down his guard and doubts.

“Take it back and give it to Luke to see if he can still save your dark side. If it can't be saved, then we can only find a way to seal it up and lock it away as a dangerous item.” Stephen was extremely familiar with the procedure for dealing with abyss-infected objects. Anyway, it was about controlling the uncontrolled expansion of the abyss as much as possible.

The Time Administration had used similar items containing a bit of abyss power to destroy more than one civilization. Many civilizations that were hit by it would feel that strange power after inexplicably obtaining abyss items. And without knowing the danger of the abyss and being particularly confident in their own technology, they would mostly analyze and experiment with the item.

Some technologically advanced civilizations did research many things from the item, and even developed a subject from scratch.

But no matter which civilization, and no matter what they researched from the abyss item, as time went on, they would inevitably fall into war, chaos, and destruction.

The span of time might be measured in centuries, but everyone who obtained an abyss item would eventually face death and destruction.

Some had accidents, and some were inexplicably subjected to a sudden war by another civilization or multiple civilizations. The destruction of each civilization and the death of the owner seemed to be caused by various factors, but with the birth of each civilization's ruins, the abyss item gained a bit of legendary color.

Some civilizations and races with special abilities had also accurately judged the danger of the abyss item without other information and had tried to discard or destroy it, but both methods failed at the beginning.

One was that people who had been in contact with the abyss item would be marked by it, and the more contact they had, the deeper the mark would be. Coupled with the secret operations of the Time Administration, the choice to discard the abyss item was almost impossible to achieve.

The other was to try to destroy it. But the abyss item, which could carry the power of the abyss, had materials with strong resistance and tolerance to it, even better than the materials for forging artifacts. Therefore, when the powerful weapons mastered by the civilization could not destroy it, they often pinned their hopes on the almighty universe.

One civilization, whose technology was not very developed but whose race had extremely high mental advantages, had once planned to throw a mysteriously obtained abyss item into a launcher and into the star of a planetary system. The result was that decades later, the entire sun turned black and possessed strange attributes and energy, twisting and infecting all life in the star system.

That race with extremely excellent psychic abilities was almost defenseless against the pollution of the sun. Because it was not just them that had mutated, but also the energy, vegetation, environment, beasts, and bacteria on their planet. They had no way to avoid it and had to experience multiple infections every moment. Eventually, they became corrupted and became a crazy race that worshiped the black sun and the power of the abyss. These crazy dependents even turned around and hunted down their relatively calm compatriots, forcing them to participate in the depravity ceremony, and believed that this was the best way to continue the race and life.

Malice, disaster, destruction.

With the large-scale投放 of abyss items, many multiverse had related legends, and regarded it as a huge disaster like a flood. But when obtaining and analyzing abyss items, no one could be sure of this. After all, abyss items were varied.

It might just be the core of a certain ore buried under a planet, and then this planet was discovered by a nearby civilization, and some ores with strange energy were mined, and they were regarded as important resource stars, and used to climb out of new technology trees and point out new technologies.

Then at this moment, they mined that abyss core. After some research and analysis, even if they realized the danger at this time, because of the major investment in the early stage and the prospect of various new technologies in the future, they were reluctant and unable to make a decisive decision to cut their wrists, so they could only forcibly turn a blind eye to the possible dangers, and continue to move forward with a fluke mentality. In the end, they inexplicably became more and more deeply involved, more and more fearful and insane, full of destructiveness and aggression, until they self-destructed, or were destroyed by other civilizations and strong people.

In a world with Asgard, the young version of Odin, who was full of the desire to conquer and the heart of war, had obtained such an abyss item in the countries he had conquered and destroyed. He collected it as a trophy in his Odin's Vault.

This abyss item was soon taken a fancy to by Hela and picked out.

It can only be said that Hela's character and power attributes were very pleasing to the abyss item. Under the mutual complement of the two, Hela's power expanded rapidly, but at the same time, the distortion of her spirit and body became more and more difficult to hide. In the end, her abnormality was discovered by Odin.

Just like the story that Thor and his siblings had understood countless times, their family battle inevitably occurred. The first game was still the familiar Odin, the God King, and Hela, the Goddess of the Underworld.

The Valkyrie Valkyries fell one after another, and then their souls did not return to Valhalla, but along with their corpses, under the influence of the abyss item and Hela's power, they became distorted bodies of the abyss dead.

This time, Odin, the God King, did not suppress the extremely powerful Hela, but was beheaded by Hela with a sword, doing what many universes of Hela longed to do but could not do. Because she devoured Odin's divinity and power, Hela's power became more and more powerful, and what followed was the complete fall of Asgard!

Every Asgardian was forcibly subjected to a corruption ceremony and became the carrier and dependent of the two forces of the abyss and the undead in Hela's hands.

They would not die, would not get tired, and had the high pollution, assimilation, and devouring properties of the abyss.

An abyss army that made the entire universe terrified swept the Nine Realms and the universe under Hela's reorganization.

No one could resist Hela's attack. No one could deal with and destroy that abyss army. Even if one was killed, they would pollute a piece of land and eventually be resurrected in the polluted land and continue to fight. This made it so that even if there were powerful legions that could fight Hela's abyss army head-on, they would face the catastrophic situation of their homes being polluted, their people being polluted, and themselves being polluted. In the end, even if they fought to the death and did not retreat, they became the same kind and had to accept Hela's restrictions. This was really a point that made all civilizations and strong people break their defenses.

In the end, Hela, who had not achieved the great cause of unification in other universes, was forcibly done by Hela in this universe. All the civilizations and planets that Hela had set foot on were corrupted and depraved into the abyss army. In the end, things got out of hand, and the Time Administration, which could not hold back, had to come over to clean up the situation.

They even guided the rebels in this universe to find the whereabouts of the Infinity Stones and pointed out the location to them one by one. Thanos, the leader of the rebels, did his old job in other universes, collecting Infinity Stones, forging the Infinity Gauntlet, and snapping his fingers.

But this time it was not to destroy more than half of the life in the universe, but to destroy Hela and the abyss army raging under her command.

With the secret help of the Time Administration, Thanos smoothly achieved all the prerequisites for snapping his fingers, and snapped his fingers in front of Hela.

The abyss army was indeed destroyed under the power of the Infinity Stones, and could no longer be resurrected as the undead. But the bad thing was that the power of the Infinity Stones failed to erase the power of the abyss. Instead, because it lost many carriers, the power of the abyss had a big explosion and began to pollute the starry sky universe from life.

Realizing this, Thanos had to forcibly extract more power from the ring again and restart it. Unfortunately, the restart did not make the power of the abyss disappear. Instead, because of the early stage of the universe's restart, it combined more deeply with the universe.

In the end, the Time Administration had to let the mages of Kamar-Taj and the technicians of Hebron clean up the mess. After spending a lot of manpower and resources to contain the abyss in this new universe, the Energy Bank immediately enacted one harsh law after another on the use of abyss items, and traced the source to collect the abyss items that had been thrown out in the past, so as to avoid such a loss of control in the future.

However, as a result, the Time Administration has mastered many detailed observation reports on abyss items, and this valuable intelligence and information has also been shared with Hebron and Kamar-Taj. With the help of this data intelligence, the abyss power's restriction has also been updated twice.

So although the abyss is still troublesome, as long as it does not spread, Stephen can even use it as a killing weapon. The abyss pollution on Bruce, which is separated by several layers, is not very dangerous to Stephen once it is controlled.(End of this chapter)