"What's your relationship with Zod?" Barry asked.
Al hesitated, stopped himself, then tried to speak again. His mouth opened and closed for a long while before he finally said, "...The two of us don't have any relationship."
Barry narrowed his eyes. Just as Al was about to say something else, Barry held up One Hand and said, "You don't need to say anything. I understand."
Al really wanted to know what exactly he understood, but Barry fell silent. Watching Al take a mold out of the cryogenic chamber, he asked, "What is that?"
"A key," Al said.
"What's it for?"
"Starting a machine." Al smiled, opened the mold, and took out a nail wound from spirals of silver metal. Crimson liquid had condensed within it, like a beating heart.
"Sounds like you had a plan all along," Barry said, folding his arms.
"It wasn't that I had a plan. It was that the Kryptonian race had one." Al turned around and said, "This planet is very special. It may look like a small planet, but at its center is a heart more powerful than the star of our solar system."
"What do you mean?" Barry did not want to analyze all the metaphors in his words, so he simply asked.
"Who do you think created Krypton?"
"Uh, God?"
Al shook his head. "God may be your deity, but he isn't ours. The god worshipped by the Kryptonian race and Kryptonians is called Rao. In the Kryptonian language, that name means 'sun.'"
"Legend says that Rao planted a seed in Krypton's core and allowed Kryptonians to draw power from it. That is why, for generations, we have been extracting energy from the core."
"Where would the core get that much energy?" Barry could not help asking. He compared it to Earth—although