Meteorite

By the time Yuri left the Ambrosius family, the sky had already darkened.

Yuri refused Old Adam's offer to send him home by car and chose to run back on his own. With the help of the palm imprint, his abilities had now been integrated into a unified whole, but he still needed to explore their specific applications bit by bit himself. Besides, he had no plans to head to the New York Sanctum and travel to Kamar-Taj for magic training anytime soon. Tony had called not long ago to say that he had completed the virtual model for the new element.

The official manufacturing date had been set for the next few days.

The expensive suit could not withstand the wind pressure generated by Yuri's running and tore apart inch by inch. Strips of fabric danced in the wind, and, thoroughly annoyed, Yuri simply ripped off the entire upper half of his clothes. In the middle of a leap, he changed into a specially purchased ultra-elastic, wear-resistant bodysuit.

He grew faster and faster, his swinging limbs turning into a blur. A golden "tail" more than ten meters long trailed behind him, with no sign of stopping its growth. Mark could drag out a golden trail of light stretching for thousands of meters with his super speed, but Yuri could clearly feel himself improving at a rapid pace. Under the effects of the Mutants' powerful evolutionary genes, he believed the day he surpassed Mark was not far away.

Whoosh—!

Yuri suddenly came to a stop. Space Power flashed and vanished, dissipating the enormous kinetic energy generated by his high-speed sprint. Before him stood an abandoned suburban park, and the source of the noise was a black meteorite that had fallen from the sky.

Spider-Man was in a very bad mood today.

Ever since Tony had exposed his identity, he had been on edge, terrified that some giant screen on the street would suddenly display a news headline like "Spider-Man's True Identity Is Peter Parker." As a result, he had been listless all day. After casually helping a few people, he returned home early.

When he learned that Aunt May would be working overtime and would not be coming home tonight, he immediately pulled on his mask and swung from the bustling city center to this suburban garden. This was where he had gone on his first date with his first love, Mary. Later, Mary fell in love with his best friend Harry, and Peter gave them his most heartfelt blessing.

Whenever Peter felt unhappy or troubled, he would come here alone. Years of neglect had given the place a quietness reminiscent of a primitive jungle. No one wanted to set foot on the overgrown paths crawling with mosquitoes and insects, so nobody ever came to disturb him.

But something seemed to have gone wrong today.

Peter, lying on a battered rocking chair, suddenly opened his eyes and flipped away. When he raised his head to see where the danger had come from, a meteorite falling from the sky precisely struck the rocking chair where he had just been lying. Countless shattered rocks scattered in every direction, but Peter's powerful senses and extraordinary agility allowed him to easily dodge every scorching fragment.

Once the smoke and dust had completely dispersed, Peter finally saw the meteorite's true appearance. It was a pitch-black stone, with several finger-thick holes scattered across its surface. Bold because of his skill, he cautiously approached and crouched down to inspect it closely.

Splat!

A glob of black slime suddenly shot out and splattered across Peter's raised hand. It swiftly stuck to him as if it were alive, and no matter how hard Peter tried, he could not shake it off.

"What are you doing?"

Spider-Man abruptly turned around. An exceptionally handsome man pushed aside the wildly growing bushes, looking strangely at him as he flailed around as though dancing. Most striking of all, the man's eyes were an unusual dark gold.

A flood of thoughts ran through Spider-Man's mind in an instant. The thing stuck to my hand should be that legendary alien creature, right? Should I tell this man there's an alien here? If I tell him, and he tells the police, will I, as the first person to come into contact with it, get captured and sliced up for research? ...The more he thought about it, the more terrified he became. Peter hid his hand behind his back and said, "It's just a meteorite. There's nothing interesting here, sir. I suggest you leave as soon as possible, just like I'm about to do."

"Uh..."

Yuri watched Spider-Man flee at top speed as though escaping for his life. After shaking his head, he stopped paying attention to him. Of course, he had seen the black slime stuck to the other man's palm. If he was not mistaken, that was probably some kind of Symbiote?

The meteorite embedded in the ground gradually cooled. The sound of liquid flowing came simultaneously from the holes on its surface. Before long, three or four streams of viscous black fluid fell to the ground. With clear determination, they surged toward Yuri, whose eyes had turned completely white, scrambling to reach him first.

"So weak."

A Symbiote without a host was nothing more than a moving pile of sludge. Controlling their minds was no more difficult than controlling a slightly clever cat or dog. Yuri raised a hand and extracted some materials from the dilapidated rocking chair nearby. This directly caused the chair to fall apart completely. If Spider-Man came back here, he probably would not be able to lie on it to "calm his mind" anymore.

Under Yuri's control, the materials taken from the rocking chair warped and fused together, forming spherical containers that trapped every Symbiote that had crawled out. He disdainfully shook the crude iron spheres. The reason he had helped Tony so much was that improving one's manufacturing abilities required drawing inferences and learning by analogy; it was impossible to create something from nothing.

In other words, he would never possess Tony's unparalleled research and development ability. But as long as he learned the manufacturing process of something, he could modify and create variations of it at the same level better than anyone else.

"Soon. Soon."

Ignoring the meteorite that still gave off faint wisps of heat, Yuri stored the containers holding the Symbiotes and turned toward his shop. He remembered that, in the future, a company called the "...Life Foundation" would explore space in search of the Symbiote planet and bring Venom back to Earth. To avoid changing the plot too much, he might as well leave this meteorite here. It was useless even if he took it.

His sharp hearing caught the sound of helicopter rotors several miles away. He had no interest in finding out whether they belonged to reporters or government personnel. After erasing all traces of his and Spider-Man's presence, he left immediately.

He was very busy tonight. Not only did he need to finish the Steam Armor that would be delivered to Black Eggplant and the military old man tomorrow night before Kate and Vanax returned from fighting crime, but he also wanted to study the Symbiotes in the containers. He had heard that these things grew stronger against the strong and weaker against the weak—a race that truly only knew how to bully others with borrowed power.

The possibility of another consciousness appearing in his mind was something he found difficult to accept.

So he wanted to see whether he could use his abilities to completely erase the Symbiotes' souls and consciousnesses, turning them into sentient-free, independently controllable individual biological weapons. If he succeeded, he also wanted to "help" them reproduce, striving to give every member of his family a Symbiote armor that brought nothing but benefits.

Mutants + Symbiotes.

That would definitely be interesting!