A Lobotomy for Spider-Man

Buzz--!

As the pink light from Jiang Li's fingertips lit up, the world before the mutated Peter's eyes instantly plunged into absolute darkness.

There was no upside-down city, no painful white cocoon, and no arrogant giant neural spider.

When Peter opened his eyes again.

He found himself lying on an extremely rough, dusty asphalt road. The air was thick with the pungent smell of car exhaust and the acrid stench of sewers.

"My power... where is my net?!"

Peter tried to roar, but the sound he made was so weak that it couldn't even cause a vibration in the air.

He lowered his head in fear.

What came into view was no longer the glowing nerve plexus, nor the indestructible pale spine, but eight extremely thin, fragile legs covered with black down.

He turned into an ordinary insect.

A common house spider, no bigger than a fingernail, huddled on the edge of a sewer, barely clinging to life.

What you fear most is neither gods nor destruction.

Above the sky came Jiang Li's unique, ethereal, and childlike voice, characteristic of the Pesky Dust. To Peter, however, this voice was a thousand times more terrifying than the death knell of Hell.

[You are a mutated monster, a parasite that feigns power by feeding on the pain of others. Your deepest fear is that even after stripping away this monstrous skin, you will still be nothing more than an ant to be trampled upon.]

"No... no!! Let me out!!"

Peter struggled desperately, waving his tiny spider legs. But his insect body was so weak that he could barely even climb a small pebble.

Just then...

Boom!

The entire ground trembled violently.

Peter looked up, and his compound eyes reflected an extremely Shocker scene.

A huge shadow covered the sky. It was a foot, a human foot wearing red and blue tight-fitting combat boots!

Those were the boots he wore when he was a superhero.

But at that moment, the boot, like a collapsing skyscraper, came crashing down on him, the Spider-Man, with a whistling wind pressure!

"Get away! Don't step on me!!" Peter screamed silently, frantically trying to escape the shadows by twisting his eight legs.

But he was too slow.

Splat!

The boots stomped down mercilessly, grinding heavily on the rough asphalt road, and even rubbing viciously around half a circle.

Peter clearly felt the terrifying pain of his carapace shattering and his internal organs being instantly crushed and burst. The absolute power crushing him made it impossible for him to even have the thought of resisting.

He died.

But only 0.1 seconds had passed.

Scene reset.

Peter opened his eyes again; he was still lying on the asphalt road in the same spot. The excruciating pain of being trampled was still clearly etched into the depths of his Soul Stone.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

This time, it's not just a boot.

From all directions, thousands upon thousands of red and blue combat boots, like a dense rain of meteors, stomped wildly down on the spider, which was the size of a fingernail!

Splat! Splat! Splat!

"Aaaaaahh...

It got crushed. Reset.

Crushed. Reset.

He suffocated to death after being covered in mud from the soles of his shoes. Reset.

Within the subconscious vicious cycle woven by Jiang Li, Peter was stripped of all his supernatural powers, and could only experience the despair of being trampled to death like a bug from the most humble perspective time and time again.

There is no reversal, no hope.

Only absolute spiritual torture.

In the highest dimension of dreams.

Jiang Li, in the form of a blue sprite, hovered in the pink sky, expressionlessly watching the Soul Stone below that was collapsing in a crazy, endless loop.

He continuously sprinkled pink dust from his fingertips, keeping the "nightmare juicer" running at high speed.

"Don't you enjoy weaving nightmares for the citizens of Queens? Don't you enjoy seeing their desperate expressions in their Silk Shroud?"

Jiang Li's voice was icy and chilling.

"Then I'll make you experience the most disgusting and humiliating way to die in the entire universe a hundred million times!"

The Time Stream in dreams is entirely controlled by the Pesky Dust.

In the outside world, a second Jiang Li forcibly accelerated to a hundred years within this nightmare.

A full hundred years!

Throughout those long years, Peter did nothing but be trampled and crushed to death.

Gradually, he stopped struggling.

His self-awareness, which belonged to the category of "abnormal entities," began to completely disintegrate in this endless mediocrity and despair.

The resentment of the citizens that he had once inhaled, guided by Jiang Li's pink dust, turned into a backlash poison, severing his own mental network piece by piece.

This isn't a fight at all.

Jiang Li was performing a brain resection on this monster called "Despair".

[Ding! Target's mental dimension has been completely destroyed!]

[The target logic loop is deadlocked.]

[Concept Erasure progress: 100%!]

The moment the system notification sound plays.

This pink dreamscape, forcibly created by Jiang Li, began to crumble on a large scale, like ashes from burnt paper.

The dual mental and physical shutdown has been achieved.

Real world. Streets of Queens.

A cold wind blew by.

Jiang Li suddenly opened his eyes. He had deactivated his Pesky Dust form and reverted to his human appearance, wearing a black trench coat.

His pupils refocused.

The desolate street before me, covered in white silk threads, still stood. But the suffocating, eerie atmosphere surrounding it had vanished.

"Woof!"

The Mechanical Hound beside it shook the metal barbs on its body, and the eerie green light in its eyes flashed, indicating that the danger had passed.

Jiang Li raised his head and looked at the clock tower at the end of the street.

The enormous neural web that once shrouded the clock tower and covered half a block was now withering and weathering at an alarming rate. The nerve threads that had been shimmering with a ghostly blue light had turned into shriveled, foul-smelling rotten ropes, which fell to the ground one after another.

The Soul Stone of the citizens encased in the white cocoon vanished completely with the death of the monster, returning to nothingness. They, in this universe, were nothing more than pitiful creatures forcibly trapped by code.

"Without the support of a spiritual core, even the physical body can't be maintained?"

Jiang Li sneered.

Boom!

A muffled thud.

Above the clock tower, the largest main cocoon, which was also the hiding place of the mutated Peter, suddenly shrank and fell off, crashing heavily onto the square in front of Jiang Li from a height of tens of meters.

The cocoon was smashed to pieces.

There were no corpses or spider remains inside.

There was only a pile of foul-smelling white powder.

And deep within that pile of powder.

A core, no bigger than a fist and translucent and pale white, lay there quietly.

The surface of the core is covered with dense cracks, like human nerve endings. Each flash creates a ripple of causality in the surrounding space that is difficult to detect with the naked eye.

Jiang Li strode forward.

He could clearly sense that the core contained the very code of "fate and cause" that had almost caused his demise.

"The second fragment of the rule is mine."

Jiang Li raised his left hand, and the Phoenix Vortex on the Omnitrix lit up with a dazzling green light.