At the summit of the Himalayas.
The freezing wind was like blades of ice, savagely carving across the exposed rocks and whipping snow into the sky.
Stephen Strange—the former surgeon whose hands had once worked miracles.
Now he huddled atop the snowstorm-ravaged peak like a clumsy abandoned child.
His tattered cotton robe could not keep out the extreme cold. His numbed fingers had nearly lost all feeling, yet they still clutched an antique brass Sling Ring.
Failure.
Another failure.
He mechanically, desperately repeated the motions:
His fingers drew a circle, his mind focused, and he imagined his destination—the warm halls of Kamar-Taj.
Yet every attempt merely saw his fingertips sweep uselessly through the frigid air.
A few faint sparks flew, so weak they were nearly invisible, before the gale mercilessly swallowed them.
The frustration gnawed at him more sharply than the cold wind.
His vaunted intellect, his logic, his absolute command of the physical world—all of it seemed so pale and laughable here.
Ancient One's words echoed amid the howling wind:
"You are not learning spells. You are learning how to reconnect your spirit...
Let go of your ego!"
He was exhausted and on the verge of giving up.
The agony in his body and the torment in his mind had reached their peak.
Just as his consciousness was about to be frozen stiff and drowned in despair, a thought split through the chaos like lightning:
"Let go of your ego... See the true nature of the world."
Not controlling it with a surgeon's precision, but sensing it with his mind.
He stopped fighting the wind and snow, no longer fixating on that unreachable warmth.
He closed his eyes and let the piercing cold envelop him, yet his mind grew strangely calm.
He no longer tried to "command" space.
Instead,