Half a month later, in the wasteland on the outskirts of Louisiana.
Carol was suspended in mid-air three meters above the ground, with her eyes closed. She stretched out her hands, palms facing each other. Between her two palms, a highly condensed golden energy the size of a fist was slowly rotating.
It was no longer a ball of violent flames, but an almost perfect sphere. Its surface was flowing with lines like liquid gold, and inside it was faintly visible the birth and death of a Nebula-like structure. This small "planet", under her control, was as quiet as a work of art.
Monica was sitting on a big rock not far away, holding his chin in his hands, looking fascinated. Maria was leaning against a pickup truck, with both relief and a hint of worry in his eyes.
Carol slowly opened her hands, and the energy planet began to revolve around her body in a stable elliptical orbit. One circle, two circles...
On the third lap, she frowned slightly. In her mind, a fragment about flying at the Air Force Academy flashed through her mind, and there was a slight fluctuation in her mood.
It was this slight fluctuation that instantly broke the perfect balance.
The orbit of the energy planet began to become unstable. It shook violently, and the golden lines on its surface became crazy. The next second, it was like a comet that had derailed its orbit, dragging a long tail flame and whizzing away towards a hilltop in the distance.
"Damn it!" Carol cursed in a low voice, opened his eyes and wanted to chase after him.
But it's too late.
Just as the energy ball was about to hit the top of the mountain, triggering an explosion that was no less than a heavy aerial bomb. At this moment, Chu Hang, who had been standing by like a normal person, finally moved.
He didn't even look at the out-of-control energy ball. He just lazily raised his right hand, pointed his index finger and middle finger together and made a light stroke in the direction of the energy ball's flight.
It was as if an eraser had erased a pencil mark on the paper.
There was a distortion in the space in front of him that was almost imperceptible to the naked eye, like the heat rising from the road on a summer afternoon. The distortion only appeared for a moment, like an invisible mouth, opening and then closing.
The energy ball, which was enough to flatten the mountain, just disappeared out of thin air.
No explosion, no sound, no light.
It was "eaten".
A few seconds later, outside the atmosphere at an altitude of tens of thousands of meters, a golden beam of light flashed past and shot into the depths of the vast universe without disturbing anyone.
Carol stared at all this in stunned silence, and did not close her mouth for a long time. She knew that Chu Hang was strong, but this method of taking it lightly and ignoring the laws of energy was still beyond her imagination.
"I said, your problem is not the strength." Chu Hang retracted his hand and put it in his trouser pocket, his tone was as calm as if he was commenting on a dish, "But it is that you don't understand what you are using."
He walked to Carol and looked up at the sky. There was still a trace of energy penetrating the clouds there.
"Do you think you got Lightspeed Engine's energy?" Chu Hang asked.
"Isn't it?" Carol asked with some uncertainty.
He looked at the confused Carol and decided to give her a homemade cosmic physics lesson.
"The core of that engine, you later learned that it was called Cosmic Cube, right? That thing is not essentially an energy source, it is the embodiment of a concept. It is the source code of the entire universe's 'space' dimension, compressed into a small square. It itself is the incarnation of Law of Space."
Chu Hang paused and gave her some time to digest.
"My path is to understand and rewrite the rules. Just like just now, I did not use stronger force to block your energy, but directly rewrote a small area of space rules on its flight route, opened a back door to outer space, and let it fly out on its own."
"And your path is to use the purest energy to the extreme. Your body is now a perfect energy converter, a walking star. You don't need to understand those complicated rules, you just need to become the power itself."
Carol nodded in understanding.
"Then what should I do?"
"Continue to practice." Chu Hang's answer was simple and rude, "Practice controlling energy to the same instinct as your breathing and blinking. When you can play poker with Monica and have a hundred energy butterflies flying around you, and each one's wings flap at a different frequency, you have just barely started."
Carol's mouth twitched when he heard this. This request is simply crazy.
"Before you completely make this power a part of your body, don't even think about getting into trouble with Kree." Chu Hang gave a final warning, "Otherwise, you won't even know how you died."
After saying that, he ignored Carol and turned around and walked towards the pickup truck.
In the days that followed, Carol's training entered a new stage. She no longer pursued the intensity and scale of energy, but began to pursue the perverted and precise control proposed by Chu Hang.
She began to try to maintain a stable ball of light on her fingertips while running, and tried to use energy to heat Monica's milk to a precise 37.5 degrees while chatting with Maria.
This process was full of failures and setbacks. She almost set the house on fire several times, and once even melted Maria's favorite coffee machine, which earned Maria a whole day of blank stares.
Chu Hang, on the other hand, completely became the hands-off shopkeeper.
He spent most of his time shutting himself in his room, facing the buzzing computer, like a standard Internet-addicted teenager.
Only when Carol's training encounters a bottleneck, or when his energy is about to go out of control, will he appear like a ghost, give him some cold words or two, or resolve a disaster in an understatement, and then drift away, hiding his merits and fame.
He is very busy.
Busy laying the foundation for his future business empire.
He used [Shapeshifting]'s ability to fabricate more than a dozen new identities for himself all over the world in just half a month.
In Frankfurt, he is a Germany investment consultant in his fifties named "Hans·Schmidt". He is rigorous and rigid, wears gold-rimmed glasses, and always wears a crisp suit. With this identity, he is responsible for opening offshore companies and bank accounts at Europe.
In Tokyo, he is a technology geek in his early twenties named "Takahashi Kenichi". He has messy hair, wears a T-shirt with anime characters printed on it, and is addicted to various emerging Internet technologies. With this identity, he is responsible for collecting and analyzing the technological trends of the Asia market.
In London, he is a retired banker named "Arthur Pendragon", an elegant and gentleman, who drinks afternoon tea on time at three o'clock every afternoon. With this identity, he uses his old "reputation" in the financial world to be responsible for some large-scale capital operations that require a high degree of trust and endorsement.
He is like the most skilled puppeteer, sitting in an inconspicuous residential house in Louisiana. Through a thin network cable, he controls these "vests" all over the world and begins to weave a huge, invisible capital network.
The hundreds of thousands of dollars "borrowed" from the Butcher casino were repeatedly split, transferred, and exchanged across dozens of accounts, and were thoroughly washed like a stream flowing into the sea. Then, these funds flowed out from the accounts in various offshore tax havens, and in the name of "Angel Investment" were accurately injected into the companies that he remembered would soar in the future.
Yahu, Gouge... these small companies that are still unknown and are even worrying about the next round of financing quietly welcomed their earliest and most mysterious shareholder.
Chu Hang is not greedy. He does not take many shares in each company, usually no more than 1%. What he wants is not a controlling stake, but an admission ticket, a long-term meal ticket that can share the dividends of future technology.
Money, to him now, is just a number and a tool.
His real purpose is to use these investments to plant his own nails in the world's top technological fields in advance. He needs a huge secular empire that can provide him with information, technology, resources and cover. When the future crisis comes, Avengers will be responsible for fighting and killing in front of the stage, and he will make sure that the base in the rear is stable enough to ensure that the big ship of human civilization will not sink easily because of the superhero fights.
This afternoon, Chu Hang just opened a new anonymous account in the Swiss Bank as "Hans·Schmidt", preparing to transfer funds for the next stage of the layout.
He stretched, stood up from the computer, and prepared to go to Kitchen to find something to drink.
In the living room, Carol was sitting cross-legged on the carpet. Dozens of golden energy butterflies of different sizes were dancing around her and Monica. Maria was smiling and watching their mischief. Everything seemed so peaceful and beautiful.
Chu Hang's mouth curved in a rare way.
However, at this moment, the smile on his face suddenly solidified.
He turned his head suddenly and looked out the window at the woods to the northwest.
He heard nothing and saw nothing. However, his perception, which was strengthened by Law of Space, clearly captured a faint wrinkle that did not belong to this world.
It felt like a flat white paper, and someone suddenly pushed it on the back with a finger, and a tiny bulge appeared.
Something is entering this space through abnormal means.
It's not teleportation, it's more like... some kind of optical and spatial camouflage is being lifted.
"What's wrong?"
Carol noticed the abnormality of Chu Hang immediately. She waved her hand, and all the energy butterflies instantly dissipated in the air.
Maria also stood up nervously.
"A guest is here." Chu Hang's voice was calm, but his eyes became sharp, "The kind that comes uninvited."
As soon as he finished speaking, at the edge of the woods in the northwest, the air rippled like water waves. A dark green spaceship with a strange shape, about ten meters long, quietly appeared from the transparent state, and hovered steadily in the air a few meters above the ground.
The door of the spacecraft slid open, and a tall and thin man wearing an Earthman jacket and jeans walked out. He looked ordinary, just like an ordinary United States middle-aged man.
But he's not.
Because Chu Hang can "see" that under his human skin, a completely different Life Law signal is surging.
The man didn't show any hostility. He just stood under the spaceship and looked at the house from a distance with complicated eyes.
The moment Carol saw the spaceship, her body tensed up, and golden energy began to flash uncontrollably on the surface of her body. She recognized the ship, it was Skrull's spaceship.
"Don't be nervous." Chu Hang held her shoulders, and a calm willpower was transmitted to her, instantly calming her restless energy, "He is not here to fight."
Chu Hang looked past the man and looked at the spacecraft behind him. He could feel that there were dozens of weaker Life Law signals in the spacecraft that also belonged to Skrull. There were men, women, and even children.
This is not an army.
This is a group of refugees.
Just as they were confronting each other, a voice that surprised everyone broke the tense silence.
Ding dong.
It's the doorbell.
Maria and Carol were both stunned.
Chu Hang raised his eyebrows, with a playful expression on his face. He turned his head and looked towards the front entrance of the house.
Outside the door, stood a man also wearing ordinary clothes.
It's Nick Fury.
He came alone, empty-handed, with that signature, invisible smile on his face.
One is in the light and the other is in the dark.
One came quietly from the sky, and the other rang the doorbell from the ground.
These two groups of people were obviously not the same group. But they appeared here at the same time.
Things are getting interesting.