The ruins of the altar reeked of scorching, a trace left by space being torn apart by force.
Chu Hang stood amid the collapsed wreckage of black alloy. The ground beneath his feet had long since crumbled to dust.
Countless tiny shards of space floated around him, like broken mirrors reflecting warped light.
He made no move to leave. Instead, he raised his right hand, and intertwined gold and silver-white light appeared in his palm.
Under his will, Control Origin became countless fine threads. They spread in every direction, probing the lingering traces of energy as he tried to reconstruct Doctor Doom's final actions before retreating.
The threads were like sensitive nerve endings, catching every faint disturbance left in the void.
Chu Hang closed his eyes and sent his awareness deeper along them.
He saw that, before severing his projection, Doctor Doom had released an extremely subtle wave of green energy into the area.
The wave had not been meant as an attack. It had spread outward at a peculiar frequency, as though carving an invisible mark into the universe's underlying code.
Chu Hang's eyes snapped open, gold-red and silver-white light blazing from them.
He had seen the mark for what it was—using something akin to quantum entanglement, Doctor Doom had forcibly severed Universe 621's causal ties to every surrounding parallel universe.
The universe was now an island adrift in the ocean of the Multiverse. The mark would repel any outside interference.
Worse, that isolation would hasten the universe's decay.
Like an ecosystem cut off from all exchange with the outside world, its internal disorder would grow exponentially.
Chu Hang could clearly sense Universe 621's spacetime structure breaking down at an astonishing rate. It might once have lasted another few months; now it had only hours.
He frowned. The golden