There had once been a blue planet here, home to billions of lives, as well as his friends, his allies, and his enemies.
Now, everything had been reduced to dust.
He fell silent for a moment, then spoke.
"Earth," he said with a strange nonchalance, "really is easy to destroy."
He turned to look at the survivors of Earth's explosion.
Odin, Thor, Dark Phoenix, Magneto, Apocalypse, and Zheng Xian were all looking at Russell.
"You want to know what happened." Russell shrugged. "So do I. But first..."
He reached out.
Threads of causality erupted from his palm, extending in every direction like countless glowing tentacles.
They pierced time, space, and every corner of reality.
"I'm going to turn back time."
His voice was calm, but every word carried an absolute, unquestionable power.
"Back to before Earth exploded."
Time began to flow backward, like a river whose course had been reversed.
The void began to change. Matter emerged from nothing, growing from sparse to dense, from chaos to order.
Earth's outline began to reappear. Continental plates rejoined, oceans filled again, and the atmosphere reformed.
Life reappeared.
Humanity reappeared.
Everything returned to the instant before the explosion.
Then Russell ended the temporal rewind.
He stood above New York, looking down at the restored city and searching for the culprit behind Earth's explosion.
Below him, the secret research base was still operating, and Reed was still preparing his time machine experiment.
"All right." Russell's voice drifted through the wind. "The dangerous experiment ends now. We need to talk."
"About the Fantastic Four, and about this time machine..."
The corners of his mouth rose slightly.
"And about how you tried to deal with me by blowing up Earth."
His gaze settled on the secret base below. Reed Richards had no idea that he had