The other side of the portal was utterly silent.
There was no starlight, no air currents, and even space itself was shattering at a visible speed.
The entire universe was reduced to an Infinity extending Void.
The moment Wanda landed, she glanced around, and crimson Chaos Magic condensed at her fingertips without dissipating.
Strange stood motionless in the center of the ruins.
His dark purple tentacles all retracted into his Cloak, and his aura became extremely restrained.
Thor gave no one time to reflect.
He took the Stormbreaker off his shoulder and casually tossed it into his spatial storage.
He raised his right hand, his five fingers spread.
Blue-gold patterns began to spread from the center of his palm, climbing up his knuckles, wrist, and forearm.
The pure laws began to manifest one by one.
The light of the four laws—time, space, reality, and creation—intertwines, weaving a visible matrix of rules around him.
Wanda's Chaos Magic resonated instantly, and red energy uncontrollably overflowed from the back of her hand.
She took half a step back, suppressing the magic.
" Strange." Thor didn't even turn his head. "What's your girlfriend's name again? Christine Palmer? Think about what she looks like in your head; I'm just pulling it from your memory."
Strange's chest rose and fell slightly.
The green light of the Eye of Agamotto flickered for a moment. He didn't speak, but Thor had already intercepted the image from his mental frequency—blonde hair, a blue dress, and a canine tooth on the right side when she smiled.
Thor pushed forward with his right hand.
The entire cosmic ruins began to invert.
The shattered star map was pieced back together, and even the drifting pebbles underfoot were returning to their places at an incredible speed.
In the sky, the extinguished stars shone again, and the planetary orbits regained order from chaos.
Time is flowing backward.
The timeline of the entire universe is being forcibly reversed.
Wanda's red eyes reflected this scene, and her heart began to race involuntarily.
The essence of Chaos Magic is to rewrite reality, but rewriting and reversing are two different concepts.
The former involves altering the answers within the rules, while the latter involves tearing up the exam paper and creating new questions.
The light faded.
They were standing on a mountain road.
The night was deep, and in the distance, car headlights flickered around the bend. The air smelled of pine trees and earth.
Strange's breath hitched.
Here, right here, at this bend, on this road.
The silver-gray Rambo was speeding towards us from 300 meters away, its headlights tearing through the night, and the sound of its tires crunching on the asphalt was clearly audible.
In the driver's seat, a dark-haired man is looking down at his phone—that's him from the past.
A blonde woman was sitting in the passenger seat.
Christine.
Thor waved his right hand.
Space distortion.
The passenger door was ripped open at an impossible angle, and the blonde woman's body was pulled directly from the seat by an invisible force—the next second, she was standing in front of Strange.
Christine Palmer landed on her feet, staggered a step, and her blue skirt still fluttered in the inertia.
She looked up blankly and met a pair of dark eyes that gleamed with an eerie green light.
"Sti--"
She didn't finish her sentence.
The entire sky cracked open with a snap.
A massive crack appeared in the very center of the sky, from which black Void poured out and began to devour everything.
The mountain road is crumbling, the trees are disappearing, and the city lights in the distance are going out at a visible speed.
The universe is collapsing.
Strange pulled Christine behind him, dark purple tentacles bursting forth from beneath his Cloak, weaving an impenetrable protective shield around them. He then turned to Thor.
"Still not working?"
He uttered five words, his voice hoarse and almost cracking.
Thor stood in the center of the collapsing world, the ground around him crumbling away beneath his feet, plunging into the bottomless Void.
He put his hands in his pockets, tilted his head, and thought for a few seconds.
"The destruction of this universe is irreversible, it can't be reversed." He raised his chin. "But your girlfriend surviving is no problem."
Strange's tentacle twitched.
"I can even rescue everyone in this universe," Thor added, as if discussing dinner, "It just depends on whether you only want to save her, or—"
"The whole universe."
It wasn't Strange who spoke up.
It's Christine.
She squeezed half her body out of Strange's tentacle shield, her blonde hair disheveled by the collapsing air currents, and her blue dress covered in dust.
Strange turned to look at her, and something in her green eyes seemed to shatter and then reform.
He opened his mouth.
Christine shook her head at him.
Thor watched this scene, and the corner of his mouth twitched.
Okay.
He took both hands out of his pockets, his fingers spread wide.
The multicolored patterns of laws lit up again, this time ten times more intensely than before. The Law of Creation was operating at full power, the Law of Space was expanding the framework, the Law of Reality was filling in the details, Law of Time anchoring cause and effect.
The entire collapsing universe was held down by an irresistible force.
It's like a hand gripping the waist of an hourglass.
Crash paused.
Thor reached out with his other hand and grabbed at the void—a whole new space was pulled out of nothing.
A miniature Pocket Universe, rapidly expanding under the infusion of his laws.
Galaxy, planet, atmosphere, ocean, land—everything takes shape in seconds.
Then came the relocation.
Every living thing, every building, every tree, and every drop of seawater in the entire universe was uprooted from the collapsing old universe and placed into the newly created pocket dimension.
The entire process lasted less than thirty seconds.
The old universe collapsed completely, turning into a desolate ruin.
Thor inserts the newly created Pocket Universe into the coordinates of the old universe.
It fits perfectly, with not even a millimeter of deviation in latitude and longitude.
He patted non-existent dust off his hands.
"Okay, all done."
Strange stood still, all his tentacles drooping, while Christine leaned against his chest; neither of them moved.
The surrounding environment has transformed from a broken mountain road into a neat apartment living room, with even the open medical journal on the coffee table remaining exactly the same as before.
"So," Thor gestured towards Strange, "Are you two staying here, or coming back with me?"
Strange was silent for three seconds.
"Leave it here."
His dark purple tentacles rose from the ground, condensing in the air into the shape of a portal—leading towards the bedroom of the apartment.
Christine looked up at him, and he looked down at her without saying a word.
"Call me if you need anything," Strange's voice came from the other end of the portal, his tone now deep and steady. "I'll be there whenever you need me."
The portal closed.
Wanda stood two meters behind Thor, her pupils still reflecting the lingering effects of what had just happened.
"You can create a universe now?"
Thor turned around, looking completely indifferent.
"You could do it too if you were a little stronger."
Wanda didn't respond.
She stared at Thor for two seconds, swallowing back the words, "Just how much more skill do you have that you haven't shown yet?"
"Let's go check out another Zombie Universe."
Thor slashed through the void with his right hand, tearing open a new portal.
On the other side of the door was a gray-green sky, and the air was filled with the smell of decay and rust.
Earth-89521
The moment the two stepped through the portal, a stench assaulted their senses.
Beneath my feet was a cracked asphalt road, and on either side lay the wreckage of abandoned vehicles.
A three-story concrete building stands fifty meters away, with all the windows welded shut with iron plates, and a makeshift Sun panel and a few crooked antennas mounted on the roof.
And all around them were countless zombies.
There are at least a thousand.
A rotting body, empty eye sockets, and viscera hanging from between broken ribs.
They had been wandering aimlessly, but the moment Thor and Wanda appeared, all the zombies turned around at the same time.
Thor glanced around.
The building's location, structure, and surrounding landmarks—the images in his memory matched perfectly.
Yelena's survivor base.
Interior of the building.
Six monitoring screens glowed faintly, displaying live footage of the zombies outside.
A blonde woman wearing a dark green tactical vest is wiping a dagger, her movements mechanical and repetitive—it is Yelena Belova, the second Black Widow.
Sitting next to her was a burly middle-aged man in red, Alexei, the Red Guardian, who was idly fiddling with a walkie-talkie that had run out of power.
In the corner, Melina was organizing ammunition on a folding table.
A woman with wheat-colored skin, wearing a light blue jacket with a white five-pointed star tattooed on the chest, was sprawled on the sofa, munching on a compressed biscuit.
On another sofa, Female Hawkeye Kate Bishop off, her legs curled up and clutching her bow.
Erik Brooks, the Blade Knight, watched everything outside with a faint white light in his eyes.
In the very center of the room crouched a brown-skinned girl, clutching a pair of homemade gauntlets; she was none other than Kamala Khan, the Ms. Marvel.
Kamala glanced up at the monitor, bored.
Then she sprang up from the ground.
"That—that's Thor and Wanda, isn't that?!"
Her voice was so shrill it was almost cracking, and her finger was pointed tightly at the screen.
In the scene, a tall blond man and a red-haired woman are standing in the middle of two waves of zombies, their expressions unusually calm.
"We're saved!"
Yelena stopped wiping the dagger.
She raised her head, her pale green pupils sweeping across the screen without any emotional fluctuation.
" Wanda Maximoff was infected three months ago." She sheathed her dagger and stood up. "No one has seen Thor since Wakanda."
She walked up to the monitor and stared down at the two figures on the screen.
"Those two outside--"
Yelena's hand had already reached for the pistol tucked behind her waist.
"They might be in cahoots with those guys."