"Teacher, the thing is here." Cyclops gently placed a black briefcase on the table and entered the password under everyone's watchful eyes.
A soft click,
The lid pops open automatically, revealing a specially made glass tube about the thickness of a thumb and ten centimeters long. Inside, hundreds of ethereal blue dots slowly swirl, like Stardust dancing, a breathtakingly beautiful sight.
Shadowcat couldn't help but exclaim softly, "So beautiful."
"Mmm!" The blonde girl, Illyana, nodded repeatedly, her eyes sparkling.
Wolverine scratched his chin, somewhat surprised. "How do you use this thing? Do you inject it directly into your body, or dilute it with water and drink it?"
Scott shook his head. "No need for that. Vitas said these X-Factor are pure energy states; all you need to do is open the lid and stick your fingertip in."
"It's that simple?"
" Vitas is amazing!"
Everyone was amazed.
In contrast, Professor X showed a rare hint of excitement. He carefully picked up the glass tube and unscrewed the sealing cap step by step.
In an instant, a powerful craving, originating from the depths of their cells and etched into their genes, surged forth from each X-Men, urging them to immediately devour those glimmers of light.
The sudden instinctive impulse startled everyone, and they quickly calmed themselves down, forcibly suppressing the restlessness.
At that moment, Professor X had already inserted his index finger into the tube. The blue light seemed to be drawn by an invisible force, silently seeping into his skin and disappearing.
He immediately felt a tremendous change within his body: his mental power was quietly being reconstructed under the activation of the X-Gene, and was undergoing an unprecedented leap.
It was a transformative power.
Everyone held their breath, staring at the professor who sat silently with his eyes closed. Storm fingers, her voice slightly strained. "Professor, how are you feeling?"
After a long while, Professor X slowly opened his eyes, a smile spreading across his face, "I'm fine, better than ever... Hahaha!"
Before the words were finished,
Buzz!
A vast and powerful force of thought suddenly spread out from him, causing the entire office to tremble instantly. Desks, chairs, papers, and pen holders all floated off the ground and hovered in mid-air.
Immediately afterwards, this force surged out of the teaching building, covered the playground, and then spread throughout the entire campus.
The earth rippled slightly, as if responding to this long-dormant, now fully awakened power.
A month later, when Professor X had fully mastered Telekinesis, Chen Xiao's space research, which had taken several months to complete, finally came to fruition.
On the fourth basement level, a more sophisticated culture device was operating quietly. Inside the container, thousands of silver specks of light floated like stars, shimmering and dazzling, a beauty beyond words.
Under the soft halo, the surrounding air was slightly distorted, and the light subtly bent.
As a natural-born spatial ability user, Clarice was shocked the moment she approached and blurted out, " Vitas, you really succeeded!"
"Well, it's finally done." Chen Xiao nodded, his tone carrying a hint of relief after exhaustion.
For the past few months, he has barely slept, repeatedly rehearsing, debugging, failing, and starting over. He has not only invested billions of dollars, but also become mentally exhausted.
But it was all worth it. With spatial abilities, he could enter the sealed space before the opportunity arose and take the Reality Stone.
With the Reality Stone, he was confident he could suppress the Ancient One, who wielded the Time Stone, and bring it under his control.
Before he could finish expressing his feelings, Chen Xiao reached out and opened the container door, inserting his entire right arm inside.
In an instant, countless silver lights, like birds returning to their nests, rushed into his flesh and blood.
What exactly is space?
In the Marvel Universe and many comics and superhero films, spatial abilities are often simplified to teleportation, teleportation, storage, or tearing through the void.
But it wasn't until Chen Xiao extracted fragments from the X-Gene of a large number of space-type Mutants, cross-cultured them, and fused them layer by layer, finally condensing the complete Space X-Factor and completing the fusion, that he truly saw the truth.
As the factor was integrated, the X-Gene in his body began to mutate, and his mental state was also being reshaped in sync.
At this moment, in his infinitely microscopic spiritual vision, space is not a single plane, but rather layers upon layers of "membranes," each composed of indescribable "primitives."
They are neither energy nor matter, and are many orders of magnitude smaller than quarks, so minute that even he could barely detect their existence.
More importantly, these "primitives" are not evenly distributed; some areas are sparse and loose, naturally leaving gaps.
This disruptive perception, and the entirely new understanding of the nature of space, is like a key that suddenly unlocks a corner of the world's deepest depths.
The entire reality suddenly became clear before his eyes, leaving him deeply shocked.
At this moment, Chen Xiao felt like air to ordinary people—obvious to be everywhere, yet seemingly nothing at all.
However, once you set up a magnifying glass a million times, you will find that the seemingly empty air is actually churning with countless particles, energy flows, and invisible disturbances.
He raised his hand and made a gentle sweeping motion in front of him. Without a sound, a deep, dark crack appeared in the center of the laboratory. It was as black as ink, its edges neither spreading nor overflowing, but quietly absorbing the surrounding airflow, even drawing in light. But after only a few breaths, it quietly closed up, as if it had never existed.
Immediately afterwards, he lightly tapped a device diagonally in front of him with his fingertip, and in an instant, a dark slit more than a meter long and only a finger's width swept across the middle of the device.
The instrument then broke off silently, the cut as smooth as a mirror, the cross-section gleaming with a cold metallic sheen, without any signs of burning or tearing.
At this point, Chen Xiao stopped and turned his gaze to the black-haired girl beside him. " Clarice, did you notice?"
"... Spatial fluctuations." Clarice paused briefly before answering in a low voice.
"Anything else?"
She frowned slightly, hesitated for a moment, and then shook her head. "That's all."
"Hmm, it seems the problem lies with me." Chen Xiao nodded.
Because spiritual power can infinitely approach the microscopic scale, when he awakened the spatial attribute, he truly "saw" space itself, not as a concept, but as a concrete structure, folds, and tension.
Mutants like Clarice, though born with spatial abilities, are limited to instinctive use: they can open doors but don't know what doors are; they can teleport but don't understand the underlying laws governing their teleportation.
They know its use, but not its underlying principles.
In Chen Xiao's eyes, Mutants in this world are actually blessed with unique abilities, each corresponding to a certain underlying rule of the universe.
In other words, their abilities are like keys that unlock the laws of nature.
For example, Clarice's spatial teleportation, Shadowcat's molecular penetration, Colossus's material reconstruction, and Cyclops's precise release and suppression of high-energy beams; and Storm's manipulation of the atmosphere and the summoning of thunder are not simply the outward release of energy, but rather a genuine resonance with the rhythms of nature.
Unfortunately, due to limitations in their cognitive depth and Origin abilities, the vast majority of people are unable to unleash the true power that matches their talents.
Especially those innate "shortcomings," Chen Xiao became increasingly convinced that they were shackles deliberately placed by the Celestials. Otherwise, if they were allowed to grow freely, the entire Star Sea would probably have already fallen under the control of Mutants.
The ranking of Mutants is essentially a measure of the completeness of their abilities: the more stable, controllable, and closer to the Origin laws, the higher the ranking.
Once one breaks through the limitations of their own abilities, they can Omega-level, which is the threshold to truly touch the core of the rules.
Chen Xiao suddenly spoke up, " Clarice, grab me."
The black-haired girl blinked and grabbed his wrist as instructed. The next instant, their figures vanished, and when they reappeared, they were standing in the back garden above the mansion.
She paused for a moment, then blurted out, "Spatial cutting, spatial teleportation... Vitas, you've mastered two spatial applications simultaneously, that's amazing!"
Although she herself could open teleportation portals, the distance was limited, the energy consumption was high, and there was no offensive or defensive extension, so she had long considered them useless.
"Two kinds?" Chen Xiao shook his head slightly, then raised his hand and grasped the distant pavilion.
In an instant, that space, like a taut sheet of transparent paper, suddenly twisted, collapsed, and shattered.
In the blink of an eye, the entire pavilion had been crushed into a jumbled mess of metal and stone, its shape bizarre and utterly irregular.
He said calmly, "Space itself is a kind of power. It's just that the concentration of X-Factor is still low right now; otherwise, crushing a planet wouldn't be an exaggeration."
In fact, spatial abilities did not bring Chen Xiao an explosive leap in combat power.
The number of newly activated X-Gene cells is too small, and their strength is limited. Currently, the farthest teleportation is only a kilometer; the effective range of spatial cutting and distortion is only a dozen meters, which is less than the killing radius of his straight punch.
At this stage, its value lies more in expanding tactical dimensions.
Only when the space system X cells proliferate in large numbers and reach the same scale as the X Energy Berserk cells can the Alpha-level space power be truly released.
Although the increase in combat power was not significant, Chen Xiao gained much more than that: his understanding of the world became more thorough, and scientific research bottlenecks were broken one after another.
For example, when the material strength of the Stellar Suit was insufficient, he forcibly improved it through space compression; when the nuclear fusion furnace was difficult to miniaturize, he simply did the opposite, first expanding the furnace volume and then using space cutting to compress the entire reaction area to the extreme.
After all, how can the energy released per second by a miniature fusion reactor the size of a fist compare to the massive power output of a large power plant?
Moreover, Chen Xiao's vision goes beyond this: he plans to embed ten, or even dozens, of independent fusion cores into the surface of his suit.
As nuclear energy flows endlessly, its upper limit remains unknown; however, its energy supply will be completely free from the worry of depletion.
Ultimately, with his current strength, the Stellar Suit is no longer a necessity for him.
But he still insisted on building it, preparing for the worst. In case he ventured deep into the dark star field and encountered a protracted battle, without a star to replenish his energy, running out of energy would be a fatal flaw.
It should be noted that even Superman can become exhausted. He may appear omnipotent, but once the solar energy stored within his body is depleted and he cannot obtain replenishment from sunlight, he will still become weak and frail.