Chapter 18: The Universe Serpent
The sterile black walls of Carter's **Fortress Foundation** vanished.
One moment, Carter was standing, ready to initiate the hunt. The next, the perspective snapped across countless parsecs to the **cold, vast emptiness of a distant galaxy**.
There, dwarfing moons and obscuring nebulae, drifted a monstrous, living conduit for the entity **Zoth**. This was **Marcellus**, no longer merely human, but a colossal, serpentine being, nearly **three miles wide** at its shoulders, his very skin shimmering with raw, stolen cosmic energy.
Marcellus brought his massive, clawed hand up, spreading it wide open. From his immense, draconic chest, a silent, terrifying exhalation began. It wasn't air; it was a pure, concentrated stream of **electric void energy**—the channeled power of Zoth.
The darkness shot forth, expanding instantly into a colossal cone of destructive negation, a wave of anti-mana that consumed the light of distant nebulae and shredded the very fabric of space. The void extended for miles, then **hundreds of thousands of miles**. Entire stellar systems winked out as the force of the exhalation drove the black energy outward, creating an **impassable cosmic seam**.
The exertion was immense. Marcellus's immense body shuddered violently, and he let out a long, guttural sigh that resonated across the vacuum before shifting his gaze toward a distant, manufactured celestial body—his **laboratory planet**.
He gently touched down on the dark, crystalline sphere, which was riddled with glowing veins of siphoned energy and protected from the very void energy he had just expelled.
Inside his crystalline chamber, Marcellus looked at a complex **hologram** depicting his grand design: a universe-long **Mana Belt**, a gargantuan construct designed to span entire galactic arms and siphon power from every cosmic phenomenon it touched. The raw mana that Carter had unleashed on Earth was nothing but a delicious ripple in the vast cosmic pond that Marcellus intended to drain.
*"This universe is young, vulnerable,"* Zoth's resonant voice echoed in Marcellus's mind, a symphony of ancient malice. *"The mana flow, once chaotic and abundant, is now ripe for harvesting. Every pulse, every spark, every new surge of power on any world... it feeds us."*
Marcellus traced the holographic belt with a finger that could crush a moon.
"We will call it **The Void**," Marcellus declared, his voice firming with ownership. "It is not merely a siphon, but a statement. It will be the eternal separation, the barrier between the useless, manaless side of creation and the realm that holds my dynasty. The worlds within The Void are fuel; the worlds without are ours to rule."