CHAPTER 3: THE MIND STONE'S TOUCH - PART 1
The enhancement chamber hummed with barely contained energy, its walls lined with sensors that tracked everything from electromagnetic fluctuations to quantum disturbances. Pietro stood before the sealed entrance, his hands steady despite the chaos raging beneath his skin. The void energy he'd carefully distributed through his nervous system writhed like a living thing, eager to interact with whatever force awaited him beyond that door.
Dr. List adjusted his tablet one final time, reviewing readings that would mean nothing in approximately ten minutes. "Subject Twelve, your final biological markers are exceptional. Neural coherence at ninety-seven percent, cellular integrity optimal, bioelectric patterns stable."
"If only you knew what you were really measuring," Pietro thought, forcing his face into a mask of grim determination. The void energy was already interfering with their instruments in subtle ways—creating phantom readings, masking his true power signature, making him appear more baseline human than he actually was.
Baron Strucker approached, his weathered face alight with anticipation. "Today we create perfection, young Maximoff. Today you become something greater than human."
"Today I become a weapon against Stark," Pietro replied, letting calculated hatred bleed into his voice. The lie came easily now, worn smooth by repetition. "That's all I care about."
But beneath the performance, terror clawed at his throat. He was about to voluntarily expose himself to an Infinity Stone—one of the most powerful forces in the universe. Even with his void energy buffer, even with his transmigrator knowledge, there were no guarantees. The Mind Stone had killed dozens of volunteers before him. It might kill him too, regardless of his preparations.
The chamber door slid open with a pneumatic hiss, revealing a space that looked more like a cathedral than a laboratory. The ceiling soared thirty feet overhead, lined with monitoring equipment and energy dampeners. At the center of the room, suspended in a containment field of pure light, hung Loki's scepter.
The Mind Stone blazed within its housing like a captured star, yellow-gold energy rippling through the air around it in visible waves. Pietro felt the void energy in his cells respond immediately, dark wisps beginning to leak from his pores before he could stop them.
"Fascinating," List murmured, noting the readings on his instruments. "Subject Twelve is generating an electromagnetic field we've never seen before. It appears to be... defensive in nature."
Pietro stepped into the chamber, and the Mind Stone's presence hit him like a physical blow. Power pressed against his consciousness from all directions—vast, ancient, intelligent. The Stone wasn't just an energy source; it was alive, in its own cosmic way, and it was taking his measure.
"It knows I don't belong here," Pietro realized with growing dread. "It can sense the dimensional displacement, the foreign memories. It knows I'm an anomaly."
The containment field began to lower, bringing the scepter closer to his position. Golden light filled the chamber, casting everything in brilliant relief. Pietro could hear Strucker's voice through the intercom, calling out final instructions, but the words seemed to come from very far away.
"Initiating exposure sequence," Dr. List announced. "Beginning with low-level contact to test compatibility."
A beam of Mind Stone energy lanced out from the scepter, no thicker than a pencil but carrying the concentrated force of an Infinity Stone. It struck Pietro in the center of his chest, and his world exploded into chaos.
The void energy he'd carefully distributed throughout his body reacted instantly, surging upward to meet the Stone's power. Instead of the controlled enhancement he'd hoped for, Pietro found himself at the center of a war between cosmic forces.
Golden light clashed with purple-black shadow as the Mind Stone's power encountered the void energy head-on. The Stone's energy sought to rewrite Pietro's biology, to grant him the speed that had always been his destiny. But the void energy fought back, defending its claim on his cellular structure, refusing to be displaced or overridden.
Pietro screamed as the conflicting energies tore through him. His body became a battlefield where two incompatible forces struggled for dominance, each trying to reshape him according to its own alien nature. The Mind Stone wanted to create a speedster, a being capable of moving at supersonic velocities with perfect control and enhanced perception. The void energy wanted to preserve its hold on his soul, to maintain its connection to the collapsed realities that had given it birth.
Through the observation window, Pietro could see Dr. List frantically checking his instruments while Strucker leaned forward with predatory interest. Neither man understood what they were witnessing—the birth of something that had never existed before, a being touched by both the structured power of an Infinity Stone and the chaotic hunger of the void between worlds.
The battle raged for what felt like hours but could only have been seconds. Pietro's enhanced perception, already accelerated by the void energy, stretched each moment into subjective eternity. He felt his cells being torn apart and rebuilt, his nervous system rewritten, his very DNA altered at the quantum level. The Mind Stone was trying to grant him speed, but the void energy was corrupting the process, adding its own alien elements to the transformation.
"This isn't how it's supposed to happen," Pietro thought desperately as pain beyond description flooded his system. "In the movie, it was clean, controlled. He just gained speed. But the void energy is changing everything."
Then, without warning, the cosmic forces reached a violent equilibrium. Instead of one power overwhelming the other, they separated completely, carving out distinct territories within Pietro's transformed body. The Mind Stone's gift—pure, unlimited speed—settled into his physical form, rewriting his muscles, bones, and nervous system to handle velocities that would liquify a normal human. Meanwhile, the void energy was forcibly ejected from his biology, driven deeper than flesh and bone until it found refuge in the one place the Mind Stone couldn't follow.
His soul.
The separation was agonizing. Pietro felt reality fracture around him as the void energy, displaced but not destroyed, carved out a permanent home in the deepest part of his being. The dimensional power wasn't gone—if anything, it was stronger now, concentrated and refined by its conflict with the Infinity Stone. But it was no longer part of his biology. It had become something far more fundamental.
As the energies settled into their new configuration, Pietro's consciousness fragmented. The trauma of hosting two cosmic forces had broken something essential in his mind, and suddenly he was experiencing memories that weren't entirely his own.
He saw himself—the original Pietro Maximoff—running through the streets of Sokovia as Ultron's drones filled the sky with death. Saw himself positioning his body between Clint Barton and a hail of bullets. Felt the bullets tear through his chest, his lungs, his heart. Experienced the moment of his death, the final thought that had crossed his mind as his vision darkened.
"Wanda will be safe now. That's what matters."
But these weren't the transmigrator's memories. These were echoes from the original timeline, fragments of a life that had been erased when the transmigrator took his place. The Mind Stone, in its infinite complexity, had somehow accessed the quantum signature of the Pietro Maximoff who had died, pulling his final moments from the collapsed probability thread and forcing them into the new Pietro's consciousness.
For a terrifying instant, Pietro experienced both deaths simultaneously—his original self dying in Sokovia, riddled with bullets, and his transmigrator self dying in another world, in another body, under circumstances he could barely remember. The dual trauma nearly shattered his sanity completely.
But then the void energy surged from his soul, wrapping around his fractured consciousness like protective armor. The dimensional power that had taken refuge in his deepest self reached out to heal what the Mind Stone had broken, weaving the conflicting memories together into a coherent whole. Instead of two separate identities warring for control, Pietro became something new—a fusion of transmigrator knowledge and original heroism, held together by void energy that existed outside normal reality.
The pain began to recede, replaced by a sensation Pietro had never experienced before. Every cell in his body hummed with potential energy, ready to propel him at speeds that defied physics. But beneath that familiar power lurked something far stranger—the void energy in his soul, dark and hungry and utterly alien, connected to realities that no longer existed.
He was no longer entirely human. He was no longer entirely himself.
Through eyes that now perceived time differently, Pietro saw Dr. List rushing toward the chamber's emergency controls. The entire transformation had taken less than thirty seconds, but Pietro's enhanced perception made it feel like hours of subjective experience. His new nervous system processed information at incredible speed, analyzing thousands of data points simultaneously.
The Mind Stone's energy was already beginning to fade, its work complete. But the void energy in his soul pulsed with satisfaction, having successfully claimed its territory within his transformed body. The two powers existed in careful balance now—speed governing his physical capabilities, void energy controlling his connection to dimensions beyond normal space.
Pietro tried to speak, to tell the panicking scientists that he was still alive, but his enhanced perception made their movements seem glacially slow. By the time he formed the words, List had already begun the emergency shutdown sequence.
The golden light faded, leaving Pietro alone in the chamber with his transformed body and his fractured memories. He was alive, enhanced beyond his wildest dreams, and carrying secrets that could reshape reality itself.
But as consciousness began to slip away from him, one thought echoed through his mind with terrifying clarity:
"The void remembers everything. And it's still hungry."