Chapter 2: First Observation
Time, for an entity born of primordial chakra, was a fluid concept. Three months passed since the cataclysm of his compression, though to the world outside his secluded valley, the passage of days meant nothing but the brutal cycle of survival.
Within the valley, however, a new epoch had quietly begun.
The epicenter of his arrival—the glass-lined crater—had become the heart of a terraformed anomaly. The dense, violet nature energy that had bled from his true form was now trapped within a fifty-mile radius, held in place by invisible, conceptual barriers erected by the Absolute Seal. He had created a localized biosphere, a 'Forbidden Zone' where the fundamental laws of Marvel's prehistoric Earth had been overwritten by the sheer density of Yin and Yang release.
The flora had weaponized itself. Towering obsidian trees bled sap that acted as volatile explosive tags if struck. The undergrowth was a labyrinth of razor-sharp ferns and parasitic vines that fed on ambient energy. The fauna that had survived the initial mutation were no longer mere animals; they were monstrous, chakra-infused apex predators. Sabrecats with calcified bone-armor plates, wolves that could exhale superheated ash, and massive avian creatures that rode the thermal updrafts of his residual power.
And then, there were his fangs.
He sat cross-legged on a perfectly smooth throne of black glass at the center of the crater, his chin resting on his knuckles. His pale lavender eyes, ringed with the dormant ripples of the Rinnegan, watched impassively as his newly christened Acolytes trained in the shadow of the corrupted forest.
There were nineteen of them left. One had perished in the first week, unable to withstand the psychological strain of the chakra coils forcibly expanding within his primitive nervous system. His body had simply detonated, returning to the soil as pure energy. A minor miscalculation in the contract's output parameters, easily adjusted for the survivors.
Ur, the broad-shouldered leader he had first marked, was currently sparring with two massive, mutated dire wolves. Ur was no longer the terrified, dirt-smeared savage of their first encounter. The chakra had refined his physiology. He stood straighter, his muscles coiled like dense steel cable. His eyes glowed with a permanent, faint violet luminescence. As a wolf lunged, Ur didn't flinch. He channeled the meager fraction of chakra the MC allowed him, focusing it into his legs, and vanished in a blur of primitive, unrefined Shunshin (Body Flicker). He reappeared above the beast, driving an obsidian spear down with enough kinetic force to shatter a boulder.
They are adapting faster than anticipated, the MC noted internally, the thought cold and clinical. The human genome in this universe is remarkably malleable. It lacks the inherent rigid spiritual boundaries of my original reality. They accept the chakra virus seamlessly.
[System Query: Absolute Seal - Contract Network Status]
[Active Nodes: 19]
[Energy Tithe: 0.001% passive absorption from nodes. Stabilizing Vessel.]
The contracts were a perfect loop. He granted them a fraction of his infinite, sealed power. In return, the Absolute Seal anchored itself to their life force. Whatever they hunted, whatever energy they naturally generated through physical exertion or primitive worship, a microscopic percentage was siphoned back to him. It was a negligible amount of power for a being of his magnitude, but it served a vital purpose: it kept his own immense power circulating, preventing it from stagnating within his humanoid shell and causing another catastrophic leak.
He closed his eyes, focusing past the physical world.
While his body was localized, his sensory perception—an advanced, planetary-scale application of the Kagura Shingan combined with the Rinnegan's visual prowess—was not. He pushed his awareness outward, beyond the barrier of his violet valley, rolling across the prehistoric landscape like an invisible tide.
He felt the untamed, raw leylines of Earth. He felt the distant, chaotic churning of the magma within the planet's mantle—and the terrifying, slumbering density of the Celestial seed, Tiamut, incubating at the core. He avoided the core; touching that mind, even passively, might trigger an awakening he was entirely unprepared for.
Instead, he swept his senses across the surface, moving eastward toward the fertile crescent of the two great rivers, the cradle of early human civilization.
It was there, roughly three hundred miles from his sanctuary, that he detected the anomaly.
His eyes snapped open, the tomoe in his hidden third eye spinning rapidly in response to the stimuli, though the slit on his forehead remained sealed shut.
It was an energy signature unlike anything he had encountered. It was not the natural, biological warmth of the primitive humans, nor was it the ambient, chaotic nature energy of the planet. It was structured, yet deeply, fundamentally flawed.
Cosmic, he identified, parsing the data through the Absolute Seal's analytical framework. It possesses the frequency of universal background radiation—the signature of the Celestials. Yet, it is corrupted. Mutated. It feels like a genetic algorithm that has collapsed into a state of permanent, violent cancer.
He stood up. The glass throne beneath him dissolved into white ash.
[Warning: Foreign Energy Signatures Detected. Classification: Unregistered Biological Entities. Threat Level to Host: Minimal. Threat Level to Local Ecology: Extreme.]
Deviants, the MC deduced. The Celestials' first, failed experiment on this planet. According to the timeline, the Celestials had visited Earth millennia ago, experimenting on early hominids. They created the Deviants, who possessed unstable, constantly mutating DNA, and the Eternals, perfectly stagnant, immortal beings designed to cull them.
The Eternals wouldn't arrive to "save" humanity for another ten years. Which meant, right now, the Deviants were the unchecked apex predators of the globe, slowly devouring early human settlements.
This was an opportunity. He had mastered the manipulation of his own chakra, but to truly dominate this universe, the Absolute Seal needed to consume and integrate local power systems. He needed to understand the mechanics of cosmic energy and Celestial engineering.
"Ur," the MC's voice echoed across the crater, not loudly, but with a resonant frequency that commanded absolute obedience.
The human leader immediately ceased his slaughter of the wolves, dropping his spear and blurring across the distance to drop to one knee before the MC. He was panting, his skin steaming slightly as the chakra burned off his sweat.
"Master," Ur grunted, his violet eyes fixed firmly on the ground.
"Gather your weapons," the MC commanded, his pale lavender eyes staring off toward the east. "We are leaving the Sanctuary. There is a new prey in the cradle of the rivers. Something not born of this world."
The journey took them less than half a day. With Ur leading the way, his body continuously reinforced by the MC's passive chakra supply, the human moved at speeds that would shatter the bones of an ordinary mortal. The MC simply drifted behind him, his feet barely touching the earth, employing a frictionless hovering technique that consumed virtually zero energy.
They arrived at the edge of a sprawling, elevated plateau overlooking the Tigris river basin. Below them lay one of the earliest large-scale human gatherings—a proto-city of mud-brick dwellings, crude palisades, and communal fires.
Or rather, what was left of it.
The settlement was engulfed in panic. Smoke choked the twilight sky. From his vantage point, the MC looked down with cold, calculating detachment.
Tearing through the mud-brick walls with the ease of wet paper were five massive, abhorrent creatures. They defied taxonomic classification. One resembled a grotesque amalgamation of a silverback gorilla and a deep-sea crustacean, boasting asymmetric, heavily armored limbs. Another was a serpentine mass of shifting muscle and toxic spines. They were entirely distinct from one another, united only by their sheer, chaotic ugliness and the aura of corrupted cosmic energy they bled into the atmosphere.
They were slaughtering the humans effortlessly. Spears shattered against their hides. Arrows bounced off their shifting armor. They did not just kill; they consumed, their bodies grotesquely expanding and mutating further as they absorbed the biomass of their prey.
Ur trembled beside the MC. It wasn't fear, but a visceral, biological revulsion. The pure chakra within Ur was fundamentally opposed to the chaotic, corrupted biology of the Deviants.
"Abominations," Ur spat in his primitive tongue, his hand gripping his obsidian spear tight enough to draw blood.
"Fascinating," the MC whispered.
He didn't see monsters. He saw walking, breathing data packets of Celestial technology.
"Observe, Ur," the MC said, stepping off the edge of the plateau and descending toward the burning settlement like a falling leaf, utterly devoid of momentum. "Observe the architecture of the cosmos, and witness its flaws."
The MC landed silently in the center of the chaotic village square. Humans screamed and fled around him, ignoring the pale, tattooed man in their desperation to escape the beasts.
The largest of the Deviants—the gorilla-crustacean hybrid—tore a human in half and tossed the remains aside. It turned, its multiple, unblinking black eyes locking onto the MC. It paused. Its corrupted instincts, tuned to hunt the weak, suddenly screamed in absolute, paralyzing terror.
It couldn't comprehend what it was looking at. The MC was suppressing his massive energy, appearing as nothing more than a frail, white-haired human. But on a cosmic, instinctual level, the Deviant felt the shadow of the Ten-Tails pressing down on its soul.
The beast roared, trying to drown its fear in aggression, and charged. The ground shook with each of its massive footfalls. It raised an armored limb, intending to crush the MC into paste.
The MC didn't move. He didn't weave signs. He simply raised his right hand, his palm facing the charging monstrosity.
Shinra Tensei. (Almighty Push).
He didn't vocalize the technique. He merely executed the concept. He channeled a fraction of a percent of his gravitational authority through the Absolute Seal on his palm.
Space itself seemed to warp violently in front of him.
The Deviant struck the invisible wall of repulsive force. There was a deafening CRACK that echoed across the river basin. The beast's armored limb shattered into powder. The gravitational wave continued, slamming into the creature's massive torso.
The Deviant didn't just fly backward; it was fundamentally deformed. Its internal organs ruptured simultaneously as it was launched horizontally at supersonic speed, tearing a trench through five mud-brick houses before slamming into the stone wall of the surrounding plateau, cratering deep into the rock.
Silence fell over the immediate area. The surviving humans stopped screaming. The other four Deviants froze, their chaotic minds struggling to process the instantaneous destruction of their alpha.
Up on the ridge, Ur fell to his knees in worship.
The MC slowly lowered his hand. He wasn't interested in the humans. He walked calmly toward the crater where the dying Alpha Deviant lay embedded in the stone.
The creature was still alive, its highly regenerative, mutated DNA desperately trying to knit its pulverized internal structure back together. It wheezed, a bubbling, horrific sound, as the MC stepped over the rubble and stood before it.
"Your existence is an error," the MC spoke, his tone completely devoid of malice. "A failed equation left to rot by your creators. But your building blocks... they are divine."
He extended his hand, pressing his pale, tattooed fingers directly against the beast's exposed, shifting flesh.
"Absolute Seal: Devour and Deconstruct."
The black fractal tattoos on his arm flared with an intense, blinding white light. The light flowed from his fingers into the Deviant.
The creature unleashed a final, blood-curdling shriek as the System activated. This was not the gentle sharing of power he had used on Ur. This was the Absolute Seal acting as a predatory black hole.
[Target Acquired: Biological Entity (Deviant). Energy Type: Corrupted Cosmic/Unstable Biomatter.]
[Initiating Extraction and Breakdown...]
The Deviant's body began to desiccate rapidly. Its flesh turned grey, flaking away as dust. The MC felt a sudden, violent surge of foreign energy rush up his arm. It was agonizingly chaotic—like swallowing broken glass wrapped in lightning. His chakra coils instinctively flared, attempting to reject the invasive force.
Suppress it, he commanded his own biology. Analyze it.
[Processing...]
[Warning: High levels of genetic instability detected. Filtering out necrotic mutations. Isolating core Celestial energy signature.]
The MC's eyes widened slightly as the sheer complexity of the energy unfolded within his mind. It was a completely different language of power compared to chakra. Chakra was the blending of physical and spiritual energies. This... this was the fundamental code of reality, manipulated and programmed into biological matter.
He saw glimpses of a grand, terrifying design. He saw the golden, towering forms of the Celestials, engineering life in the cold dark of space. He understood, instinctively, how they programmed the Deviants to evolve rapidly, and how that programming had critically failed, resulting in endless, cancerous mutation.
[Extraction Complete. Target Terminated.]
[New Energy Profile Acquired: Cosmic Energy (Trace Amounts). Genetic Adaptability Matrix (Corrupted).]
[Integrating data into the Absolute Seal...]
The Deviant was gone, leaving nothing but a faint outline of grey ash on the stone wall.
The MC withdrew his hand, looking down at his palm. The black tattoos seemed to shimmer with a faint, almost imperceptible golden hue for a split second before returning to their stark black state.
He had done it. He had successfully absorbed and assimilated a foreign energy type from the Marvel Universe without his vessel destabilizing. He now held the foundational data for Celestial biological engineering within his own matrix.
He turned back toward the village. The four remaining Deviants, stripped of their predatory confidence, turned and fled into the wilderness, their instincts screaming at them to escape the apex predator that had just consumed their leader.
The MC did not pursue them. They were irrelevant now. He had what he came for.
He looked at the surviving humans. They were staring at him, faces stained with ash and blood, eyes wide with the exact same terror and reverence Ur had shown months ago. They fell to their knees in the mud, bowing toward him.
"Ur," the MC called out telepathically.
Within seconds, the mutated human blurred to his side, spear at the ready, looking at the cowering villagers.
"Mark the strongest among them," the MC ordered coldly, turning his back on the settlement and walking back toward the plateau. "Leave the weak to the scavengers. Expand the network. We have much to prepare for."
As he walked back toward his sanctuary, the MC's mind was calculating variables at quantum speeds. The Deviants were a treasure trove of raw, adaptable cosmic code. If he could harvest enough of them over the next ten years, he could refine the corrupted cosmic energy within them, purifying it through his Ten-Tails chakra network.
By the time the golden ship of the Eternals pierced the atmosphere in 5000 BC, he would not just be a hidden god of chakra. He would be an entity fluent in the very cosmic laws their Celestial masters used to build the universe.
The game had truly begun, and the MC intended to rewrite the rules.