Reborn with Steve Stand-Chapter 823: Back to X-Men 1973!

"Everyone knows that Stephen Hawking couldn't walk, and Professor X couldn't walk either.

Hawking proposed a theory about traveling back in time, and Professor X also proposed a theory about going back in time.

Hawking loved children, and so did Professor X.

Hawking had a super brain, and Professor X had a super brain as well.

Hawking made great contributions in his field, and Professor X did the same in his field.

Hawking stood up under the influence of a powerful figure from China, and Professor X also stood up under the influence of someone from China.

Hawking and Professor X never appeared at the same time."

Inside the spaceship's cabin, Fang Mo stared at Charles, who had just stood up from his wheelchair, and firmly declared, "So... Stephen Hawking *is* Professor X!"

"No..." Charles, who had just risen, couldn't hold back anymore after hearing Fang Mo's statement. "Why do you always manage to say such nonsense with such conviction?"

"Because it's fun," Fang Mo replied with a cheerful grin.

"I..." Charles rubbed his forehead, clearly at a loss for how to respond, and after a long pause, he managed to mutter, "But your jokes are just too inappropriate..."

"Here's a fun fact," Fang Mo interrupted. "Hawking stood up only twice in his life: once to toast a leader in china and another time in front of a blackboard on Loli Island. Coincidentally, Charles also only stood up twice."

"You..."

"I, Fang Mo, prefer to call this the 'Second Stand.'"

"Wait, hold on—"

"And because both times Charles stood up were with my help, people jokingly call it the 'Second Aid.'"

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said anything to you," Charles sighed deeply, realizing his mistake. "I apologize—let's change the subject... maybe we can talk about your wish-granting machine?"

"Oh right, the wish machine," Fang Mo, reminded by Charles, snapped out of it. He took the golden Holy Grail from Charles’s hands and started testing his own wish, but not before asking, "So how are you feeling now?" ʀáℕ𝘖Ꞗ˧

"I feel great," Charles began, "It seems this thing—"

However, before he could finish, a sudden sharp, numbing sensation shot through his waist, and his legs went completely numb. His body gave way, and he collapsed back into his wheelchair.

"What just happened?" Charles looked up in confusion. "Did your wish machine malfunction?"

"Oh, no," Fang Mo calmly replied, shaking his head. "I just made a wish for you to become paralyzed again."

"I ALREADY APOLOGIZED!!!" Even the usually composed Charles couldn't help but shout.

“Haha, relax,” Fang Mo laughed, raising his hands. "I was just testing the machine’s functionality. I promise I'll have you up and walking again soon."

“Sigh...” Charles covered his face in exasperation.

“Alright, enough frustration, let me test the strength of this thing,” Fang Mo said, waving his hand as he refocused on the wish machine, letting his thoughts wander while trying out different wishes.

Knowing that humans can come up with some pretty wild ideas, Fang Mo went ahead with an array of creative wishes.

These included, but were not limited to, requests for infinite wealth, the resurrection of the dead, the creation of a living being, immortality, making someone fall in love with him, acquiring great power, killing someone, healing injuries, time travel, and even asking for strange little gadgets like a hypnosis app or a plastic time-stopping watch...

In response to each wish, the machine offered different outcomes.

Fang Mo didn’t sit idle either. He activated his dimensional power, his eyes glowing white as he closely observed how the wish machine operated internally.

For the first wish—acquiring wealth—Fang Mo watched as the Hōgyoku's power began to work. Spiritual particles rapidly gathered and formed, with the Holy Grail following suit. Under the push of dimensional energy, the spiritual creations materialized in the form of piles of gold, silver, and jewels, forming a small, glittering mountain in front of him.

Fang Mo was slightly surprised by the sight. He wasn’t sure if the Third Magic from *Fate* was supposed to work this way. In *Heaven’s Feel*, the Third Magic—Materialization of the Soul—referred to giving a soul the properties of matter, allowing it to exist independently from the body, thus achieving immortality.

In theory, *Fate’s* Holy Grail could grant a wish for wealth by using magic to mass-produce valuable materials. But this East-meets-West combination was something Fang Mo had never seen before.

Shaking his head, Fang Mo shifted his attention to the next wish: resurrecting the dead.

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However, resurrecting the dead proved to be much more challenging. Even though both the Hōgyoku and the Holy Grail were working in tandem, the energy within the Grail was nearly overheating, yet it still couldn't fulfill the wish.

Fang Mo had chosen to resurrect Mystique, Raven. Unlike Darwin, who had mysteriously vanished into space a few years earlier, Mystique was definitively dead according to the *Days of Future Past* storyline. Her shapeshifting genes were the key technology behind the Sentinels, so she had likely been captured and dissected long ago.

After carefully observing the workings of the wish machine, Fang Mo quickly identified the reason for the failed wish. The *Fate* Holy Grail should theoretically be able to resurrect the dead since it can grant a physical body to heroic spirits. However, there was a critical prerequisite for resurrection: the soul of the deceased must be found. The current wish machine lacked any mechanism to locate a soul, which explained why it couldn't resurrect the target.

"Seriously? It can't even find the target..."

After realizing this, Fang Mo couldn't help but mutter to himself. Despite this, he didn’t stop working, flipping through the books Ancient One had given him, looking much like a novice programmer coding by following tutorials.

After reading through a pile of material, Fang Mo had a sudden burst of inspiration. He reached behind him and pulled out the *Book of the Abyss*. This book didn’t contain just any ordinary spells—it held the oldest and most forbidden magic in existence. In fact, calling it magic was inaccurate; it was more a collection of rituals from cultists fanatically devoted to the Outer Gods, seeking their power and offering sacrifices.

One of these terrifying rituals, known as Dark Resurrection, was a nearly perfect method for bringing the dead back to life. Its true power didn’t lie in the resurrection itself but in its ability to forcibly summon a soul to the caster, regardless of how long the person had been dead or where their soul currently resided.

Fang Mo began analyzing the ritual, flipping between the *Book of the Abyss* and various dimensional magic tutorials. After a long study session, he roughly grasped part of the ritual’s mechanics and attempted to integrate the Abyssal magic into the Holy Grail.

Once this was done, he activated the Grail again and made his wish to resurrect Mystique.

This time, the process went much smoother. A profane whisper echoed from within the Grail, followed by a mist rising. Soon, a figure of a woman emerged from the mist.

"What... what is this?" Charles gasped, his eyes widening in disbelief. He was so emotional that he could hardly speak. "Raven? Is... is it really you?!"

"Charles?" Mystique, clearly disoriented, looked around and instinctively asked, "Where am I? Why am I here? Wait... Fang Mo?!"

"I'm busy. Let Charles explain it to you," Fang Mo replied nonchalantly, showing little interest in the resurrected Mystique and instead turning his focus back to testing other wishes.

Fang Mo quickly ran through a series of tests, wishing for immortality, great power, the ability to kill someone, and healing injuries. The responses from the wish machine were surprisingly consistent. Healing was relatively simple—it either healed the target directly or, if that wasn’t possible, killed and then resurrected them.

For more extreme cases, Fang Mo engraved another Abyssal magic into the Grail: the Time Rewind Ritual, which could revert someone to a state before they were injured.

As for wishes like immortality, power, and killing someone, the machine's answer was the same: evolution. This came from the Hōgyoku's power. Combined with the Holy Grail's Third Magic, the machine modified the user’s natural abilities, unlocking their full potential and granting them immense strength.

To test this, Fang Mo called over Colossus and made a wish for immortality. Afterward, Colossus's body seemed to freeze in time. His cells stopped aging, and his telomeres repaired themselves. At the same time, he gained a super-regeneration ability far beyond that of Wolverine; even if his body were reduced to just a finger, he could regenerate.

When Fang Mo wished for great power, Colossus's mutant ability underwent a qualitative leap. His metal skin became harder than vibranium, and even Fang Mo’s powerful magic sword couldn’t cut through it. His physical strength also skyrocketed, comparable to Superman, but without the weakness to kryptonite.

As for the wish to kill someone, the machine provided the same kind of power enhancement—essentially, it gave you the strength, but you had to figure out how to use it to achieve your goal.

With wishes like wealth, power, immortality, and saving others tested and confirmed, Fang Mo then turned his attention to more complicated desires, such as creating life, making a goddess fall in love with him, or creating strange gadgets like hypnosis tools. These involved manipulating consciousness, memory, and personality, areas outside Fang Mo’s expertise. So, he turned to the master of telepathy, Professor X.

Charles was incredibly patient and thorough in his teachings. However, Fang Mo quickly realized that manipulating memory and consciousness was far more complicated than he had anticipated. If he were to compare it to something, human consciousness was like an enormous, intricate control console, and memory was a highly encrypted file containing audio, video, models, text, and lines of code.

To interfere with memories, one would need to modify, edit, compress, and debug them. After three days of nonstop studying, with Charles’s guidance, Fang Mo finally grasped a small portion of the principles. He used a "Mom’s Love" module to simplify the complex mechanisms and incorporated it into the wish machine.

Once that was done, the machine gained the ability to interfere with consciousness. Fang Mo tested it by placing a random stone on the ground and wishing for Colossus to fall in love with it.

In an instant, Colossus’s perception, memory, and common sense were rewritten. His brain and heart were filled with an overwhelming love for the stone. Even the structure of his brain's temporal lobe began to shift, reflecting a strange condition. The normally stoic Colossus suddenly appeared unfamiliar, captivated by the ordinary stone.

Even his physiological attraction shifted, from being drawn to human features to being enamored with the hard surface of the stone. To put it simply, Colossus now found the rough, grainy texture of the stone irresistibly seductive. He stared at it with longing, as if he were gazing at his ideal lover, and even swallowed nervously.

"Whoa… this is intense," Fang Mo murmured, genuinely impressed by the scene in front of him.

This wish worked similarly to the infamous Kotoamatsukami technique—an instant and irreversible rewrite of someone’s perception. Colossus’s love for the stone was so absolute that, if the stone told him to die, he would likely do so without hesitation. And because he hadn't lost his ability to reason, there was no way to undo the wish.

The only limitation was that the target had to be within the wish machine's range for it to work, but even that seemed insignificant compared to the overwhelming effect.

Satisfied that the machine could now manipulate consciousness, Fang Mo decided to take it further by conjuring up a bizarre pop star. Almost immediately, a figure dressed in overalls appeared and began reciting a strange speech.

"Hello, national producers..." Before they could finish, Fang Mo, satisfied with the machine’s success, sealed the pop star away with a single strike of his sword.

Having spent days fine-tuning the wish machine, Fang Mo had had enough of studying. He had tested everything he needed and backed up everyone’s memories using the machine. Finally, he found Logan and Kitty and said, "Alright, let’s get this time travel started!”