[Near Moon Orbit, Outer Space, September 2010]

"Time... Space... Reality."

The voice was vast and unhurried, carrying the weight of a being that had conversed with the silence of the cosmos long before most civilizations had ever come into existence.

"It is more than a linear path. It is a prism of endless possibility, where a single choice can branch out into infinite realities, creating alternate worlds from the ones you know."

Near the arc of the moon’s orbit, a transparent figure materialized against the black canvas of space. He was enormous, his bald head alone spanning several kilometres, his white eyes glowing with the quiet luminescence of a star that had never needed to burn hot to be seen.

He was the Watcher, Uatu. And he observed, as he always had, without interference.

His gaze drifted downward toward the blue marble hanging in the dark below him.

"I am the Watcher," he continued, his voice resonating through the vacuum where no sound should have been able to travel, and yet it did, because some things existed beyond physics. "I am your guide through these vast new realities. Follow me, and ponder the question... What if?"

He paused, the glow in his eyes deepening. "In this universe, a single soul created a ripple large enough to send waves across the stars. Big things have small beginnings."

His enormous gaze settled on the Earth, patiently.

"A soul from outside of this universe transmigrated into the body of Ethan Carter, and awakened powers beyond anything seen in this universe, or most across the multiverse. A power that grants him endless growth with every opponent he faces. From the moment he arrived in this universe, Ethan Carter began his journey of life as any other being might. But his powers gave him an edge, and he used them well enough to become one of the most influential forces on that small blue planet."

Uatu’s expression, if a being of his nature could be said to have one, carried something close to quiet fascination.

"In just ten years, he grew into a force that the wisest of this universe’s cosmic entities regard with careful attention. Not only that, he managed to help the people of Earth in ways that rewrote what was possible for them. Saving lives that were supposed to end. Making the Earth itself more fertile, using his own blood as the catalyst. Ending those who would have caused countless deaths before they ever had the chance."

A point of golden light appeared far below, rising from the surface of the Earth and climbing through the atmosphere at breathtaking speed.

Uatu watched it grow as it ascended, brightening as it came, until it was a golden comet cutting through the dark with both hands stretched forward, a grin on his face and the unmistakable energy of Genesis power wreathing his body like a living second skin.

"He also achieved what many beings only dream of," Uatu continued, his tone carrying something that, in a lesser being, might have been called amusement. "A family of extraordinary women who love him fiercely, and a life that is, by any measure, more than fulfilled."

"His most remarkable feat was ending the existence of a being like Mephisto and erasing him from this timeline entirely, to the point that only beings on the level of Celestials or higher could resurrect him. That was his way of telling the other cosmic entities that he would not play by their rules and that if they caused any harm in his life or the people he loved..."

He paused as the golden comet was not arcing away from his position. It was heading directly toward it.

"Wait."

Uatu’s white eyes narrowed, and for perhaps the first time in a very long while, something resembling alarm crossed a face the size of a large planet.

"Is he coming toward me?"

He watched as the trajectory held perfectly. Ethan Carter, wreathed in golden Genesis Power, grinning like a man without a single concern in the known universe, was flying at full speed directly toward the exact coordinates where Uatu stood narrating.

"That is impossible. No one at his level can perceive my presence. No one at his level should even be able to sense that I am here. How is he..."

The golden comet reached him... and passed directly through him.

Ethan made two clean, leisurely loops around the moon, banking with effortless confidence, as though he had finally found the one hobby in the universe that could never grow old.

Then he turned and accelerated in an entirely different direction, shrinking into a bright point against the darkness before vanishing completely.

Uatu stood very still for a long moment.

Then he exhaled, which, for a being of his scale, disturbed the solar wind in measurable ways.

"It seems I worried for nothing," he said, his voice settling back into its deep, unhurried register. "He still cannot sense my presence or perceive me. The trajectory was a coincidence."

He watched the direction Ethan had gone, the faint golden trail already fading. "Anyway... Let us continue."

His eyes followed the diminishing light. "Ethan Carter wanted something more now. With his growing power came a growing desire, not merely to exist within this world, but to build something that was entirely his own. A place along with an army. A foundation for the future he intends to create. And the destination he has chosen to fulfil that desire is Mars."

The golden light was already nearly at the edge of his sight, burning toward the red planet with purpose.

"But only time will tell," Uatu said quietly, "whether Ethan Carter will succeed in building a home where he and his loved ones can be truly happy, or whether the sheer weight of the power he carries will push him toward choices he comes to regret. Only time will tell."

His voice dropped lower still. "After all, I observe all that transpires here. But I do not, cannot, and will not interfere."

He fell silent, and watched.

...

[Mars Orbit, September 2010]

The red planet filled Ethan’s view like something out of a dream he had carried since childhood.

He slowed from his cruising speed gradually, bleeding velocity as the rust-coloured surface spread wider and wider below him, until he came to a full stop several hundred kilometres above the Martian surface, hanging in the silence of space with his arms crossed and his coat drifting lazily around him in the absence of any wind.

’God, I need to do this more often.’

He tilted his head back and let the stillness of open space wash over him for a moment.

There was something genuinely therapeutic about flying out here—just him moving through the darkness and the stars, with raw speed and the feeling of Genesis Power carrying him across the void.

He made a mental note to do this more often. Then his gaze dropped back to Mars.

’Alright then, big guy,’ It was just the natural thing to think when you were staring at an entire planet you were about to reshape from the ground up. ’Let’s see what secrets you’re hiding.’

He closed his eyes and opened his awareness.

Genesis Awareness and Genesis Telepathy unfurled outward simultaneously, not like a wave but like a tide, patient and total, pressing down through hundreds of kilometres of thin atmosphere and into the rock and dust and deep geological silence of Mars.

He was looking for life, or anything that could be called life, because the last thing he intended to do was begin terraforming an inhabited world without knowing what he was overwriting.

What he found surprised him, though only a little.

There was life on Mars. It simply was not the kind of life that built cities or looked up at the sky and wondered about other worlds.

It was microbial. Living viruses threading through pockets of subsurface ice. Single-celled organisms tucked into the mineral-rich dust of ancient riverbeds, surviving on chemistry alone, patient and blind and completely indifferent to the man hovering in orbit above them.

There were no intelligent civilizations or aliens waiting in hidden bases beneath the surface with suspiciously convenient English translation devices.

Ethan opened his eyes and stared at the planet for a moment.

’I genuinely thought there might be something on Mars. Like in those Alien or Species movies series or some ancient civilization. Something that would let me go back to Earth and say, "I told you so."’

He sighed. ’Even if it’s disappointing,’ he thought, before shrugging it off. ’Still workable for me.’

He uncrossed his arms and let his mind shift to the actual reason he had come out here, and the shape of the plan settled into place the way good plans always did.

Mars was chosen as the first and final choice to be his new home planet. Not Venus, not any of the other candidates he had considered and discarded. The reasoning was clean and he had run through it enough times to know it held.

Venus was a furnace wrapped in a poisonous atmosphere with surface pressure that would crush most materials into submission. Fixing Venus was not terraforming. It was trying to rescue a patient who had already flatlined and argued aggressively against resuscitation.

Mars, on the other hand, was simply empty. Cold and thin and red and waiting. It had the foundations of what he needed, a solid surface, a day length close enough to Earth standard, enough geological history to suggest the potential for a stable core given the right intervention.

It was a blank canvas, and Ethan Carter had always preferred blank canvases.

The primary goal was Kryptonians. He intended to build a population of them, and Mars offered the long-term stability that a Kryptonian civilisation would require once the terraforming was complete. The atmospheric composition, the gravitational calibration, the soil fertility, the radiation shielding, all of it could be shaped exactly to specification.

But then his mind moved, one step further than the immediate goal. ’Why stop at Kryptonians?’

The thought surfaced as though it had been waiting quietly in the back of his mind for the perfect moment to make itself known.

He had a Genesis Chamber and understood the principles of biological genesis at a level that would make most of the universe’s leading scientists quietly retire out of sheer embarrassment.

If he was building a world, if he was laying the foundations of something that could eventually become a genuine multi-species civilisation under his protection, then Kryptonians were a starting point, not a ceiling.

Every species that had ever existed across the omniverse could be recreated through the Genesis Chamber. And he could even combine the DNA of different species to create entirely unique hybrids that existed nowhere else, lifeforms born only on this planet, rebuilt from the ground up on a world he had shaped with his own hands and his own blood.

The image formed in his mind instantly, different ranks of beings from dozens of species standing upon the soil beneath a blue sky streaked with white clouds, all of them looking up at him as he floated in the heavens above with the quiet certainty that he had created them, this world was their home, and he was the one they were meant to serve with absolute loyalty.

He grinned then he shook his head. ’Settle down, Ethan. That is a twenty-years-from-now goal. Let’s focus on the foundation for now.’

He raised one hand and reached into the inventory spell.

Two objects emerged into the space around him, each one massive enough to register as minor satellites on any sensor array pointed in this direction.

He had taken them from the Kryptonian ship after his confrontation with Zod’s forces, two World Engines, and he had not simply stored them. He had studied them with patience.

Kryptonian technology operated on principles that were, in several respects, genuinely ahead of anything that existed natively on Earth.

The World Engines functioned through a system of coordinated atmospheric and geological intervention, deploying a cascade of terraforming processes that worked in concert: gravitational wave emitters that could gradually adjust a planet’s internal pressure distribution, atmospheric processors that broke down existing compounds and rebuilt the gaseous composition from the molecular level upward, electromagnetic field generators that could establish and stabilise a magnetosphere where none existed, and deep-core thermal injectors that reactivated dormant geological processes to generate the kind of internal heat that sustained a living world from the inside out.

The genius of the design was in the coordination. Each system fed data to the others in real time, adjusting its output based on what the rest of the network was doing, which meant the terraforming process was not brute force.

It was more like a conversation between the machine and the planet, patient and iterative, coaxing the world toward a new equilibrium rather than hammering it into shape.

Ethan had understood the base principles within the first week of study. The modifications had taken longer, not because the concepts were beyond him, but because he had wanted them done precisely.

He had adapted the atmospheric target profile from Kryptonian-standard to something that would support a broader range of species, widened the gravitational calibration parameters to allow for fine-tuning after initial deployment.

The originals had been designed to terraform for Kryptonians and nothing else. His version was designed to terraform for everyone.

He extended his telekinesis outward and took hold of both engines with ease and positioned them at opposing points along Mars’s equatorial axis.

The engines oriented themselves, their systems cycling through their startup sequences with the low, resonant hum of technology.

Then they began. The effect was not immediately dramatic, which was precisely how good terraforming worked.

The gravitational wave emitters engaged first, their output measured and precise, beginning the long process of encouraging Mars’s core toward a more active thermal state.

The atmospheric processors came online moments later, tasting the thin Martian air and beginning the work of thickening it, feeding carbon dioxide back into the cycle while steadily introducing oxygen and nitrogen in ratios calibrated to the modified target profile. Across the surface, in the deep cold of the subsurface rock, the thermal injectors began their work.

Ethan watched for a moment, then turned his attention to his own contribution.

He raised both hands and began to move them through the forms of the Runes of Asgard, the gestures precise and unhurried, each rune taking shape in the air before him as a burning crimson inscription before streaking outward and embedding itself into the Martian atmosphere at planetary scale.

He was building a protection array, the kind that did not merely repel attackers but rendered the entire planet functionally inaccessible to anyone who did not carry his explicit permission.

The runes worked in concert, each one a node in an interconnected web that spanned the entire planet.

The outer layer established a perimeter ward, something like a scaled and considerably more aggressive version of the Sanctum barriers on Earth, capable of turning away magical intrusion from entities up to and including those that operated at the level of dimension lord class threats.

He had tested the Crimson Annihilation spells himself and knew precisely where their ceiling was. The rune array he was building now could absorb five direct hits from that class of attack before requiring reinforcement.

The middle layer was a detection grid, passive and constant, linked directly to his Genesis Awareness so that anything that entered the planet’s protected space without clearance would register against his senses instantly, regardless of where he was in the universe.

The outermost layer was the interdiction field: nothing left this planet without his knowledge and nothing arrived without his consent. Not through conventional travel, not through portal magic, not through any form of dimensional transit he had catalogued so far, and he had catalogued rather a lot of them.

’It’s not perfect yet,’ he thought, watching the rune web settle into place across the rust-coloured sky below him. ’But it’s a foundation. I’ll improve it in the future.’

He would return and strengthen the array. He would add layers, refine the parameters, build redundancies on top of redundancies until this planet was the most secure location in the solar system. But for now, this was enough.

He looked down at Mars as the World Engines continued their patient work, the first faint shimmer of atmospheric change already visible in the way the light played across the polar ice caps, and he allowed himself a moment of satisfaction.

’It’s nice,’ he thought, ’to take things slow without reaching for Chronokinesis every five minutes and build it properly.’

When you could step outside of time entirely, outcomes arrived before the process had a chance to feel real. He was choosing not to do that here. Mars was going to be built at the pace it deserved to be built at, and he was going to feel every step of it.

His thoughts drifted back to New York, to the people he had left there.

Anna and Didi were dealing with a group of annoying guys who seemed determined to target them. Meanwhile, his Widows would work on removing old, sick psychopaths from the equation.

Speaking of the Widows, Melina had been chosen as his first Cosmic Herald after he figured out how to create Heralds within the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. Because she is loyal and experienced, compared to others.

He had already trained her in the use of Genesis Power within the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, and she was currently just below the level of the Silver Surfer. With enough training, she could eventually stand on his level.

At the moment, she was the only one carrying his Genesis Power. Anna possessed Genesis Power as well, but hers was fundamentally different from the power he had granted Melina.

Yelena had wanted that power too after witnessing it for herself, but Ethan had made it clear that he did not give such power freely—they would have to earn it.

He told her that after a few more days of observation, he would establish certain conditions for the Widows. Once those conditions were achieved, he would grant them Genesis Power as well, turning them into his Heralds.

That thought brought a smile to his face.

Moreover, Diana was managing Aeon Industries, which required no concern whatsoever on his part because Diana Prince managing a strategic operation was approximately as reliable as gravity.

Jean had the rest, and Elizabeth was there to support her and make sure she was not overdoing things, which she absolutely would try to do because Jean Grey’s definition of taking it easy during pregnancy was still more productive than most people’s definition of a full working day.

He smiled at the thought of them.

Once this was done, once Mars had its atmosphere and its soil and its rune array and its foundation, he would go home.

And then, for a little while, he was going to be insufferably present and his partners were going to have to deal with that.

Below him, three hours into its work, the terraforming process was nearing the end of its first phase. The atmospheric density readings were already registering a measurable increase.

The surface temperature in the equatorial regions had begun to climb. Thin, pale clouds were forming in the upper atmosphere where none had existed before, water vapour rising from ice deposits that the thermal injectors had begun to coax back into motion.

It was not finished. But it was alive now in a way it had not been when he arrived.

Ethan tilted forward in the void and began his slow descent toward the surface, the Genesis fire around him dimming to a low, steady warmth as he fell.

’Alright, Mars,’ he thought, watching the red surface rise to meet him. ’Let’s give you something worth remembering.’