Chapter 214. The Shadow of the Void
The rewards were tempting, almost physically pulling at Noah's willpower to spend them immediately, but he held back. He was a firm believer in the ritual of the summon—you didn't just pull for champions in the middle of a dead star system while smelling of ozone and failure. You needed the right atmosphere, a moment of calm, and perhaps a bit of luck.
Instead, he turned his focus to the new entries in the "Void Lord" section of his panel. This part of the interface had been dormant, a dark tab that had only truly awakened when he summoned Kassadin and allowed the first tendrils of the Void to touch this reality. Now, following the chaos of the battle, it was pulsing with fresh, urgent energy.
[B-Rank Void Chain Quest: Purify the Infected Territories!]
[Description: Great powers have clashed, shattering the delicate equilibrium of the Void. A portion of local space has been corrupted by runaway energy. You must cleanse these infected zones to restore the Void's primordial state. Be warned: the corruption is a living rot; it will expand if left unchecked. Act with haste.]
[B-Rank (Scaling) Void Chain Quest: The Pests!]
[Description: Through the fractures in reality, the essence of the Void has begun to leak, giving rise to malevolent entities. You are tasked with the extermination of these "Vermin" before they can take root in the universe.]
(Note: A primary escapee has been detected with the ability to infect other life forms, warping them into Void-spawn. The longer this entity remains at large, the greater its host swarm will become. The difficulty of this quest will increase dynamically as their numbers grow.)
"So, the rot is spreading," Noah whispered, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the lines of code and light. The system was frustratingly vague on the how of the purification. There was no guidebook for mopping up cosmic radiation from another dimension; he'd have to feel his way through it, relying on his instincts as a Summoner.
"I wonder how fast it's moving..." he mused.
His daily quest allowance was spent—the Infinity Stones had taken his full attention for the day. He wouldn't be able to officially "accept" these new tasks until the server reset the following morning. He needed to gauge the speed of the expansion. If it was a slow crawl, he could afford a night's rest. If it was a sprint, he'd have to intervene manually, even without the system's tracking.
Then his gaze drifted to the second quest: The Pests.
"Corvus," Noah spat the name like it was ash. It wasn't hard to put the pieces together. The "primary escapee" was undoubtedly the right hand of Thanos, now twisted into something far more dangerous.
"B-Rank with the ability to scale up?" Noah raised an eyebrow. This was a first. The [B~?] designation was a warning. It meant the quest was a ticking time bomb. Every second Corvus spent hiding in some dark corner of the galaxy, he was building an army of monsters, turning innocent worlds into breeding grounds for the Void.
He thought of the Mind Stone, the glowing yellow gem that had almost fallen into the creature's grasp. The stone's ability to influence and dominate minds, combined with the infectious hunger of the Void... it would have been an apocalypse in the making.
"At least I kept the prize," Noah thought, a hand instinctively going to his storage space. If Corvus had that stone, the "Pests" quest wouldn't be B-Rank; it would be a death sentence for the galaxy. Deprived of the artifact, Corvus was limited to his own newfound, raw power. He was dangerous, yes, but he wasn't a god. Not yet.
"The quest confirms he survived the spatial storm. Hard to kill, that one."
Noah looked out at the infinite blackness. He knew he couldn't hunt Corvus tonight. The universe was too vast, a haystack made of billions of stars, and he was looking for a single, venomous needle. To find him, Noah would need to establish a network, to listen for the screams of dying worlds or the telltale signature of Void energy cropping up on distant planets.
But Earth was his priority. He wasn't ready to play galactic policeman just yet. However, the Chitauri invasion had changed the game. The "cosmic age" had arrived on his doorstep, whether he liked it or not. If he wanted to protect his home, he had to start looking at the stars as a battlefield, not just a view.
"First things first. Let's see how bad this 'infection' really is," Noah decided.
He closed the panel with a flick of his wrist. He needed to return to the site of the battle, the coordinate where the Void had first bled into the real world.
Before he left the starless Kree system, he paused. Part of him wanted to leave a beacon, a mark to reclaim this place later, but there was nothing here but cold rocks and shadows. Still, he reached out with the Power of the Space Stone, leaving a tiny, vibrating anchor of his own energy at the center of the system. It wasn't a Control Totem—he wasn't going to waste a rare item on a graveyard—but it was a signature. When his mastery over teleportation grew, this flicker would be his lighthouse.
A halo of brilliant blue light erupted around him, the Tesseract's power singing in his veins.
Vrrrroooom—
The sound was more of a vibration in his bones than a noise in the air. Space folded, tucked itself away, and threw him across the light-years.
In a distant, nameless galaxy, atop a jagged, metallic platform floating in the silence, a strange, crystalline plant sat growing. To any normal observer, the platform was empty, the plant invisible to the naked eye, hidden by the veils of the Void.
Then, the blue light struck. It licked across the metal surface like lightning, and from the heart of the glow, Noah stepped out. He was back at the epicenter, the place where the world had broken.
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