The planet Ankara Domomei was a remote backwater in the cosmos—no resources worth mining, but it had its own atmosphere, good enough to let lifeforms catch a breather.
Add to that its sheer obscurity: no one would come here without a reason, which made it a perfect rest stop and trading post for raiders.
What those raiders never expected was to run into a pack of utterly unreasonable maniacs today.
Zod was genuinely interested in the technology of this Marvel universe. Seeing aliens, of course he wanted to dissect and study them.
Especially since these were raiders.
"Die!"
A raider fired an energy rifle. The beam shot out, only for Esdeath to block it with her bare hand. His face twisted in sheer terror—the expression of someone staring at a monster—right before Esdeath crushed his weapon into scrap.
Four Kryptonians were enough to steamroll anything that existed. Even Thanos himself would get beaten down, let alone a bunch of third-rate raiders like this.
Zod checked over the raiders' ships and promptly acquired a hefty sum of money.
"Good thing they use electronic currency. If it were physical cash, that'd be way too conspicuous."
Zod transferred every raider's funds into the interstellar account he'd just opened.
Right now, he was dirt poor. By cosmic standards, he was probably a massive pauper—and money in the Marvel universe seemed to hold its value extremely well.
Tifa hadn't joined Esdeath and Yan Lingji in the fight. She stayed beside Zod, watching him tinker with the raiders' ship.
Then Zod found the star map the raiders possessed.
"Ladies, we're heading out."
Zod spoke to Esdeath and Yan Lingji through telepathy.
Esdeath stopped her attack and blew out a breath.
Freeze Breath!
The remaining raiders were all sealed in ice, their faces frozen in terror.
Yan Lingji had no objections to Esdeath's methods. She was never the kind-hearted type to begin with.
Once the two of them boarded the ship, Zod guided it through a spatial node marked on the star map, a gateway leading to the biggest black market in the universe.
Angora Gang Purple Star!
A peculiar celestial body with extremely high density, which meant its gravity was intense and its atmosphere incredibly thick. Its volume was roughly fifty times that of Earth.
Basically, anything in the universe that couldn't see the light of day got traded here. You might even run into those goofballs from the Guardians of the Galaxy—though they probably hadn't formed the Guardians yet.
Seen from outside the atmosphere, the entire planet looked like a violet gemstone, which is how it got its name.
Though Zod wondered: with an atmosphere this thick, what kind of unique environment could even take shape here?
Fortunately, their ship was sturdy enough—might just be the sturdiest ship in the entire universe.
They blasted straight through the atmosphere, and inside, Zod and the others didn't feel the slightest jolt.
After punching through and entering the planet's interior, the first sensation was cold.
Then a tractor beam locked onto them. The ship auto-piloted, following the beam down to a landing zone packed with every conceivable kind of spacecraft.
Zod had looted translators off the raiders, so language wasn't an issue. Couple that with the Kryptonian super-brain, and they'd probably pick up every language in the universe before too long.
Where there's demand and supply, a market forms. At its core, a black market is a naturally occurring market—it exists because there's a need.
Angora Gang Purple Star's gravity was far heavier than Earth's. But Kryptonians couldn't care less about that level of gravity, nor whether the air was toxic or hazardous, nor what kind of reactions radiation might trigger.
Because the bio-field was the most broken protective measure in existence, filtering out anything harmful to a Kryptonian.
"I hate the cold here," Yan Lingji said, even though she didn't actually feel cold at all.
"So many weird ones. Are those aliens?" Tifa stared at the scaled, furred, arthropod, reptilian, and even coelenterate-type alien lifeforms in front of her.
Mammalian types like them counted as rare aliens.
"Here, we're the aliens," Zod corrected Tifa. He thought the Marvel universe was decent enough—at least it didn't lazily churn out a bunch of humanoids, dye their skin and hair, and call them aliens.
Though it was still mostly carbon-based life.
Angora Gang Purple Star was teeming with aliens: black market dealers, raiders, interstellar hunters, space pirates, you name it. In the comic storylines, even Nova Corps Centurions would come here for a drink.
Because aside from being the largest black market in the universe, it was also a fairly famous entertainment spot.
Kryptonian information reception was the strongest in the universe. Super hearing and super vision allowed Zod and the others to witness the darkness and cruelty of the cosmos at extremely high speed. Waves of cosmic wanderers whose homeworlds had been destroyed were being trafficked and resold here.
Rarity drove value. Because their species had gone extinct, these last survivors were extremely precious. They were sold to every corner of the galaxy, reduced to curios and playthings, spending the rest of their lives as slaves.
"What are we doing here?" Esdeath asked Zod.
"Buying technical data. These bastards are actually treating the most important scientific research like trade goods. This is the most valuable stuff."
Zod quickly emptied his funds, purchasing every piece of scientific technology he hadn't possessed before.
He mastered that knowledge in no time and still wanted more.
It made Zod really want to just rob the place. Problem was, if he robbed them, Earthlings' reputation might get ruined by him in the future.
Wearing a mask wouldn't help; their scanning tech was definitely good enough to see through that. Unless you could shapeshift perfectly like a Skrull.
Currently, no one could detect a Skrull's disguise, making the Skrulls' espionage and intelligence capabilities arguably the strongest in the universe.
After all, they could perfectly transform into a target they'd come into contact with, or even just seen. More terrifyingly, that transformation also granted them the target's memories.
Among the Skrulls, the powerful Super-Skrulls could even copy one hundred percent of a target's superpowers, memories, everything.
Just as Zod was fretting over money, he suddenly spotted bounty missions.
Bounties big and small. The highest was the Cosmic Orb, with a reward of forty billion.
If he got his hands on that sum, Zod could buy all the available knowledge and still have ninety percent leftover.
"Bounty missions don't seem bad either."
The mission list was densely packed with hundreds of pages of task data. They ranged from simple escort missions, delivering letters, and tracking the movements of space pirates, all the way to high-level ones like exterminating cosmic beasts, besieging pirate strongholds, and armed sweeps of newly developed planets.
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