The Limiter Break had one more allocation to make.
Jordan looked at what remained of the Evolutionary Power, and then looked at Super Healing — the ability he'd been running since the early Z-City days, the card that had kept him functional through enough punishment to reduce an ordinary fighter to fragments several dozen times over. It had always been exceptional. It had always been, at its ceiling, the difference between alive and not.
He directed everything that remained at it.
Super Healing — General Improvement.
Normal Series unlocked.
What came back was not Super Healing with a few points added. It was something the word healing addressed only as a starting point — the Saitama-paradigm equivalent of what recovery looked like when you removed every limitation on biological repair and let the concept run to its logical conclusion. Previously, it could reach someone at death's edge and pull them back. Now, there was no threshold it recognized as too far.
F-boy, who had watched the entire breakthrough from a distance of zero and processed everything about it with his characteristic composure, produced a gesture and an expression that translated to: At this point, finding Jordan is basically the same as collecting all seven Dragon Balls.
Jordan filed this under accurate and moved on.
The healing ability's operational ceiling had also expanded dramatically — range, target count, duration. If Jordan wanted to, Normal Healing could extend across an entire planet as a standing field effect, the same architectural approach as the Mind Network, giving every living thing on Earth a continuous regenerative buffer that made death from conventional harm effectively optional.
He had thought about this for approximately three seconds before deciding not to.
The logic resolved cleanly: eliminate death entirely, and the propagation pressure it normally checked would compound without limit. Food chains. Resource allocation. Exponential population growth with no natural corrective. Thanos had built his entire worldview around this problem, and however wrong his solution was, his identification of the underlying dynamic was not. An immortal biosphere left to itself was not a paradise. It was the beginning of a different kind of catastrophe.
Some doors were better left with a handle on them.
Useful as a targeted tool, Jordan noted. Not a general policy.
The Evolutionary Power reached zero.
Then the Limiter Break completed.
The quantum state had been maintaining a delicate suspension — Jordan's existence distributed across the probability space between real and unreal, the two conceptual forces of infinite power and the OPM ceiling-removal still negotiating the terms of his new body. Now they reached their conclusion.
From the cellular level up, he rebuilt.
Not gradually. Not the way biological healing worked, tissue by tissue, chemistry by chemistry. More like the universe deciding what something was: a declaration applied to every scale simultaneously. Flesh, bone, muscle — reshaped as if the specifications had always existed and the material was only now being instructed to match them. The Pseudo-Herrscher Core in its Möbius configuration drew the infinite power through itself and used it to fill the last gaps in its own rule authority — the conceptual gaps that had been present since Jordan had first constructed it, the places where the Honkai-based architecture had been reaching toward something it couldn't quite articulate.
Now it could.
The two structures merged: the Pseudo-Herrscher Core and the infinite power that had been living inside the Energy Star Core, the Honkai foundation and the MCU cosmos's foundational energy, two different cosmologies' rule-level authority negotiating a shared framework and finding one. The missing pieces locked into place.
What was born from this was not the Pseudo-Herrscher Core.
It was a Herrscher Core.
A real one.
The sky above Titan, empty of observers, received a faint hymn from no identifiable source — the kind of resonance that happens when a new node appears in the architecture of reality and the surrounding framework registers the addition. The Imaginary Space that had always been latent in Jordan's existence, tied to the Herrscher heritage but never fully opened, activated.
The Honkai energy came in like a tide.
It came in fast.
The Honkai surge that accompanied a Herrscher's awakening was, under normal circumstances, the kind of event that measured in global-crisis terms. On an inhabited planet this would have meant exactly what such events always meant: contamination, outbreak, the biological and physical environment responding to an energy it was not equipped to process. On Titan — already dead, already decaying, already the uninhabited ruin of a civilization that had ended itself through one man's hubris — there was no population to protect.
There was only the planet.
The Honkai energy reached Titan's core.
Nuclear-bright flashes pulsed across the surface as the rocky crust, already structurally compromised by the years of abandonment, found its stress tolerances suddenly and catastrophically exceeded. The landmass cracked along fault lines that had been waiting for exactly this kind of encouragement. Magma that had been quietly cooling for decades came back to life, forced upward through the new fracture networks. What remained of Titan's oceans boiled into steam in minutes. The forests — sparse, the legacy of whatever ecology had survived the planet's decline — caught from below and burned.
The core continued to heat.
The metaphor that came to mind was a giant egg being microwaved: internal pressure building without any outlet, the rigid shell stretching past its tolerance, the planet becoming oval under the strain before the seams gave way entirely.
The Big Bang, this time, was small enough to fit inside a solar system.
Titan disintegrated.
Gases and particulates and the compressed geological history of a dead Eternal civilization swept outward in a shockwave that was, in the scale of the universe's ongoing business, a fairly minor event. Beautiful, in the objective way that energy releases are beautiful when there's no one nearby to be harmed by them. The light of it would travel for thousands of years and arrive at Earth's telescopes as something that looked like fireworks. Astronomers in that future century would write papers about it.
Jordan took a step.
One small step, he thought, with the dry humor of someone who appreciated the reference and had genuinely earned it. One considerable leap for the concept of evolution.
He stood in open vacuum — no suit, no atmospheric containment, no external support of any kind — and existed there the way stars exist, because the nature of what he was had become sufficient to sustain itself in space.
1.95 meters. Broad shoulders, narrow waist, the proportions of a body that had been rebuilt from the specification up rather than grown from biology's approximations. Full, well-defined muscles carrying the specific quality of explosive power that was always potential rather than display. The face — angular, resolute, the blond hair that had blazed sky-blue through the quantum transformation now returned to its natural color — and the eyes, blue, lit from within, radiating a spectrum that light normally had no mechanism to produce.
He was, technically, also naked.
Newly reborn entities and their relationship with clothing, he thought, invoking no particular universe's precedent. A consistent pattern.
The dark blue suit assembled around him in the same motion as the thought — the combat suit reconstructed by habit and preference, the familiar fit of something that had been his working attire across multiple arcs of his transmigrator life. The scarlet cape would wait until there was something worth wearing it for.
"A man should protect himself when he's out in the world," Jordan said, to the expanding dust cloud that had been Titan.
He raised his right hand.
The Reality Stone's authority flowed through him — not through a Gauntlet now, not through any external housing, but through the Herrscher Core that had integrated it and made it part of his own rule-level architecture. The red light spread across the debris field quietly, methodically, the Infinity Stone's reality-editing capacity applied to the task of removing the expanding matter from the local universe's inventory.
Piece by piece. The pattern of it, from outside, might have looked like a game where matching elements simply disappeared. The violence of the planet's end was cleaned away in silence, leaving only the stars and the faint residual warmth of what had happened here.
Jordan lowered his hand.
He didn't feel guilty about Titan. The planet had already been dead for years, its last resident departed, its ecosystem reduced to whatever had survived the slow decades of neglect since the Eternal civilization ended. What he'd done here had accelerated the conclusion of a process that had started long before his arrival. The universe had one fewer uninhabited ruin.
He turned.
The galaxy spread out in every direction. He had the specific awareness now of every gravitational field within range, every star doing its slow fusion work, the traffic of cosmic events that had been ongoing since before the MCU's own origin. His perception extended naturally to all of it — not overwhelming, not intrusive, simply present, the way environmental awareness becomes background when you've lived somewhere long enough.
Herrscher of Infinity.
The name had arrived with the Core's activation, not chosen but recognized — the designation that described what the integration of infinite MCU power and Honkai rule-authority had produced. A Herrscher, like those who had come before him in the Honkai universe, but not for any single element or concept. For infinity itself. For the totality.
Jordan turned the thought over once and found it acceptable.
He thought of Earth.
And was there.
Instantaneous, unassisted, no dimensional rift required — the Herrscher Core's spatial authority and his own accumulated teleportation instincts reaching the same conclusion simultaneously. A single thought, and the vacuum of the former Titan orbit became the familiar blue sky of Earth's upper atmosphere, and then, in the next moment, whatever surface he'd decided to land on.
His new body could sustain itself indefinitely. The Herrscher Core, integrated with the Energy Star Core and the infinite power architecture, constituted an energy economy that could run until the universe ended without requiring external input. No food, no air, no sleep as biological necessity. He had crossed out of the category of things that required maintaining.
He was aware of this, and largely indifferent to it as a piece of information.
The hobbies that had survived the transmigration intact — good food, the aesthetic pleasure of a well-made meal, the various enjoyments that came with an ordinary human's relationship with being alive — were not things he had any intention of surrendering to an upgrade. Power was useful. So was a bowl of ramen at the right moment.
A smile — unhurried, the kind that arrived when nothing required managing — curved his expression.
Some things are worth keeping.