Marvel's Shendu: Dominating the Multiverse

Chapter 156 Not in the same position

Deep inside the forging yard, there is a structure.

It wasn't a room, nor a container; it was a spacetime fold eleven times, stuffed into the densest point of a neutron star's core. The Celestials called it redundant storage; a lesser civilization would probably translate it as "backup."

This redundant storage has not been accessed for 700 million years.

It was triggered today.

It wasn't ordered by anyone; it was triggered automatically. When the main consciousness of a Celestial Group is determined to be irreversibly terminated, the redundant storage protocol will automatically activate, filling a pre-stored copy of the consciousness into a pre-made body.

The entire process took nine minutes and fourteen seconds.

For the Celestials, nine minutes is enough to wage a local war on a galaxy scale.

But no one in the forge urged them on; the six Celestials were all waiting. They put aside their ongoing debate, and all their attention turned to the direction in which that spacetime fold was unfolding.

A new information field has lit up on the public frequency band.

weak.

Compared to the signal strength of Aristom in their memories, the output power of this newborn was nearly 40% lower. The decline in consciousness clarity was even greater than the predicted model, indicating that the energy circuitry of the prefabricated body was not fully compatible with Aristom's consciousness architecture.

The analysts immediately ran a diagnostic procedure. The conclusion: the new body's overall combat strength is approximately 62.3% of the original body's, memory integrity is 99.97%, and consciousness continuity is unaffected.

In other words, the person is still the same, but their health has deteriorated significantly.

Arithm did not perform any self-checks, did not adapt to the new body's motor functions, and did not test the response delay of the energy circuits.

He spoke.

To be precise, he sent a message directly into the public frequency band, so forcefully that the frequency band experienced overload jitter.

The power control of the new body hadn't been broken in yet, and this incident distorted the gravitational circulation in the forging field.

"That man."

Four words.

Arithm's information encoding method differs from other Celestials. He habitually attaches a large amount of perceptual information to data packets—not emotions, but direct mappings of primal experiences. The amount of information carried by these four words is equivalent to three times that of an analyst's entire evaluation framework.

The six groups of gods simultaneously received all of Arithm's last moments of perception.

It's not a battle report, not a data summary, but a complete first-person experience.

The eradicator's information stream displayed an unprecedented waveform. The judge's data processing module restarted twice within 0.3 seconds. The analyst immediately shut down its predictive model, as the framework would crash instantly upon inputting this data.

Arithm continued, "He changed the rules of my existence."

The transmission efficiency of the public frequency band dropped by 15%. This wasn't a technical malfunction; rather, the Celestial Team present had allocated too many processing resources to the semantic parsing of this sentence, leaving insufficient computing power for communication maintenance.

"My attack was redefined before it even made contact with him. It wasn't deflection, absorption, or cancellation; the definition itself was rewritten. The energy I released ceased to be energy when it reached him. The underlying logic of matter transformation was unilaterally revised by him."

Ethan grasped one key phrase: "One-sided?"

"I didn't detect any antagonistic force field structures." Aristam's information flow began to stabilize, and the power output of his new body was gradually calibrating. "He didn't suppress my power with greater force; he canceled the preconditions for my power to take effect at the rule level."

"What are the specific mechanisms?" the analyst pressed.

"have no idea."

The Celestials are unknown unless they are told. The very existence of this group is for the purpose of knowing everything, calculating everything, and controlling everything.

Analysts don't speak, judges don't speak, and even eradicators won't speak when they're in a rage.

Arithm said so.

"I devoted all my computing resources to analyzing his interference methods, but before my consciousness was terminated, the progress of the analysis was zero. Not one percent, not one ten-thousandth, it was zero. What he used was not in our knowledge system; it didn't even match the most basic physical framework."

The gravitational circulation in the forge completely stopped for two seconds. The six Celestials, plus Aristem, seven planetary-level consciousnesses simultaneously encountered a bottleneck in information processing.

"This is not power," Arithm concluded. "This is personhood."

This term is not a Celestial term. There is no corresponding entry in the Celestial concept library. Arithm drew it from his own experience of death. When your existence is picked up, glanced at, and then put back, and you find that your operating rules have been altered, you instinctively understand one thing.

The other party is not stronger than you.

The other party operates within a different system than you.

The eradicators remained silent for a long time.

His information flow was operating at high speed, processing the sensory data brought back by Arisham. With each layer processed, his pulse frequency decreased by one level.

"Ethan, your third reason from before." The Eradicator's information flow returned to normal. "With the three Infinity Stones and his own system, the model can't reach a convergent solution."

"right."

"Will Arithm's data be added?"

Ethan didn't answer. There was no need to answer that question. With an entity capable of rewriting the rules of the Celestials, plus the three Infinity Stones, the model wouldn't just fail to find a convergent solution; it wouldn't even provide a direction for divergence.

The judge had barely spoken until now, when he sent out a very short data packet on the public frequency.

There is only one coordinate inside.

Olympia Star.

"He's still there," the Judge said. "The fourteen individuals of the Eternal Race have completed their oaths, and the energy circuits are being rewritten. He's reshaping them."

"Transform it into what?" the eradicator asked.

"I don't know. The information barrier can't be read from the outside."

Again, I don't know.

Arithm’s new body emitted a low-frequency resonance, similar to the sigh of carbon-based life. Of course, the Celestials do not sigh, but this resonance pattern at this frequency would indeed make such an association with the recorders of a lower civilization.

"He said something when I was killed."

All available processing resources were instantly concentrated on this task.

He said: "Go back and tell your kind that I'm not interested."

This phrase has been displayed on public frequencies for a long time.

Ethan was the first to make a judgment. "He knew about the redundant storage."

“He knows everything,” Aristham corrected. “He didn’t kill me to destroy me, but to create a messenger. A messenger with complete first-person memories, to return to the forge and tell you all these things himself.”

The seven Celestials present simultaneously realized one thing: from Arithm's death to his awakening, from data transmission to collective discussion, the entire process was within the other's prediction.

They weren't analyzing a threat; they were reading a letter.

The sender did not leave a signature because it was unnecessary. The recipient was the entire Celestial Group, and the message, translated into the simplest language, is:

Don't bother me.

The eradicator's information flow restarted: "So what do we do?"