Chapter 108: Omega

Garon had been gone for two days. Hank and Hope had also moved out. The surrounding houses had been bought up by Howard but remained unoccupied. There were no neighbors, and barely any pedestrians. What used to be a lively home suddenly became eerily quiet, leaving Melin feeling a bit lonely.

"Sigh, that bastard Howard. Why did he buy up all these houses? It's just two families, tops—how many people are you planning to house? And am I really that scary?" Melin grumbled.

It wasn't hard to guess Howard's reasoning—he was afraid that the neighbors might inadvertently offend Melin. So, he bought every house around Melin's home, creating a buffer zone of emptiness.

Moreover, Howard and his family were planning to move in themselves to maintain their relationship with Melin. Living next to Melin would also offer a strong sense of security.

What Melin was actually complaining about wasn't Howard's actions—it was the fact that he bought the houses but hadn't moved in yet!

An old man like me still needs someone to chat with, play chess, have some tea—how am I supposed to pass the time otherwise?

In his past life, Melin had enjoyed playing games, but now with the support of his Cosmo, even playing with his eyes closed and feet would let him crush everyone. There was no sense of challenge or engagement anymore.

Training could indeed pass the time, but Melin was already at the peak of the Eighth Sense, with one foot stepping into the Ninth.

Yet deep within his subconscious, a mysterious voice—its origin and destination unknown—kept warning him not to take that final step. It was the wrong path.

Others might have dismissed it as hallucination.

…

…

But Melin knew well that such inexplicable intuitions were often the most accurate and vital.

So not only did he suppress his urge to re-enter the Ninth Sense, but he forcibly pulled back the foot he had already placed forward.

He carefully felt the Eighth Sense's Cosmo and began recalling past sensations. What he discovered shocked him.

During the mythological era, he hadn't experienced this kind of intuition, and the battles had been so intense there was no time for contemplation.

Only now did he realize that although he had broken through to the Ninth Sense back then, there had always been a slight blockage in the flow of his Cosmo.

Even worse, Melin—who had once stood at the peak of the Ninth Sense—now found himself with nowhere to go!

In the past, that wouldn't have been concerning. The peak of the Ninth Sense had already placed him above all gods; there was no need for more power. He had never wanted to conquer or rule the world through strength.

But now, even at his peak, he could only barely survive in this vast universe. The urgency to grow stronger surpassed even when he had been weak.

"Cosmo… The Ninth Sense is already the path to the universe's origin. So what lies beyond that? What is the Tenth Sense? Becoming the origin of the universe? Does that mean fighting OAA for the position? Is that even possible?

But if I'm not mistaken, Uranus and the Eastern Immortal Gods should all still be alive, and they must've reached the Tenth Sense—or something equal to it. Did OAA just ignore it? Or does OAA not exist at all?

A universe can only have one origin—its starting point. But Uranus and the Eastern Immortal Gods were multiple and yet all disappeared.

Hades and Zeus were able to escape to outer universes even with broken Ninth Senses, proving that the Ninth Sense does allow traversal across multiverses. But… why can't I do it?

Gods… humans… Cosmo… Wait!"

A flash of insight lit up Melin's mind—he thought of a faint possibility.

"Cosmo is the hidden universal energy within the body. Then… what about outside the body? The macrocosm!"

At that moment, Melin's body was suddenly enveloped in radiance—not blinding, but gentle and clear. If the Ninth Sense's power was like blazing fire that could burn you just by being near, then what Melin now exuded was like a spring of cool water—refreshing and calming.

"The macrocosm… Omega… This path… is the truest cultivation path for humanity! Haha… Hahahaha!" Melin clutched his face and laughed, seven parts joy and three parts bitterness.

"Five hundred thousand years… a whole five hundred thousand years! I walked down the wrong path for five hundred thousand years! How… foolish I've been!" Melin said with a self-deprecating chuckle.

From the beginning, he was human—not a god. His path should have always differed from the gods'. Yet he had relied on sheer will and talent to force himself down their path, nearly reaching the end.

But that path had become a dead end. Now, he realized—it wasn't that there was no road beyond the Ninth Sense. It was that he had no road beyond it. No—not just him, but all of humanity.

Now, however, the Cosmo within Melin had evolved into a macrocosm. It had broken free from the body's constraints and surpassed the limits of humanity—transcending the ultimate of ultimates.

The Cosmo was confined by the body, but the macrocosm wasn't. Like the real universe, it was endless—mirroring humanity's boundless potential.

Now, Melin only needed to continue expanding his macrocosm to gain infinite potential for strength.

"My macrocosm right now has only a single lonely star. The next step is to keep expanding. My first goal… is at least to have a star system. The universe is infinite—a star system is just a fragment. Hmm, I'll call it Omega (A Fragment of a Scale)."

With this, Melin no longer felt bored. He immediately entered a training state. Though Omega (A Fragment of a Scale) had just formed and was equal only to the early Eighth Sense, meaning he had temporarily regressed, that didn't bother him.

To Melin, that wasn't a loss. Omega (A Fragment of a Scale) gave him enough power to deal with current threats. More importantly, now that he was on the right path, every step forward was equivalent to three past ones. He was confident that soon, his macrocosm would expand to the scale of a full star system—returning him to Ninth Sense-level power.

"But… before I begin training, I should send word of the macrocosm and Omega back to the Sanctuary. I must keep them from making the same mistake I did."

With that thought, Melin picked up the phone.

…

At a secret Air Force experimental base, Fury, along with Carol and Coulson, had already found Dr. Wendy Lawson's files. Carol's memories had begun to stir—fragments in her mind slowly piecing themselves together.

But much of the file had been redacted, and the rest was messy. Fortunately, they found another surviving member of the Pegasus Project—Maria Rambeau.

After bypassing security and fellow agents who tried to stop them, they hijacked the most advanced experimental jet and flew off to Louisiana to find Maria Rambeau and investigate Carol's identity.

"Heh, things are getting interesting," Garon muttered, cloaking himself and trailing just behind the plane.

He didn't hide on the plane itself because there was already a stowaway onboard. Though seemingly harmless, Garon's Cosmo had detected that it was a terrifying being. Best not to provoke it.

Arriving in Louisiana, they found Maria Rambeau and her daughter. Both were shocked to see Carol alive. When the Pegasus Project failed, the military had reported her as dead.

Carol herself didn't believe she was the same person they remembered. So she laid out the entire story.

"That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard," Maria Rambeau said, clearly unconvinced.

"Aliens turning into humans? That's impossible." Like mother, like daughter—their expressions were identical, which made Fury and Coulson glance at each other knowingly.

Knowing they wouldn't believe her easily, Carol demonstrated her photon powers again. This time, though, she showed restraint—not by firing energy blasts but by… boiling water with her bare hands.

"No way! That's so cool!" Typical kid reaction—Maria's daughter's eyes sparkled.

The girl then brought out some old photos she had kept. Between that and chatting with Maria, Carol finally began to believe she might really be a former Earthling.

At that moment, the Skrull leader Talos appeared.

"Wait, don't attack!" Seeing energy gather in Carol's hands and a gun in Fury's, he quickly intervened.

"How dare you show up in front of me again?" Carol snapped. She hadn't forgotten being strung up and studied by the Skrulls.

"If it's about what happened before, I apologize. Back then, we didn't know who you were—or anything about your past."

"And now you do."

"To show my sincerity, I have a recording from the Pegasus Project. It's from the plane crash six years ago. I believe once you hear it, everything will become clear. Humans call the device a black box."

"Wait a second, the black box was destroyed. How do you have it?" Maria immediately questioned.

"Guess you didn't know? Let me explain, little miss—I have a special ability that lets me go anywhere I want… well, except one place right now," Talos said thoughtfully.

"There's a place even Skrulls can't go?" Carol asked with a cold laugh.

"Believe me, miss—without permission, no one can enter that place. Not even the so-called Supreme Intelligence. That place is called the Sanctuary. Rumor has it that a true god lives there—an actual god, older than even I am."

"If you call me 'miss' again, I swear I'll kick you where the sun don't shine."

"…Can I ask where exactly you plan to kick me?"

"Your butt!"

In the end, Carol lowered her fists, though she still didn't trust Talos. After some persuasion from Fury and Maria, she agreed to listen to the recording. Whether Talos had some hidden scheme or not, at least it might help recover the missing pieces of her memory.