Chapter 0163: Cosmic Energy

'Finally…' Alex thought to himself while pampering Wanda as she fell asleep with her head in his lap.

It wasn't that he was relieved that she was asleep — He'd been with her for more than just one of her cycles and knew very well how to take care of her mood swings — His excitement came from the fact that he'd finally gotten through the defenses of the weird Inhuman who was coating their body with Cosmic Energy.

Just as Alex breached the film of Cosmic Energy surrounding the Inhuman, they woke up and tried to resist.

Inside Alex's soul, within the space comprising his ‹Inventory›, the Inhuman screamed out and tried to burst out with their Cosmic Energy. But it was meaningless. Having spent a paradoxical amount of time within the Klyntar dimension where the concept of Space and Time didn't exist, they had long been exhausted of their reserves. The scream was just an instinctive manifestation of their resistance as Alex encroached upon their body and power.

He had already anticipated a last-ditch resistance, so he made sure to constantly take away any and all possible means that the Inhuman could use to regenerate Cosmic Energy.

Within moments, he'd devoured everything about that Inhuman's existence, taking the most useful thing, their Cosmic Energy Manipulation.

As he slowly understood the effects of his new ability, he added the new ability to his skills panel.

{ «Skill Acquisition»

«EP: 55765»

«Owned Skills: ‹Low Cosmic Physique Creation› ‹True 6th Sense› ‹Advanced Lightning Manipulation› ‹Basic Blood Manipulation› ‹Low Cosmic Manipulation (Incomplete)› ‹High Magic Affinity› ‹Host of the Scarlet Witch› ‹High Chaos Affinity› ‹Biological Manipulation› ‹Inventory› ‹Advanced Camouflage› ‹Host Enhancement› ‹Devour› ‹Copy›»

}

‹Low Cosmic Manipulation (Incomplete)›:: Allows sensing the vast and boundless force of the foundational energy that sustains the entire universe. The user can both sense and store Cosmic energy while crudely manipulating it in its raw form— Currently, the energy can only be used to coat parts of the body to provide temporary enhancements. The duration depends on the amount of Cosmic Energy utilized.

Alex had essentially gotten a slightly weaker version of the same ability as the Inhuman, but he didn't want to call it something like cosmic coating or whatever, so he just put the ability up there with the other manipulation abilities like Blood and Lightning.

'How much will I need to get the complete manipulation ability?' Alex thought as he tried to use some of his evergreen EP to enhance his ability a bit so that he could gauge how much EP he would need to get the full ability.

'…Okay…?' Alex was confused when the EP just seemed to be redirected to other parts of his enhancement instead of enhancing his new ability.

'Fuck…' After examining the ability and understanding it a bit more, he realized that it wasn't going to be as easy to deal with Cosmic abilities as it is to deal with other abilities.

It took him a few hours to quantify and analyze everything before he streamlined his skills panel.

‹Low Cosmic Manipulation›:: Cost: 1,000,000,000 Cosmic Energy Points (CP).

Just seeing that number made Alex feel worse and worse about his analysis. He ran many calculations and tried going through many aspects to reduce that cost but that quantity was always consistent.

Initially, he didn't scale things very well and came to a cost of a couple hundred thousand for the full ability, but after realizing the absurd quantity that a single unit in that measurement scale would have, he felt like shit.

Ultimately, he divided each unit into such amounts that the final cost would come to be a billion for the ability. As for the Intermediate and Advanced manipulation abilities, he didn't want to traumatize himself with those numbers just yet.

'No wonder Celestials need to incubate inside a planet that's teeming with life for literally billions of years before they are born.' Alex thought, 'They have to accumulate a nigh-infinite authority over the cosmic forces and the only way to do that is through the use of an absurd amount of Cosmic Energy.'

For the context of how absurd that billion CP really was, we can just compare it to Alex's current CP value.

«CP: 0.0347»

He had gotten less than half of a tenth of a unit after devouring that Inhuman. Although most of the energy had been wasted, Alex had still harvested 10% of the Inhumans' reserves during the entire devouring process. This meant that the Inhuman didn't even have a single point of EP at his/her peak strength. Alex didn't know the rate of regeneration for their energy, but if the quantity was anything to go by, the regeneration wasn't going to be anything special either.

'Fucking bullshit… How am I even supposed to gather cosmic energy? Devour a planet like Galactus?' Alex thought as frustration crept into him, 'I mean I could… but still, it would be such a pain to assimilate all of that mass…' Unlike Galactus, Alex wasn't used to devouring planets on a whim, devouring all life would be another thing, but the entire planet would be much more difficult.

To distract himself, he changed around his skills panel to keep himself busy.

{ «Skill Acquisition»

«EP: 55765»

«CP: 0.0347»

«Manipulation Abilities»:: ‹Advanced Lightning Manipulation› ‹Basic Blood Manipulation›

«Innate Abilities»:: ‹Biological Manipulation› ‹Host Enhancement› ‹Devour› ‹Copy›

«Derived Abilities»:: ‹Low Cosmic Physique Creation› ‹True 6th Sense› ‹Inventory› ‹Advanced Camouflage› ‹Elemental Immunity›

«Magical Abilities»:: ‹High Magic Affinity› ‹High Chaos Affinity› ‹Host of the Scarlet Witch›

«Cosmic Abilities»:: ‹Low Cosmic Manipulation (Incomplete)›

}

He shuffled around all his most prominent abilities and put them in their own brackets.

'This was a waste of time…' Alex thought. He was completely aware that there was literally zero point to this. He didn't even have enough abilities that needed to be quantified like this, 'Whatever, it at least distracted me sufficiently. Now I just have to find a way to generate Cosmic Energy naturally…' He thought, 'The method that the Celestials use might work, but how exactly do they gather the Cosmic Energy of a planet during the incubation process?' Alex would have to do some research, but he felt as if he'd just touched on a sliver an amazing method to generate Cosmic Energy consistently.

'I'll first need to research Cosmic Energy and how exactly it is generated within a planet that sustains life…' He found his next major project for Research Earth.

…

While taking care of Wanda and appeasing her, Alex had a body supervising the workers who were building the new sanctum. Both he and Wanda had worked on the design and the potential functions that the new sanctum would serve. Unlike a normal sanctum, this one was going to be much grander and would have far greater functions than the usual sanctum.

'I'll need a good name for it at some point… But first, I need to design some changes…' Alex thought to himself as he decided to incorporate Cosmic Energy into the structure, 'It's possible to use it as a focus to gather the planet's naturally generated Cosmic Energy…' Alex thought as he started revising the blueprints to allow him to make the necessary modifications later.

'I'll need Wanda's help for this. Especially with a Celestial being nurtured in the center of this planet. We need some way to bypass that too… I'm pretty sure that all of these Earths have a celestial other than a scant few like Farm and Research Earth…' It wouldn't be a straightforward thing as gathering the Cosmic energy that was produced within the planet. They would have to contend for it against the Celestial, 'That could trigger a premature birth too…' Alex felt like he would have a headache.

'Let's slow down and start small…' Alex thought, 'I first need to research the tomes about Cosmic Energy that are at Kamar Taj. They might already have some information about dealing with it sufficiently and I won't have to work too hard. I'll have to wait until Wanda wakes up for that…'

With the first plan of action in motion, Alex decided to delay the construction of the sanctum. The incorporation of Cosmic Energy into the mix might require him and Wanda to completely overhaul their initial design.

Talking to the builder in charge, Alex told them to halt the work for now since there might be some significant changes to the designs. Instead, he got the mining of the Vibranium meteor to be boosted by a large margin.

The sheer scale of the new sanctum needed a huge amount of materials. Considering that Alex wanted to use Vibranium to make the whole structure, a huge amount of it was needed. The stock that Wakanda had mined was wholly insufficient for that.

As he made plans for the new sanctum and used it as the focus to pull energy from the MCU Earth, he decided to focus on researching the ability on Research Earth too.

But that needed him to get his head scientist back in top shape. And he was nowhere near fixing her new personality disorder.

***

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