Chapter: 186
The Reality Stone, arguably the most powerful among the six Infinity Stones, can transform a person's thoughts into reality without exaggeration. It renders any physical laws meaningless in its presence.
It can be said that the Reality Stone is an all-powerful wish-granting machine. Even if the wish-maker desires to overturn the basic laws of the universe, the Reality Stone can make it happen.
However, in order to harness the terrifying power of the Reality Stone and turn it into a true all-powerful wish-granting machine, the remaining five Infinity Stones must be collected. By allowing them to interact and form a complete energy circuit, they provide the immense energy needed to rewrite reality. This imposes significant limitations on the functionality of the Reality Stone.
Not to mention how difficult it is to collect all six Infinity Stones in the vast universe, which may be no less challenging than the effort required to fulfill one's wishes in the first place.
Even if someone does manage to gather all the Infinity Stones, the immense energy generated by the six-stone energy circuit during the wish-making process is enough to cause the majority of wish-makers to physically collapse and die before they could see their wishes are fulfilled.
Therefore, after obtaining the Reality Stone, the Dark Elves did not limit themselves to its inherent applications. Instead, they used the Reality Stone as the core to create a terrifying artifact that instilled fear across the Nine Realms—the Aether.
The Aether strips the Reality Stone of almost all its abilities and possesses only one power: the ability to transform any object into dark matter.
The principle behind this is to pre-configure the wish to be made to the Reality Stone—transforming the object into dark matter—and continuously extract the infinite energy from the Reality Stone, storing it as the required energy to fulfill the wish. This creates a closed-loop circuit that is self-sustaining and perpetual.
One must commend the Dark Elves for coming up with such a usage for the Infinity Stones. They have found an effective way to utilize the stones, and their ingenious design still appears flawless to someone like Mark, who comes from a thousand years in the future.
Such a design has led to another functionality of the Aether particles—the creation of cursed warriors.
This is a capability that only affects the Dark Elves. As a race born from the endless darkness, the bodies of Dark Elves are different from those of races born from the light; they are composed of dark matter.
When the cursed stones, created using fragments of the Aether, enter the bodies of Dark Elves, they continuously absorb the life energy within them and convert it into dark matter, further strengthening their bodies and turning them into cursed warriors.
The reason it is called a curse is that while becoming powerful, they also constantly experience the loss of their life energy, hastening their journey toward death.
If one refuses the cursed stone, they will die in battle due to their own weakness. Once they accept the cursed stone, they can only fight until they meet their end. It is a tragic curse that cannot be broken. As the only race born from darkness, their tragic fate seems to have been destined from the very beginning.
The deeper Mark delves into the study of the Reality Stone, the more obsessed he becomes with it. He has already come into contact with three of the Infinity Stones: the Space Stone, the Mind Stone, and the Reality Stone he is currently researching.
Each stone shares a common characteristic—the seemingly infinite energy contained within them. This is something that Mark finds difficult to comprehend.
In Mark's logical thinking, everything must have its source, and these energies clearly cannot arise out of nowhere. If the interior of the stones is an advanced energy generator more advanced than the Arc Reactor, then after experiencing such a long period from before the birth of the universe to the present, their energy should not have remained without any decay.
Therefore, Mark put forward two bold speculations regarding the source of this energy.
First, the Reality Stone rewrote the corresponding rules, allowing the Infinity Stones to possess infinite energy within this universe.
According to the known law of energy conservation in Earth's research, if correct, the Infinity Stones should be able to continuously extract energy from the universe during the activation process and release it when fulfilling their respective functions, thus maintaining the ability of energy conservation in the universe.
The modified universal rule by the Reality Stone is that the Infinity Stones, when exerting their powers, do not cause an increase in entropy.
The second conjecture Mark made completely transcended the limitations of his own universe and even the dimensions. According to Odin's description of the Infinity Stones, they existed before the formation of this universe.
That means the Infinity Stones themselves are not items from the universe where Mark resides; more precisely, they are not items from the dimension in which Mark exists.
Because only existences in higher dimensions can freely alter the operational laws of lower-dimensional worlds, and the six Infinity Stones, in terms of the rules of space, time, mind, soul, reality, and power, obviously possess such abilities.
In other words, the energy of the Infinity Stones originates from a higher-dimensional space, perhaps the fourth dimension, the fifth dimension, or even higher. Mark cannot determine this.
However, if this conjecture is indeed true, Mark's research on the Infinity Stones could very well help him find a way to communicate with other dimensions and fulfill his envisioned spatial portals.
Mark currently laments that he is in Asgard, which prevents him from connecting to the servers on Earth. Otherwise, he would definitely be able to use informational vision to obtain more information from the Aether and acquire more knowledge.
Restricted by the current conditions, Mark can only rely on the holographic scanning device he carries and the Soul Forge provided by Asgard, namely the quantum field generator, to study the Aether. Compared to informational vision, this approach undoubtedly reduces efficiency, the intuitiveness of data, and its credibility by several notches.
Since informational vision is definitely not an option, as it would inevitably cause him to lose consciousness and waste more time, it is better to completely shut down his vision to enhance the brain's computational power for processing and memorizing information.
"Baymax——"
"At your service, Master."
"Help me intercept all information transmitted from the visual nerves to the visual center, and let the nanobots take over visual assistance and deliver image information."
Mark's intention is to block all the various and complicated information conveyed by informational vision and let the visual assistance module replace the eye function before Heaven's Eye modification. This will maximize the brain's available computing power.
"Understood, Master."
A few seconds after Baymax's response, Mark's vision suddenly turned black, and then, after a few more seconds, it regained brightness.
The visual augmentation module, after undergoing system calibration, is no different from that of a normal person. However, after completely cutting off the burden caused by informational vision, Mark can clearly feel the relief and ease in his brain after being liberated.
In that case, it is now time to fully devote himself to solving the problem with all his might—!
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