Prologue 3 - Research and Experimentation

Looking at the dead bodies of the mother and child pair, Zeel felt as if he had done something wrong but was unaware of exactly what it was.

Zeel proceeded with his extermination plan anyway, meeting more children and shooting without the same hesitation as before – with practice eased and perfection like the 15-year-old assassin he was trained to be.

"Seems I experienced a muscle cramp before," Zeel muttered to himself, not believing for a second that he actually hesitated to shoot the previous mother and child pair.

After a couple of rounds in the Mansion ensuring there was no one left, Zeel relaxed slightly.

He knew that it would take several more hours for any back up to come, The Mansion was obviously a black site of sorts for The Asheborn Family. The Asheborn's were known for their technology-canceling abilities.

They were somewhat anti-Homo-Superiors in a sense. Thankfully, Zeel had learned how to kill efficiently without the use of technology. It was almost as if The Asheborns had trained Zeel to kill them.

Walking around, Zeel managed to find the vault of the mansion. Everything was so antiquated and distasteful. Zeel was surprised to find anyone stupid enough to keep their valuables in a steel safe.

Ironically, it took Zeel thirty minutes to figure out how such a basic tool worked. It was just too basic that he overthought the patterns.

'Looks like the Asheborns knew what they were doing after all,' Zeel thought.

It took him another thirty minutes to destroy the footage. The recording system used some primitive form of magnets and storage drives.

Zeel's stoic face twitched constantly as he disabled the system in the vault. Zeel would have eaten the components had his nanites not been dispelled from his body.

Entering the vault, Zeel found a huge chunk of the God Syphon meteorite. It gave off a strange red glow that matched his ruby-red eyes. The stone was extremely heavy, but also very malleable. Zeel decided to study the rock in detail after his return home.

Zeel escaped into the nearby forest. The moment he entered the forest, Zeel connected to every information network in The Universe. Everything was at the tips of his fingers, everything flooded his mind all at once.

He was finally back to feeling like a Homo-Superior after so many years. A portal appeared in front of Zeel and he stepped through. The forest would block long-distance travel, but the best place to hide someone was the first place everyone else would look.

Zeel could surmise that he was not that far from The Crawford Estates.

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"Today on news! Zeel the 'Perfect Homo-Superior', who alongside his mother Clara Crawford was kidnapped five years ago, has now returned home!"

"It has been reported that one month ago, he was seen exiting the Mystery Forests of Candoro on an Unknown Planet in the Andromeda Galaxy.

Our sources are told that his mother was killed five years ago upon his kidnapping. Zeel's body is riddled with scars. I fear to imagine what it was that the Nation's prodigy experienced at the hands of his captors,"

Zeel was the only topic that aired on the news for days. Zeel was the scion of The Crawford Household, and the pinnacle of Homo-Superiors everywhere.

On a floating Island in New Genesis Sector

After exiting the shower, Zeel proceeded to shut off the projection. A couple of minutes later, the alarm of his island was opened as Zeel's father and sister breached the perimeter. Both people were instantly teleported to Zeel's location at the center of the island.

Zeel was temporarily kept from contacting his family over the last month after his subsequent 'rescue' due to check-ups for lasting psychological and physical damage.

It was soon deemed safe to see his family for a couple of hours each day. The doctors were still searching for possible brain tampering effects. Homo-Superiors could replace a person's brain with little trouble, so many people suspected that Zeel had undergone such a procedure.

Sitting opposite his father, Catherine rushed from her father and hopped onto Zeel's lap happily.

"Did she suffer?" Zeel's father, Tom, asked after about five minutes of silence.

"No. I killed her before they could torture or rape her," Zeel replied with a partial truth. His mother did suffer and was still suffering.

"Okay. Thank you for returning!" Tom replied before getting up and leaving along with a teary-eyed Catherine – Zeel's younger sister.

By now Catherine was 9 years old as she was born in the year 4061.

4070 was known as the year of Zeel's return which was a great propaganda opportunity to once again unite the Homo-Superior Race. Zeel could tell that unity was not the Homo-Superior's problem at this time.

There were probably several underlying issues that the council hid from the public.

After Zeel's return, for the next year and a half, he was paraded around for the Crawford industries to lure in potential Galactic investors. Apparently, Tom had spent the majority of the wealth suppressing the now deceased Asheborn Household.

Zeel reluctantly completed the task. Tom promised Zeel that he would get beyond sufficient funds for his upcoming independent research projects.

The next two years, Zeel spent the time finishing mandatory school, World-Defence training, and through those processes, he made a lot of connections that he judged would be useful in the future.

During the two years, Zeel grew notorious for his playboy attitude as he dated one girl after another; though most of the girls were Princesses of their respective kingdoms, hence why he became notorious.

The Homo-Superior Race entered several conflicts with the Races due to Zeel's notorious track-record with royal females of different species.

Zeel, with the INT purged from his system, had begun to experience minor emotional responses – mostly revenge.

In order to trigger other emotional responses, he sought out other stimuli, such as relationships with princesses as he read in antiquated books like 'Shrek' and 'Snow White'.

The next three years were spent attempting to reconnect with his estranged father and sister. Tom had grown distant from Zeel which was understandable as Zeel had murdered his mother, who was also Tom's wife.

Tom, however, could be seen trying really hard to move on from the incident and one day when he and Zeel were alone, Zeel showed him something that changed Tom's attitude drastically towards himself.

Most of the five years were spent studying the rock fragment he got from Asheborn's mansion and pursuing a World's Recognition Degree from Harvard University (the level above a Ph.D.).

During this time, he also founded a secret research facility with the help of his father, specializing in the study of wormholes or cosmic holes to be specific.

Zeel discovered that wormholes of space and time could be classified further. This research was never shared with anyone, nor was any documentation of its existence allowed anywhere outside the lab.

The cosmic wormholes were so rare that Zeel suspected that no one could ever find them, even Zeel only managed to find one by a series of coincidences along with the tilt of the Earth being just perfect for a single instant.

During this time, Zeel had also made constant breakthroughs with the rock fragment (God Syphon) retrieved from the Asheborn's Mansion; however, after a year of prolonged exposure, Zeel realized that he had gained somewhat of a sixth sense.

He could imagine his intuition as an extension of his body itself. Zeel's intuition evolved to such a scary degree to the point he could guess the Mega Intergalactic Lottery numbers for the next day by just counting from 1 to 99 repeatedly until he figured out all the numbers.

Still, Zeel kept his ability hidden since 'abilities' outside of Technology-manipulation was banned within the Homo-Superior Race. This was done for good reason as well, there was nothing a Homo-Superior could do with abilities that they could not do with technology.

After some research, Zeel realized that God's Syphon could alter genetic structures at microscopic levels. He proceeded to give trace amounts to his father and younger sister without their knowledge and also laced the pipes that led to an underground facility below his island.

Overtime, Zeel noticed his sister's aging slowing down to a crawl as she looked 14 but was truly 18, leading him to discover her near-immortal healing factor.

tom began generating a barely noticeable electromagnetic field around his body that seemed to fluctuate along with his emotions.

Zeel spent some time creating a dampener in the form of a watch. He gifted both family members the gifts, but Catherine could tell that the watch was much more useful than Zeel originally claimed.

Zeel was not willing to take any risks with Catherine. He could care less about Tom though. Homo-Superiors had recently come to realize that INT was not the pinnacle of what they could achieve.

People had come to realize that Immortal Nanite Technology was having more and more side effects but it was already too late to address the matter. Being immortal was excellent but becoming immortal without working for it yourself would lead to a problematic outcome even if you had a universe of empty space at your beck and call.

One day, Zeel had been feeling extremely dreadful towards nothing in particular.

His intuition was blaring from morning until night, the only moment of peace he could preserve was when he worked with locating a cosmic wormhole.

Zeel's actions became erratic – working on one project and immediately dropping it and working with another project, something Zeel would never do if he could help it.

Zeel's father and sister had become extremely agitated at his behavior, which led him to calm down quite a bit on the surface, though Zeel would always express worry on his usually stoic face whenever the duo were not observing him.