Chapter 40: New Element

"Hey, Hulk, I want to be friends with you."

After a brief but intense exchange, Zod used his psychic abilities to calm the Hulk, making sure not to overwhelm the Hulk's limitless potential. Hulk, initially confused, was soon astonished by Zod's control. His anger subsided, and with it, his boundless strength began to stabilize.

With Hulk at peace, he reverted back to Bruce Banner and fell into a deep sleep.

Zod wasted no time and brought Bruce Banner back to the Blade Tech Industries base. Dr. Connors took charge and immediately began to draw blood from Bruce.

"Be careful, his body is saturated with gamma radiation," Zod warned.

Though Dr. Connors had undergone his own transformation, he was not immune to prolonged exposure to gamma rays. Connors nodded, donning protective gear before beginning his analysis. If Zod could develop a serum from the Hulk's blood, he would be able to create a battalion of Hulks—an unstoppable force that could dominate the universe. Even the three great empires and the Black Order would fall before them.

As Zod contemplated this, time seemed to freeze. Dr. Connors stood motionless, and a figure in a vibrant orange cloak materialized before Zod.

"Stop this now. You're tampering with the future," the Ancient One warned.

In all his previous endeavors—war machines, secondary Kryptonian metal, the fire reactors, even the lycanthropic soldiers—the Ancient One had not interfered. But studying the Hulk was different. The fabric of time itself had begun to unravel, leaving even the Ancient One unable to foresee what would happen next.

"Who are you?" Zod asked, feigning ignorance, although he recognized her instantly.

"I am the Ancient One," she replied. "Mr. Zod, I must insist you cease your research on the Hulk."

Her shining bald head and calm demeanor were unmistakable. Zod, knowing that he was no match for her at this point, nodded in agreement. There was no point in provoking a confrontation with someone so far beyond him.

"No problem," Zod said, backing down for now.

The Ancient One gave a slight nod, unsurprised by Zod's pragmatic nature. Without further words, she vanished, and time resumed its normal flow.

Dr. Connors blinked, confused. The blood sample and Bruce Banner had both disappeared. "What... happened, boss?" he asked.

Zod's face darkened in frustration. "It's nothing. Focus on the animalized soldiers."

Without another word, Zod disappeared from the lab.

He did not pursue learning magic from the Ancient One. The magic in this world always required a steep price, often taking a toll on the soul. Even the "white magic" taught by the Vishanti came with a cost, no matter how small. Zod's own Kryptonian nature would not save him from these consequences.

Since the Ancient One had stopped his Hulk experiment, Zod turned his attention to another target: the Red Hulk. General Ross had undergone gamma radiation exposure, and Zod was determined to exploit this for his research. The Red Hulk was just as formidable, and this avenue had yet to be blocked.

However, that was for later. Right now, Zod had another mission in mind. He stealthily infiltrated Tony Stark's home. With the help of the Black Queen, Jarvis' sensors were blinded, allowing Zod to scan Stark's model of the Stark Industries campus. Using this, Zod acquired the particle structure of a new element.

"Incredible," Zod muttered as he returned to his lab.

The periodic table of Krypton was vastly different from Earth's. While there were similarities, this new element was something Zod had never seen before. It was hard to imagine how Howard Stark had even discovered it.

Once he had the particle structure, synthesizing the new element became far easier. Using alpha-ray bombardment of natural radioactive elements with the help of accelerators, he began to recreate it.

This element, Zod surmised, was likely an isotope of the energy contained within the Tesseract, the Cosmic Cube. Howard Stark must have reverse-engineered it from the Cube's molecular structure; otherwise, such an advanced discovery would have been impossible given Earth's limited scientific knowledge at the time.

However, the process of creating this element was anything but scientific. It's widely understood that breaking particles apart can lead to the recombination of fragments into a new nucleus. When that nucleus is stable, a new element is born. But in reality, most new elements decay in mere billionths of a second, making them nearly impossible to stabilize—certainly not in the way Stark had in his arc reactor.

There were glaring scientific flaws in Stark's original method. First, there was no way Stark could stand near an accelerator without being exposed to lethal radiation. Second, the beams he used to create the new element shouldn't have been able to concentrate in only one direction.

Imagine two cars colliding—do all the fragments fly in just one direction? No, the debris scatters everywhere. This same principle applies to particle collisions. When Stark collided the two streams of particles, and they all moved forward in one direction, it broke the law of conservation of momentum. For 400 years, humans have adhered to this law.

If Stark had used some advanced magnetism to focus the particles, it might have been more plausible. But even then, Zod couldn't see it happening with a simple wrench.

From a scientific standpoint, synthesizing a new element with Stark's limited technology and energy was impossible. Creating new elements requires several particle accelerators and industrial-grade electricity. Furthermore, Stark's new element would have to be near the end of the periodic table, which means it should have decayed rapidly, emitting deadly gamma radiation in the process.

Yet, Stark somehow survived all of this with nothing more than a pair of goggles. Logically, he should have been killed by the exposure to radiation alone.

Of course, Zod thought, Stark's arc reactor could simply be storing immense energy in the form of some advanced isotope or stable ionic state. This substance, held in a highly energized state, might be what Stark was using as a battery. But even with all of this considered, the exact nature of the element remained a mystery.