## Tao's Entry
One step forward, and the familiar hum of the portal died at my back. Just another day of being Tao. Step through the dimensional walls, find a nice, quiet, earthly timeline - somewhere with solid ground and predictable physics -and get my bearings. Simple
But the plan crumbled almost immediately.
My feet sank into sand, gritty and sun-warmed. Coney Island. New York. The skyline loomed like an old friend I hadn't seen in lifetimes, jagged spires piercing a sky too blue, too alive.
For a stupid second, nostalgia hit like a rogue wave ~ Earth? ~ nearly buckling my knees. I'd walked countless realms, climbed from mortal dust to the precipice of True Divinity, but this... this tugged at the frayed edges of the man I'd been before the cultivation paths claimed me.
Then the wrongness set in.
At first, it was subtle, a flicker at the corner of my vision. The beachgoers laughed, waves crashed, vendors hawked hot dogs. Normal. Earthly. But as my senses fully engaged ~ eyes sharpening with soul-tempered clarity, divine perception unfurling like a lotus in bloom ~ the lie shattered.
My vision clung to the illusion: sunbathers, roller coasters, the distant roar of traffic. But my divine sense? It screamed a different truth. No solid ground. No stable weave of qi or law. Instead, a searing ocean of energies ~ seventeen, no, twenty-three distinct fields ~ swirled in chaotic harmony, threads of potential dancing in rhythms that should have unraveled existence itself. It was too bright, too alive, like staring into the heart of a newborn Dao without the buffer of realms to contain it.
I took a blind step forward, desperate for something real to anchor me.
Big mistake.
The world flickered. My eyes adjusted to a new "when": a figure suspended in the air, darkness bleeding from their form like ink in water, devouring a gleaming Watchtower whole. Heroes scattered like ants before a storm. Then it snapped back: sand, sky, screams of delight from a child on the Ferris wheel.
Focus, Tao. I have my own things to worry about.
I'd faced apocalypses in the Apotheosis source world, bent time itself to my will. This was just... unstable. I knelt, letting sand slip through my fingers. Each grain shimmered, transforming mid-fall ~quartz to ether, particle to waveform ~rippling outward in echoes that warped the air. The city skyline blurred, dissolving into scattered villages and wigwams dotting a primal landscape. No permanence. Every action, no matter how small, tugged at the threads, and they slipped free like water through clenched fists.
Anchoring to a single timeline? Impossible here. My divine sense stretched outward, probing for purchase, but the fabric slithered away, greased by its own defiance. Worse, the act of reaching loosened my own foothold ~the null state I'd woven around myself, a bubble of shielded intent, began to fray. Space warped in response: one breath, Coney Island's salt-tanged breeze; the next, cold vacuum, Earth shrinking to a marble below, stars mocking my drift.
"...Well, this is new."
He found himself in space. Still the place is just as bright in divine sense.
Direct exploration of the land he'd imagined proved impractical. His divine sense returned only fragments of a picture too vast and unstable ~ unreliable information about the reality surrounding him.
There was much to unravel before he could actually experience this new world.
## Leaving as soon
A portal swirled to life behind him, a thought-made exit. He has dimmed his presence to almost nothing already, sealed most of power away to be a polite guest, and still… the universe is giving the cold shoulder. The rejection was palpable.
"I wasn't just a visitor; I was an allergen."
The brief transport dumped me out into… nothing.
Complete void.
But it wasn't empty. Not really. His first impression wasn't isolation - it was absence. The lower law layers He is used to, the foundational bedrock of reality? Gone. In their place, a few higher layers hummed with an energy that felt strikingly familiar… like Divine Daos.
The sensation felt like lingering dreams of creation itself, layered with cosmic energies that tugged at his divine sense. Excitement ran through him ~ part awe, part thirst for knowledge ~ as new understanding of the rules began making some sense.
The rigid frameworks he'd mastered in previous realms crumbled before this infinite complexity of sentient constructs.
Yes. They were alive. Shifting and changing as he observed them within his shielded null space, responding to his very act of perception. Nothing like the rigid cultivation worlds he'd known. The feeling was extraordinary.
This marked his first entry into a non-cultivation multiverse reality within the omniverse.
This was:
**Marvel Multiverse**
Earth had been a shaky entry point. Better, he decided, to first map the structure of this universe. Heroes and villains could wait.
## The True Void
This time, Tao had deliberately aimed for the most remote corner he could visualize ~ A cosmic back alley where he could adjust to the chaos without causing a scene.
His divine sense expanded in all directions with his presence dimmed to almost nothing. A thousand miles first, then ten thousand miles but stopped there. It's as if there is a highly viscous medium around preventing any further exploration.
Moreover it seems to falter the farther it goes. The moment his ability left his his sphere of perfect comfort its exploration power began to deteriorate even in null state.
"It seems even the observational ability of my soul is incompatible here," he mused. "What would happen if I didn't mask my presence? Would the whole place just… reject me entirely?"
The range was pitiful. A fraction of what he could manage in the TDG world.
He moved around for what it felt like days? Or weeks? Honestly he doesn't seem to know. And yet... nothing. Timeless void, devoid of change, existing as background for all reality's layers.
The immensity was its own humbling lesson. Perhaps plunging headfirst into some timeline wasn't wise, as he'd learned on his own ~ not even when he stood as little more than an average Joe beside reality's true controllers - without his abilities fully unleashed.
Yet with strength still far beyond ordinary beings, would he be just able to mingle among them for simple affairs?
Something would have to change.
## Recollection
In the endless nothingness, he closed his eyes for a moment. His mind pulled up fragments of half-remembered lore from his past life.
" The First Firmament - that was the name of the original cosmos, wasn't it? Willed into being by the One Above All.
Lonely, so it birthed companions: Aspirants, Celestials. But companionship had soured into war, and the First Firmament had shattered. Out of that ruin, bloomed the multiverse and the Second Firmament. "
The memories kept coming, a chain reaction. The Celestials survived, and their survival carried consequences. They paved the way for beings like the Beyonders. They brought the idea of death itself into the weave of existence.
Another cycle. The Third Cosmos. Conflict deepened, narrative took root: existence against non-existence. Lifebringer One against the Anti-All. Victory on one side, but the struggle left its imprint on creation.
Layer after layer, cycle after cycle. The Fourth Cosmos gave rise to archetypes, characters meant to embody universal roles. The Fifth introduced magic. The Sixth introduced science, weaving a skeleton for reality. The Seventh built something more refined - an engine for narratives themselves.
But even perfection drew hunters. The Beyonders destroyed it, fearing Enigma… Essex, yes, Nathaniel Essex, who had clawed his way into becoming a Dominion-level being.
Anyway after that came the Eighth. Not a natural evolution, not growth, but a recovery. Less than one percent of the old multiverse endured, yet from those ashes, a new cosmos stabilized. A healing phase, fragile, patched together from survivors.
" I hadn't read every story, of course. This was just the lore I could scrape together. "
•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•°•
Tao's eyes opened again with new realizations. He let the chain of memories go silent. Whatever the truth behind them, this was the canvas he now walked. Seventh cycle or eighth, comic lore or cinematic one ˜ he could enter them all, if he chose.
( PoV shifts)
I fed the leftover fragments to the Library of Heavenly Paths, and it churned out another round of inferences.
I'm in the 7th.
Here, in Marvel's order of things, reality isn't carved in stone. It's… pliable. Shaped by thought. Bent by perception. The line between what happened and what was perceived to have happened is a blur. And the whole cosmology runs on that very definition.
Places I'd once read as fantasy were now real landmarks: Under-Space, the Quantum Realm, the Astral Planes, the Negative Zone, the House of Ideas, the Far Shore… The scale of it dwarfed anything I'd known. The TDG worlds, the Apotheosis source world - they seemed… narrow by comparison. Tidy. Marvel's reality didn't just sit above them in a hierarchy; it enveloped them in its sheer, defiant indefiniteness.
The description of the One Above All and the place beyond reality… it reminded me of 'Cong' in Perfect World. But below that level, imagine trying to fit every single globe world or reality plane into a single, sprawling reality where everything else resides. That's the Marvel multiverse.
Street-level fighters like Captain America exist side-by-side with the exiled First Firmament itself. It's insane.
***
The planes I'd walked before - those neatly tiered cultivation worlds where beings slowly, laboriously climbed the ladder from mortal to god in their own safe spaces - were a infintely away from this. Here, survival for the weak is… optional. Some creatures are born with power that eclipses True Gods. And the abstracts… Infinity, Eternity, Death, Oblivion. They aren't titles. They're beings. Sentient laws. Walking, talking embodiments of creation itself.
At first, it seemed unfair.
But the more I pieced it together with the origin I'd remembered, the more it made a twisted kind of sense. If the first spark of existence was a being suddenly born with omnipotence and a restless curiosity… then of course everything that followed would be this abrupt. This… narrative.
Power granted at birth. Reality bending as naturally as breathing. Archetypes stamped onto existence like cookie cutters, ensuring every cycle had its heroes, its villains, its gods and tricksters.
It hit me then. The creator of this reality wasn't obsessed with cultivation, or balance, or orderly progression.
The creator liked stories.
And so, stories became the skeleton of everything. The foundation of the entire, chaotic, magnificent, and terrifying Marvel multiverse.