[ Tao : The Honest Fellows ]
We had seen enough of humans. Somewhere south of Khartoum, we left the noise behind, discarded our shoes, and shed the pretense of being mere tourists.
What welcomed us was the baked dry and smelling of crushed acacia leaves and sun-scorched earth. Out in the thorn scrub, we finally let our presence breathe.
A pride of lions found us at twilight. Their old king lunged at me. It was the correct instinct, though the outcome was predetermined. A simple flick of my wrist sent him tumbling into the red dust. I crouched to his level and let a fraction of my true nature slip free. Not a threat, just a fact. The growl died in his chest. When I scratched his massive chin, the four hundred pound beast leaned into my hand.
Yuyin laughed. Her unguarded joy leaked into the air, and the entire pride melted into her warm aura. We slept among them for three days. When we finally departed, three sleek females and one curious male simply followed us. We were amused comparing with ourselves. The island needed a savannah anyway.
[ Ziyun : The Heavy Steps ]
In Tsavo, a ten ton bull elephant in musth charged us like a localized weather event. The ground shuddered with the rhythmic impact of his footfalls, throwing up thick clouds of red laterite dust.
Yuyin stopped him with a single palm between the eyes, freezing the beast through sheer evolutionary terror. According to her, he was a good boy with abandonment issues.
Then Ning began to hum in a sect cultivation technique after knowing the concept of musth for some reason. But it was an old glacial melody from the Ancestral Mountains. Driven by her sudden inspiration, the song rippled outward and affected everything around.
We all turned to look, pausing in awe as her intent actively shifted reality, mirroring the effects of my own mutant power. Even Tao wore a rare look of surprise.
Recognizing the opening she created, I reached out with my power. With a mere thought, I traced frost patterns along the elephant's swollen temporal glands, cooling the fierce ache that musth puts into bone. His trembling slowed even though he already suddenly stopped. His eyes changed.
Later, once the adrenaline faded, Ning tried to recapture that profound musical inspiration but couldn't, much to her disappointment. Still, the fleeting moment stood as a powerful reminder: the true potential of reality is often just one spark of inspiration away from mastery.
The Congo basin swallowed us next. The sparse, sun-bleached plains gave way to an emerald twilight of towering mahoganies, where the air hung heavy with the suffocating moisture of rotting orchids and damp loam.
A clumsy baby gorilla fell directly from the canopy into Yuyin's lap. The silverback father came crashing down, but Tao spoke a single word of primate resonance. The forest listened. The silverback looked at us, recognized our absolute moral confidence, and turned his back in ultimate trust. We named the snoring infant Mvula.
[ Xiao Ning : The Honest Wild ]
We played our way across the continent. We healed a snared leopard and comforted a grieving rhino, prevented Tao from skinning a snake that tried to attack me. Trio joined our growing procession. Cheetahs raced Ziyun across the salt pans. A pangolin curled into my arms with absolute certainty.
Tao even shifted into a lion for a few days. Yes, you heard it right. He sure has a lot of weird ideas lately.
In his own words, " the weight, the uncomplicated honesty of having fangs and knowing exactly what they were for. No cultivation ranks. No sect obligations. No destiny. Just breath and territory and the clean arithmetic of survival."
Out here, cruelty was only ever survival, and affection came without calculation. After a world terrorized by demonic beasts, these creatures felt almost absurdly simple ~ honest in a way nothing back home had been. In our world, human spiritualists lived in fear of demon beasts and habitat shrinked to such a small city like Glory. Those elsewhere didn't even had food to eat let alone survive.
Here it is almost reverse, the beasts are hunted for entertainment and food. Weird world.
When we finally turned north, Tao opened a spatial world heavy with life. We hadn't meant to become collectors. We just kept saying yes. Dozens of creatures now rest in pristine grassland under a sky forged by his mind.
***
[ Tao : The Atomic Crucible ]
We'd been letting the wildness of the African continent wash over us, unhurried. Outside that bubble, it was late April 1986 in the Soviet Union. Around midnight, while Yuyin poured our spiritual tea, the planet's atmosphere gave a violent hiccup some four thousand miles away.
The night sky above our camp was an uninterrupted canvas of brilliant, cold stars. Yet the disruption carried a distinct, metallic taste that coated the back of the throat. It was an unnatural static that made the fine hairs on my arms stand on end, a sharp contrast to the earthy scent of our brewing tea.
I didn't feel it physically. My Divine Sense did ~ a jagged spike of unguided energy, raw and ungoverned. Not magic. Not some cosmic entity stirring awake. Just an unhinged atomic chain reaction tearing through its own containment: a crude fission meltdown humans would come to call Chernobyl.
I lowered my teacup and let extended perception unspool the history of it. To mortals, it was an invisible cloud ~ geopolitical catastrophe wearing the shape of toxic death.
Through cosmic awareness, though, the radiation read differently. It wasn't chaos. It was a blunt, aggressive command line executing a localized evolutionary leap.
"What broke?" Yuyin asked quietly, catching the shift in my attention.
"An energy toy," I said. "Spilling invisible poison. Play with fire long enough, you're ought to remember it burns. Watch what it does."
They saw it unfold too. The fallout wasn't only killing fragile cells ~ it was hunting dormant X-Genes. Wherever human biology had no spiritual coolant to call on, the genome ignited violently instead, fighting to survive. In the people nearby, and in generations not yet born, it would keep igniting. A sudden, massive cluster of mutant infants was being seeded across Eastern Europe.
Sebastian Shaw's theory, it turned out, hadn't been paranoia. The nuclear age really was the crucible built to mass-manufacture the next mutant era.
"It's deathly for them..." Yuyin murmured, visibly disturbed.
"It's a lesson worth remembering. Besides ~ we already agreed not to play savior."
I caught their hand before it could become a question. If we stepped in now, conditioned it, softened it, the ripple would unmake the very history that was supposed to produce them ~ the mutants, the humans, all of it.
Piotr, Illyana, the entire Russian and eastern European mutant demographic to name a few.
"They need the fire to remember and evolve. Now pour me another cup."
***
[ Xiao Ning : The Broken ]
After months in the wild, human architecture felt aggressively rigid. Historically important place called, London hit us first. Apart from the usual hubris and tumultuousness of mortals albeit with a little more standards, we saw extra-ordinaries hiding. In a hidden street tasting of old blood, we observed the Hellfire Club pulling strings.
The city was draped in a familiar, damp chill, its narrow cobblestone alleys slick with a mixture of eternal drizzle and the greasy exhaust of diesel cabs.
Tao pointed out Selene, an immortal parasite who had spent seventeen thousand years playing games of social dominance. Through Tao's retrospective magic, we learned their former leader Shaw was dead and the telepath Emma Frost sat in a government cell though not for long.
In Europe, inside a splinter realm, we detected Dracula's vampiric kingdom thriving in the margins of civilization. Observing them taught us to distinguish the soul deep curse of lycanthropy from genuine mutation, which was simply biology failing to adapt.
Most out of norm happened was when a sudden, demonic looking book materialized before Tao. It was named Darkhold as we came to know later. Dark tendrils of raw entropy reached out, but Tao's soul power burned the corruption away before it touched his skin. He read it cover to cover multiple times with pure appreciation, treating the apparent elder god named Chthon - Tao told us. His magic spells like a simple novel.
"At least Chthon was thorough," he murmured, tossing the artifact back into the void. He had no use for a book of sins when he could write his own universal laws. "Let us go visit a demonic mountain."
[ Tao : Crossing Continents ]
I searched the map and found neither Latveria nor Sokovia. Both had been carved up and annexed by their neighbors centuries ago. I did find Mount Wundagore. We did not enter. I simply analyzed its mystic roots from the perimeter. Studying the Darkhold had already pushed my reality manipulation a small step, but past a critical threshold, making the fabric of the universe feel vastly more compliant.
The more I play with the energy even after distilling its demonic nature, more it feel to me that the container needs some special configuration to run it aptly. I was tempted to do so with the adaptive nature of my skill, but after I felt two things I stopped. One, it began to produce unnecessary karmic threads across dimensions where the energy is being drawn from, and two, it began to conform my outer soul and even consciousness;
***
Then we observed the mutants. We felt their faint energy resonance everywhere.
To my wives, they looked like cultivators with shattered bloodlines. Their mortal biology lacked the architecture to carry such high tier energy. I viewed it as a thermal mismatch. The human soul lacked the coolant system to handle the intense load of the X-gene. A girl in Lagos whose skin turned to broken mirrors. A boy in Siberia whose screams killed every dog in his village. Even one little girl who poop ice-creams flavoured items. Their powers arrived like terrible news disguised as gifts.
The X-Men appeared on television with clean costumes and promises that only mattered within a fifty mile radius of America. Their idea of cohabitation is a pure brain hole, but hey at least that bald head came up with great idea of training school children into militants to do moral policing and becoming social workers.
Every public display taught humanity to associate mutants with catastrophe. Can every mortal be equal and fit to survive in a collective community, if one is blessed or cursed by nature to have such wild powers. People remembered exploding cities, not rescued civilians.
That man alone through pure coincidence held back decades of peaceful hidden growth of his own community by throwing out the wild term. Mutant.
But then again, blaming one individual for decades of conflict doesn't fit the complexity of Marvel or I'm just intentionally biased based on all comics I read?
Is isolation what they need? Isn't it like making yourself a bigger target? Well, few years to decades of peace may be considered worthy for such an attempt when average mortal's lifespan is just over 50.
The rest of the world in present was left to a rigged game. Manifest, get hunted, and die. Or perhaps survive through violence, build fleeting influence, and inevitably end up in a lab, battle field or a grave.
But the select few, those born with great powers or a great psyche, just handful is enjoying - no thriving... truly great comfort in treading through the life.
Below me, the sprawling city was a chaotic grid of amber streetlights and gridlocked traffic, the sounds of distant blaring horns floating up to meet the vast, indifferent silence of the Kenyan night sky.
Should I change it? I thought, watching the tragic pattern from a rooftop in Nairobi.
Nah..Too much effort.
I kept moving. We mostly kept our hands to ourselves.
Mostly.