Marvel Magic Case Files

Chapter 1633 Kamar-Taj Control Center

His skin was swollen and white from being soaked in the river. The clear water from the Alps flowed over his rotting eyes, washing away the maggots wriggling on the eyeballs. Limbs separated from his body in the water, and schools of fish tore at the soft, rotting flesh. He lay supine on the corpse, dark green algae climbing up his skin with the current. His heavy clothes kept dragging him down, but the dense, bloated, pale bodies on the river's surface held him up, preventing him from sinking into the dark depths where the sunlight was blocked by the corpses.

"Your psychic powers are strong enough to alter the genome, which means you will have no choice. You can't even commit suicide, my dear child; you are forced to confront all the filth in this world." The Sorcerer Supreme stood on the water, ripples spreading from beneath the simple boots of Kamar-Taj. "If you don't remember, I'll remind you, this is the Sava River, and these corpses are witnesses to the atrocities of the Ustasha. And you experienced it all, even if it was just a dream woven together by all the survivors and victims. It is the filth of the collective unconscious of humanity, and the mud at the bottom of the river is the embodiment of this concept. But you had no choice; that is why you were born, isn't it?"

[To fight against the insurmountable]

"In all your simulations and deductions, you haven't left yourself a place."

The Venerable Master frowned as he looked towards the riverbank.

The corpses were piled high, the storm roared in his ears, and tiny psychic lightning crackled on the river's surface. Every body on the riverbank bore at least several bullet holes or cuts. These were wounds inflicted by a dagger with a hilt, a weapon invented to more efficiently slit the throats of concentration camp prisoners from behind.

"Let's go, they've already found us here, and I don't have much time left."

The Sorcerer Supreme blinked hard, and a wisp of spiritual energy spilled out uncontrollably, spreading across the wide river, now teeming with floating corpses. This was unprecedented in the past millennium, signifying that the Sorcerer Supreme was gradually losing control of himself. Clearly, the Sorcerer Supreme was aware of the situation—night was falling rapidly, the Milky Way's brilliance stretched across the sky, and all the stars were moving at supernatural speeds, as if billions of years of time had been compressed and placed before them. The instantaneous expansion of heat and high-speed particles rubbed wildly against each other in the atmosphere, eventually igniting the atmosphere to form a dazzling aurora—the difficulty of predicting the future was no less than calculating the trajectories and interactions of all the stars in the Milky Way, but the Sorcerer Supreme and the Emperor were still able to do it.

"Let's speed things up and take a look at the final results of all your models and simulations."

The warm yellow light illuminated the chessboard, and the emperor extended his wet, scarred fingers to place another chess piece on the small round table. Each deduction placed his soul between the past and the future; as the timeline intertwined repeatedly, the joy, sorrow, anger, and despair experienced by each person involved in the prophetic model overflowed from his eyes, even his breathing was painful and trembling. What had been placed within his soul revealed itself once more, as a spiritual manifestation; each roughened finger wore an old copper ring. Thin drops of blood dripped from his fingers onto the chessboard, triggering a frenzied, chaotic roar in the utterly silent darkness. Beyond the halo of light, vaguely visible pseudo-feet and deformed claws reached out, attempting to probe into this eternally tranquil space, but the halo of light was to them no less than molten steel to a human body; they were instantly vaporized into energy the moment they squeezed into the edge of the halo, making the light even brighter and hotter.

Accompanied by Royal Guard member Amphitriteon, the sorcerer Daniel arrived with Wanda Maximov at the so-called "central control room" in Kamar-Taj Courtyard. This area was bypassed directly from the First Secret Service's assault team's planned route, as it housed a large number of magical artifacts far too dangerous and powerful for ordinary people. Kamar-Taj's defenses were quite robust to protect these items from damage or misuse by passersby and naive apprentices. Moreover, this side hall was not located on a primary route, nor was it a refuge for large numbers of people; leaving an automatic sentry gun to control the entrance was sufficient to bypass it.

Wanda Maximov came here for the first time.

Prior to this, even as a guest and the emperor's student, she was not allowed to set foot in this side hall where magical artifacts were stored. Here, she saw several enormous animated landscape paintings, but only after being allowed to approach did she realize that the so-called landscape paintings were actually large floor-to-ceiling windows, and behind the windows were real landscapes. The mage Daniel explained that these floor-to-ceiling windows were actually fixed teleportation portals, but their operating principle was basically the same as the teleportation portals in the Immortal City—both had pre-set departure and destination points.

"Don't touch that potted plant," Master Daniel quickly looked up. "And don't talk to that two-headed snake. Anyone who talks to it will come to a bad end."

"A curse?" Wanda Maximov was startled and quickly took a few steps to the side, nearly bumping into the guard, Amphitrite. "Why did you put something so dangerous here?"

"There's no curse. That snake is just a bit talkative; everyone who talks to it ends up suffering from neurasthenia due to lack of sleep," the mage Daniel said casually, continuing to open the next door with a key the size of an adult woman's forearm. "And don't touch this stone tower; it's frozen in this spacetime. If you've studied relativity and don't want your fingers cut off, don't touch its surface." He glanced at the Royal Guard, Amphitryon, as he turned the psionic key. "And don't ask me where this thing came from. I don't know who was so idle as to use an expensive spell of eternal stasis to protect a stone tower that could collapse at any moment. Of course, it's not like no one has gleaned new wisdom from this stone tower; it's now widely believed that it's actually the work of Agamotto."

"I didn't ask," said the Royal Guard, Amphitryon.

"I'll take that as a question."

As Master Daniel pushed open the doors, the Royal Guard was first greeted by a corridor paved with black marble, lined with bizarre and terrifying statues. At the end of the corridor was a circular hall, its curved walls carved with galaxies and stars, along with numerous reliefs depicting spellcasters in robes and cloaks battling amorphous shadows. Before the palace was built, the battle exploits of many great psionicists in Kamar-Taj's history were etched on the walls of this hemispherical hall, and the amorphous shadows were, in fact, a personification of some invisible threat. In the center of the hall, a giant brass model of a celestial sphere slowly rotated, its surface encased in brass tracks, simulating the ecliptic and equatorial planes of the rotating celestial sphere.

"The Planetary Defense System is not isolated planetary magic; it should be categorized as celestial magic and idol magic—a highly complex composite magic. The celestial magic of the Planetary Defense System changes constantly, corresponding to the movements of all celestial bodies in the solar system and even the Milky Way. It is precisely because of the complexity and precision of this celestial magic that this unprecedentedly powerful spell can protect the entire Earth from harm. However, you will notice that this is a geocentric model of celestial bodies, which is masculine in the entire system. The idol magic part borrows the image of Earth itself, using the concept of Earth as humanity's mother planet, and employing feminine qualities and the legend of the Earth Mother Goddess as feminine elements within the system." Even the sorcerer Daniel, when explaining the Planetary Defense System, would puff out his chest, "One precise, one vague; one masculine, one feminine; one gold, one mercury. This is one of the great miracles of alchemy."

"What should I do?" Wanda Maximoff felt she couldn't quite understand what the sorcerer Daniel was saying. Her knowledge of alchemy was limited to the basics, and celestial magic wasn't her forte either; the symbols and intricate calculations were giving her a headache. "I have absolutely no exposure to this kind of knowledge."

"He taught you internal alchemy, Miss Maximov."

"I've heard of internal alchemy, but I've never studied it."

"You've studied it, you just don't know it. You've studied idol magic, how to stay focused, the Hermesian texts, the Primordial Void Golden Flower Principle, explored the witch's path, and climbed in your inner spirituality. This is alchemy, only different cultures have different views and understandings of it. What you've learned is the unified standard formed by him breaking down, integrating, and demystifying all the secrets. After stripping away the veneer of cultural differences and religious superstition, it's normal that you don't know what the knowledge you've learned used to be called, just like an ordinary student wouldn't know the relationship between Kepler's Third Law and Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation."

"Are we just going to stay here like this until he comes out?" Stephen Strange asked impatiently.

Although the Royal Guards, including Amon and Athena, exerted a strong sense of pressure on him, he remained relaxed thanks to the timely protection of the sorcerer Daniel and the fact that he hadn't witnessed the bloody battles taking place in other courtyards. His studies at Kamar-Taj had made him realize that his once-proud photographic memory and concentration were merely specific manifestations of his psychic potential. Just as some people are exceptionally adept at sensing others' emotions or have accurate intuition, it's simply a different expression of different psychic talents—in some aspects, his senses weren't as strong. Although he could see the strange phenomena in the sky with his second eye, he didn't feel the same sense of being in the eye of the storm as Sherlock Holmes beside him. The latter's intuition was extremely powerful, and his second eye saw a greater depth than Stephen Strange's.

No one answered his question.

Athena stood shoulder to shoulder with the Praetorian Guard, the pressure she exerted on the other sorcerers no less than that of the demigods undergoing genetic alchemy. Athena knew some secrets about the creation of the Praetorian Guard. Even she couldn't fully know the Emperor's hidden secrets, but her wisdom allowed her to deduce some of the steps and principles. In her view, the Praetorian Guard was an upgraded version of the Sisterhood's androids. Although the former were genetically modified warriors created through technological means, the theories used to create the latter were still applied in stages such as mental conditioning and chemical hypnosis.

(End of this chapter)