The footsteps approaching from the hallway suggested the absolute worst.
They were light, quick, and carried a distinct rhythm that told me whoever was wearing those sneakers didn’t care about corporate protocols, estate lawyers, or billion-dollar inheritance disputes.
Then she appeared.
Blonde hair fell around her shoulders, framing bright blue eyes that looked out at the world with a mix of intelligence and casual defiance.
She wore a simple sweater and faded jeans, looking more like a student interrupted in the middle of studying than the daughter of the woman currently controlling my life.
Police captain.
Widowed mother.
Daughter named Gwen.
Blonde.
Blue eyes.
Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.
My heart skipped a beat.
There was nothing superhero-like about her.
No glowing costumes, no radioactive glow, no dramatic theme music playing in the background.
Just a normal girl standing on the polished wood floor of a suburban house.
Which somehow made it significantly worse.
Because if my previous life had taught me anything about comic books, this was exactly how the worst disasters started.
The most terrifying apocalypses didn’t begin with a giant sky beam; they started with a quiet, regular day right before everything went completely off the rails.
Before she even opened her mouth to speak, my mind went into absolute overdrive, running through every horrible possibility.
Gwen Stacy shouldn’t be here.
At least, not according to the standard Marvel Cinematic Universe timeline I’d spent hours memorizing.
She didn’t fit the script.
Did this mean this wasn’t the MCU?
Was I trapped in a comic continuity?
Was it the Ultimate universe, where regular people were basically treated like collateral damage and planets were routinely consumed by cosmic entities?
Or worse—what if this was the Marvel Zombies reality?
What if I was currently sitting in a peaceful house just three years away from a global plague where a single bite turns gods, mutants, and billionaires into rotting, flesh-eating monsters?
A cold sweat threatened to break out across my neck.
A multi-billion-dollar trust fund and a corporate mining empire were completely useless if I had to fight off a ravenous, zombie version of the Hulk with a squishy, baseline human body.
I wouldn’t last five minutes.
No.
Think.
Panicking wasn’t going to help change the variables.
I forced myself to take a slow, invisible breath and review the hard evidence I had already gathered.
Tony Stark still looked exactly like Robert Downey Jr.
Every public photograph, interview clip, and media profile I had checked matched perfectly.
That was the only solid anchor keeping me from having a complete psychological breakdown right there in the living room.
As far as public records showed, Iron Man hadn’t appeared yet.
The Avengers didn’t exist.
Stark was still just a weapon-manufacturing playboy in Malibu, and New York wasn’t scheduled to be invaded by an alien legion anytime next week.
Conclusion: Either the baseline timeline had shifted, or this specific universe was just incredibly weird.
Both possibilities were deeply concerning.
But neither required me to lose my mind immediately.
I still had time.
Time to get stronger.
Time to abuse the absolute hell out of the System .
Time to become so fundamentally rich and powerful that continuity anomalies stopped being my problem entirely.
The panic receded just enough for me to focus on the conversation in front of me.
Helen smiled, stepping forward to break the silence.
“Chris, this is my daughter.”
The girl took a step forward, her blue eyes examining me with an intelligent, curious spark.
She extended her right hand.
“Hi.”
I stared at the extended hand for a fraction of a second, ensuring my face remained a perfect, unreadable mask.
“I’m Gwen.”
Stacy.
The world had officially become a much more dangerous place.
I reached out and shook her hand, keeping my grip firm and completely normal.
“Chris.”
For a moment, neither of us said anything.
The quiet of the house returned, heavy and tense.
My brain was still fried from the timeline realization, and before I could stop my mouth from working independently, words simply slipped out.
“Your eyes are—”
I stopped.
Oh no.
Gwen blinked, her hand slipping back to her side.
“My eyes are what?”
“…Blue.”
Silence.
Excellent recovery.
Ten out of ten.
No notes.
Truly a masterclass in human interaction.
Across the room, Helen slowly closed her eyes, letting out a heavy, exhausted sigh that felt like it had been building up for years.
“Chris.”
“Yes?”
“You have known my daughter for approximately seven seconds.”
“It was an observation.”
“It was seven seconds.” Helen pointed a strict finger directly at my face.
“Try making it to ten before you start flirting.”
Gwen immediately snorted, a sharp sound of amusement breaking through the tension.
I felt my soul physically leave my body.
“Mom,” Gwen protested, her posture shifting into pure teenage sarcasm.
“What?” Helen asked, entirely unbothered.
“You say that like I’m the problem here.”
Then she looked back at me.
Then she returned her gaze to her daughter.
“I wasn’t talking about you.”
“Hey,” I muttered, the phantom embarrassment of the previous owner’s reputation warming my ears.
“Your mother has been telling me stories about you since you were twelve,” Helen stated flatly, picking up her leather briefcase from the table.
That was somehow significantly worse.
Gwen’s grin widened into a full, delighted smirk.
I suddenly understood exactly why corporate lawyers avoided bringing their clients home for family dinners.
Helen shook her head, clearly deciding this conversation had reached its legal limit.”Right.
Before Chris says anything else that gets me investigated by a grand jury, I’ll show him his room.”
“I barely said anything,” I said.
“You’ve been in my house less than a minute,” Helen replied.
“I think that’s a little unfair.”
“It really isn’t,” Helen said dryly.
Helen turned on her heel and started toward the stairs.
I followed immediately, desperate to escape the living room.
Behind us, I could hear Gwen’s quiet laughter bouncing off the walls.
This was going to be an incredibly long year.
As we walked up the wooden staircase, the tone of the house became noticeably quieter.
The hallway on the second floor was lined with simple frames, and my enhanced mind picked up every detail without needing to pause.
It wasn’t an exposition dump.
It was just quiet observation.
There was a photograph of a younger Gwen holding a massive science fair trophy, her smile wide and bright.
Another one showed her standing proudly beside a tall, broad-shouldered man in a crisp police captain’s uniform.
There were birthday parties with messy cakes, standard family vacations, and normal, unscripted memories.
It felt strangely foreign.
The Sterling estate had plenty of photographs, but every single one of them looked like it had been staged by a professional marketing team for an annual corporate report.
They were portraits designed to show status, power, and genetic perfection to the board of directors.
Here, for the first time since waking up in this reality, I noticed something completely missing.
Money.
The house wasn’t trying to prove anything to the neighbors.
Nobody here was competing for social standing or trying to flex their net worth through interior design.
The Sterlings spent their entire lives treating wealth like a weapon to keep people at a distance.
This place just used wood and plaster to keep the wind out.
Helen stopped in front of a plain wooden door at the end of the hall and pushed it open.
“This will be your room.”
I stepped inside, my boots quiet against the carpet.
The room was simple.
A large, comfortable bed sat against the far wall.
There was a basic wooden desk, an empty bookshelf, a small closet, and a single window overlooking a green backyard.
No imported Italian marble.
No absurd modern art installations.
No custom furniture pieces that cost more than a standard American suburban home.
Just a room.
A completely normal room.
For some reason, it felt significantly more comfortable than the entire forty-billion-dollar Sterling empire.
“You can change things if you want,” Helen said, leaning against the doorframe and watching my expression closely.
“We can order different furniture if it’s too small.”
I glanced around one last time, taking in the simplicity.
“No. It’s fine.”
That seemed to surprise her.
Her eyebrows raised slightly.
“Really?”
“It’s a room, Helen. It has a bed and a roof. It works.”
She stared at me for a long moment, perhaps trying to find the spoiled billionaire heir she had been warned about, before finally nodding.
“Lunch will be ready in about thirty minutes. You should come down and eat something.”
I considered the offer for a fraction of a second.
I didn’t want to go back downstairs.
Not because I was paralyzed by grief over parents I had never met, but because my brain was currently redlining.
I desperately needed uninterrupted time to think.
I needed to talk to the System.
I needed to figure out the timeline, the layout of this world, and how to scale my power before a superhero fight flattened my neighborhood.
“I need some time alone,” I said quietly, keeping my voice level.
Helen’s expression softened slightly.
She misinterpreted the isolation entirely, projecting the standard image of a grieving teenager who had just buried his family and moved into a stranger’s house.
The corporate lawyer mask dropped, replacing itself with something genuinely maternal.
“Dinner, then,” she said softly, not pushing the issue.
“I’ll be there.”
“Take your time, Chris.”
She stepped back into the hallway and gently pulled the door shut.
The moment the mechanical latch clicked into place, the quiet mask evaporated from my face.
Finally.
Alone.
Everything came rushing back into my head like a physical tidal wave.
Gwen Stacy existed.
OsCorp was almost certainly operating somewhere in the city.
The entire timeline was drifting away from the stable, predictable MCU safety blanket I thought I had.
I was sitting inside a regular house in a universe that could potentially feature flesh-eating super-soldiers or planet-devouring gods, and my current physical durability was exactly equivalent to wet tissue paper.
Wonderful.
I raised a hand, clearing my throat in the empty room.
“Status.”
A translucent blue screen materialized instantly in the air, casting a cool light over the wooden floorboards.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
RIMURU EVOLUTION FRAMEWORK
CURRENT ACTIVE BALANCE: $274,950,000
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Two hundred and seventy-four million dollars.
Yesterday, that number would have made me feel like the king of the world.
Right now?
It felt terrifyingly small.
Way too small.
Because I wasn’t planning a short-term corporate defense campaign against a few greedy board members anymore.
I was trying to survive the Marvel Universe.
“System,” I thought sharply.
[Yes.]
“What universe is this? Give me a definitive classification.”
The response generated without a single second of hesitation.
[Insufficient Capability.]
I blinked, my jaw tightening.
“What do you mean, insufficient? You’re a multiversal evolution tree.”
[Current instance of the Framework lacks the analytical capability required to determine universal classification or cross-reference deep reality signatures.]
I frowned, crossing my arms as I leaned against the desk.
“Then how do I unlock that capability? What’s the prerequisite?”
[Purchase Research Assistant.]
Of course.
I let out a dry, irritated chuckle.
Apparently, even multiversal systems charged consulting fees.
If I wanted to know whether I was about to get eaten by zombies or crushed by an alien invasion, I had to pay the entry fee first.
“Fine,” I muttered, shaking my head.
“If I can’t figure out the universal parameters yet, let’s look at the immediate bottleneck. What is the absolute fastest way to make more money through this interface?”
The blue light flickered once, the text rendering instantly.
[Recommendation: Purchase Storage.]
I frowned.
“Storage? How does putting things in a pocket dimension make me a billionaire?”
The interface shifted, cascading into a massive, detailed ledger that unrolled across my vision.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ [Storage Tree]
Spatial Pocket — $50,000,000 Capacity: 5 Tons Recommended Scale: Gold, Gems, Artifacts, Rare Resource Samples
Shadow Storage — $500,000,000 Capacity: 50 Tons Recommended Scale: Vehicles, Containers, Warehouses
Stomach (Sub-Dimension) — $5,000,000,000 Capacity: 500 Tons Recommended Scale: Buildings, Excavators, Small Mining Sites
Greater Stomach — $50,000,000,000 Capacity: 5,000 Tons Recommended Scale: City Blocks, Small Factories, Quarry Operations
Spatial Isolation — $500,000,000,000 Capacity: 50,000 Tons Recommended Scale: Open-Pit Mines, Industrial Complexes
Giga Stomach — $5,000,000,000,000 Capacity: 500,000 Tons Recommended Scale: Large Mines, Serious Mining Operations
World Vault — $50,000,000,000,000 Capacity: 5 Million Tons Recommended Scale: Entire Mountains
Imaginary Space — $500,000,000,000,000 Capacity: 50 Million Tons Recommended Scale: Large Asteroids, Small Moons ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
I stared at the numbers, tracking the exponential growth of the scale.
Five tons.
Fifty tons.
Five hundred tons.
Five thousand tons.
Fifty thousand tons.
Five hundred thousand tons.
Five million tons.
Fifty million tons.
I slowly leaned back against the bed, a cold, predatory realization clicking into place inside my brain.
The Storage Tree wasn’t actually about storage.
It wasn’t designed just to give me a neat inventory system to carry my wallet and a change of clothes.
It was about scale.
A standard corporate executive looked at a mountain and saw a landscape.
A miner looked at a mountain and calculated the raw financial yield.
The Framework simply took that baseline mining logic and scaled it up until it expected me to look at asteroids and moons the exact same way.
“Why storage?” I asked internally.
“Connect the dots for me.”
[Storage unlocks Resource Liquidation,] the System explained, text typing out smoothly.
[Resources successfully stored within approved system sub-dimensions may be sold directly through the Framework interface for immediate currency conversion.]
I sat upright on the mattress, my fingers gripping the fabric.
Direct liquidation.
That single sentence completely changed the rules of the game.
My family had spent three generations building a global dynasty by investing billions of dollars into heavy mining infrastructure.
They built shipping fleets, constructed massive refineries, leased railway lines, negotiated international trade permits, paid thousands of employees, and dealt with endless regulatory red tape just to move rock from the dirt to a buyer.
The System didn’t care about any of that.
The Framework didn’t need a refinery.
It didn’t need a transport contract.
It didn’t need environmental permits, corporate overhead, or labor unions.
It just wanted the raw material.
If I could touch a resource, store it in the sub-dimension, and instantly convert it into digital cash through the shop interface…
I was bypassing the entire global supply chain in a fraction of a second.
Coal.
Iron.
Copper.
Gold.
Rare earths.
Vibranium.
The word alone practically printed money in my mind.
A single, decent-sized chunk of that sound-absorbing metal would yield billions upon billions of dollars instantly through system liquidation, completely breaking the back of the multi-trillion-dollar paywalls blocking my path to godhood.
A slow, genuine smile spread across my face as I closed the blue screen.
The panic vanished entirely, replaced by a cold, calculative certainty.
For the first time since activating the Framework, I felt like I was finally looking at the real path forward.
Money wasn’t the end goal.
Resources were.
And the Marvel Universe contained an awful lot of resources.
See you in the next chapter!