After observing the bizarre ritual for a moment, Thanos drifted directly above the pyramid-like structure and reached out to grab the floating yellow gem.
In the next instant, a potent wave of psychic energy violently invaded his mind.
Yet… nothing happened.
It was as if it had absolutely zero effect on him.
Taking the Mind Stone in hand, he simply turned and left the Ice Crystal planet behind.
Over the next few years, relying on his overwhelming, unstoppable strength, he destroyed one planet after another, conquering entire star systems.
Eventually, his campaign led him to Earth.
Leading his massive armada, he systematically annihilated the Avengers, the Illuminati, Wakanda, Kamar-Taj, and every other faction that dared stand in his way.
Ultimately, he gathered all six Infinity Stones, ascending as the supreme, undisputed ruler of the Marvel universe.
But as the years relentlessly turned into decades, he began to slowly age.
His monstrous strength faded.
And despite holding absolute control over the universe, the six Infinity Stones were completely powerless to reverse his inevitable decline.
Just as he sat on his throne, quietly waiting for death in the depths of despair, Thanos suddenly felt a bizarre tremor.
It grew increasingly violent, shaking the very fabric of his reality.
A split second later, he violently snapped out of the psychic grip, crashing back into reality.
He was still standing in the exact same cavern.
Due to the intense, apocalyptic quakes shaking the planet’s surface above, loose rocks were constantly raining down from the ceiling.
In fact, he had just been jolted awake by a chunk of stone bouncing off his head.
Looking forward, he realized his hand was still hovering three centimeters away from the Mind Stone.
It immediately clicked.
Everything he had just experienced—the conquest, Earth, the aging, the despair—was nothing more than a meticulously crafted illusion fabricated by the stone’s power.
“Ding!
Spirit has been tempered, increasing by 50 points.”
Hearing the System’s prompt, a faint smirk tugged at the corner of Thanos’s mouth.
He reached out and firmly grasped the Mind Stone.
Unwilling to be captured, the relic flared, unleashing another massive pulse of psychic energy.
But Thanos was already prepared this time; he wrapped his consciousness in a dense layer of energy, completely shutting out the illusion.
Down below, the Ice Tribesmen who had been deeply entranced by the gem’s psychic waves were violently ripped from their stupor.
They immediately collapsed, clutching their heads and letting out agonizing screams.
“Ah!” “It hurts!” “My head… my body!”
With the Mind Stone securely tucked away in Thanos’s grip, the natives were completely severed from the dream world.
However, some of them had been trapped under its euphoric influence for far too long.
The moment they snapped back to reality, their neglected physical bodies immediately registered the catastrophic toll.
Having gone without food or water for god knows how long, many were reduced to literal skin and bones.
Waking up in that state was pure agony.
Some of them were so emaciated that the sheer shock of returning to reality killed them on the spot.
Seeing their sacred relic in his hand, they instantly erupted in frenzied, furious roars.
“Our sacred relic!
He stole it!” “Give it back to us!” “Vile invader!
Die!”
The Mind Stone was the holy relic of the Ice Tribe.
For thousands of years, it had been their sole source of spiritual entertainment—or rather, their spiritual narcotic.
For most of them, their ultimate life goal was simply to earn the right to enter this cavern and commune with it.
Within its illusions, they could experience a lifetime of absolute joy and bliss completely out of reach in their brutal, freezing world.
They could even reunite with deceased loved ones.
That was exactly why, the moment they realized their world was ending, their first instinct was to run to the relic to permanently escape reality.
But the Mind Stone was no holy artifact; it was a demonic parasite.
While they were lost in blissful dreams, it actively siphoned away their mental energy.
The process was highly addictive, trapping them in a euphoric stupor until they withered away and died.
Seeing their ultimate fix being snatched away triggered severe, violent withdrawals.
It completely overrode any natural fear they had of the towering cosmic overlord, driving them to launch a desperate, suicidal charge.
Even in the face of planetary destruction, they would rather die than lose their relic.
However, they never even reached him.
Massive chunks of the collapsing ceiling began raining down into the cavern, crushing the stampeding natives and claiming life after life.
Thanos simply shook his head at the frantic, pathetic mob leaping up to attack him.
Turning his back on them, he flew straight out of the crumbling cavern.
These absolute ants weren’t even worth lifting a finger to kill.
Emerging back out into the freezing air, he found the earthquakes tearing across the Ice Crystal planet had grown exponentially worse.
As the mountain shuddered and collapsed in on itself, a massive landslide quickly sealed the cave entrance shut, permanently entombing the surviving Ice Tribesmen inside.
Rumble…
As if the planet itself could sense its own impending doom, the sky churned with thick, pitch-black clouds, and massive bolts of lightning began crashing down from the heavens.
Yet, when the lightning struck Thanos’s armor, he didn’t even flinch.
At his current level of physical conditioning, natural elements like this were entirely negligible.
Ignoring the apocalyptic thunderstorm around him, he looked down at the thumb-sized, glowing yellow stone resting in his palm.
If Captain Marvel’s appearance had only confirmed that the Marvel cinematic timeline was officially in motion, acquiring the Mind Stone out in deep space pinpointed the exact timeframe.
He was probably going to run into that unlucky bastard, Loki, pretty soon.
Shaking his head, Thanos blasted through the atmosphere, leaving the dying world behind and entering the cold vacuum of space.
From out here, he had a front-row seat to watch a planet actively die.
Massive, jagged black fissures spiderwebbed across the stark-white surface like gaping, glowing wounds, followed by the violent eruption of brilliant red dots.
Those were active volcanoes. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
Considering this was a planet with a surface that was ninety percent frozen over, volcanic eruptions were supposed to be geographically impossible.
The fact that raw magma was violently breaching the ice meant the planet’s tectonic plates and crust had already suffered catastrophic, irreversible damage.
Closing his eyes, he reached out with his senses.
The Power of Destruction he had embedded into the crust had swollen to a staggering eight kilometers in diameter, and it was now barely a thousand kilometers away from the planet’s core.
In ten minutes, the core would be completely obliterated.
Once a planet’s core was destroyed, it officially became a dead world.
Its electromagnetic field would shatter, completely failing to repel solar winds.
The atmosphere would slowly be stripped away, and cosmic radiation would systematically sterilize whatever organic life was left over.
Alternatively, the destructive energy might just consume a massive chunk of the core’s mass, completely throwing off its gravitational balance and resulting in perpetual earthquakes and an endless loop of natural disasters.
But despite running through every possible scenario in his head, he had still drastically underestimated the sheer, apocalyptic potency of his own power.
The exact millisecond the payload made contact with the core, the destructive force triggered a cataclysmic chain reaction.
The core’s highly pressurized matter was instantaneously annihilated, violently throwing the planet’s internal pressure out of balance.
The resulting subterranean explosion was so impossibly huge that it forced the entire Ice Crystal planet to literally bulge outward, swelling before cracking open at the seams.
Seeing the structural integrity of the planet failing completely, Thanos immediately ordered his armada to pull back, retreating millions of kilometers away into the safety of the void.
A few hours later, the Ice Crystal planet erupted in an absolute, blinding flash of light.
BOOM!
Naturally, there was no sound in a vacuum.
But watching an entire planet detonate and splinter into billions of flaming fragments, everyone in the fleet instinctively heard a phantom explosion echoing in their minds.
The sheer scale of the destruction was just that awe-inspiring.
Right then, the System chimed once more in his mind.
“Ding!
Host has destroyed a planet.
Unlocked the achievement: Planet Destroyer.
Rewarding Unique Skill: Star-Absorbing Art.”
Hearing this, Thanos blinked in mild confusion.
He understood the achievement system just fine; back when he conquered his first star system, he had earned the Ruler title and its corresponding stat-boosting skill.
But what the hell was the Star-Absorbing Art?
Was this some kind of Wuxia crossover?
After studying the System panel for a moment, he finally understood.
It had nothing to do with martial arts tropes.
It was a cosmic skill that allowed him to actively drain a planet’s core energy to directly permanently strengthen his own attributes.
Of course, any planet that had its core drained dry would still end up completely destroyed.
‘Looks like I won’t have to rely on such messy, brute-force planetary destruction next time,’ he mused, a cruel smile forming on his lips.
‘Draining them dry is much more efficient.’