With the Convergence of the Nine Realms finally over, the depths of the Arctic ice cap gradually returned to their usual cold silence.
Mike stood quietly where he was, staring at the place where the projection of Asgard had just disappeared.
He thought back to the final image before the rift closed, when Loki had stood inside Asgard’s Golden Palace and invited him to come there if he could.
“So you’ll wait until I reach Asgard?” Mike’s lips curved into a faint smile as he stared at the empty space where the projection had vanished.
“Don’t worry.
I’ll come.” He was certain of that.
After Odin died and Hela, the Goddess of Death, escaped from her prison, Mike would go to Asgard.
He would kill Loki with his own hands, take his head, and place it before the graves of his adoptive parents as an offering.
It wouldn’t even take that long.
Only four years.
That worked out perfectly, because Mike also needed time to comprehend the Sixth Sense.
Only a Saint who awakened the Sixth Sense could truly be considered a Saint.
In Sanctuary, a Saint who had awakened the Sixth Sense could calmly face hundreds of Saints who had not.
Not only would he avoid being overwhelmed, he could defeat all of them with ease.
A difference in quality simply couldn’t be overcome through numbers alone.
In his second life, Mike had never awakened the Sixth Sense.
After all, back then he had only been a Bronze Saint candidate in Sanctuary.
He hadn’t even possessed a constellation of his own, so awakening the Sixth Sense had been far beyond him.
Because of that, Mike had no idea how long it would take him to achieve it in this life.
Still, four years should be more than enough.
In fact, even if he awakened the Sixth Sense earlier than expected, Mike probably still wouldn’t go to Asgard ahead of time.
He had no intention of changing Asgard’s fate.
Its destruction was already destined.
The same principle still applied.
If Thor had been willing to put justice above family and hand Loki over to him earlier, Mike would have repaid that favor and stood with Thor, perhaps even trying to prevent Asgard’s destruction.
After all, helping out a friend would have been perfectly normal.
But Thor had chosen to protect a criminal instead of handing him over.
Every choice had consequences.
Thor had made his decision, so Mike had made his as well.
He would stand by and watch Asgard be destroyed.
Then, four years from now, when Hela escaped from her prison, he would go there and take Loki’s head back to the graves of his adoptive parents.
For now, however, it was time to go home.
Mike looked around at the Arctic ice cap, now thoroughly devastated by two consecutive battles, and drew in a deep breath.
Once his Cosmo recovered enough for him to move properly again, he turned and raced away from the Arctic at tremendous speed, leaving a string of afterimages behind him.
Five days later, after dozens of hours of travel, Mike’s plane finally entered the skies above New York City.
An hour later, at five in the afternoon local time, Mike walked out of the airport.
When he had left New York, it had still been late February.
By the time he stepped out of John F.
Kennedy International Airport, March was already coming to an end.
That single month, however, had completely transformed him.
When he left New York a month earlier, he had been nothing more than an ordinary man.
Now, after returning to the city, he had once again become a Saint who cultivated Cosmo.
More importantly, he was the only Saint in the entire Marvel Universe.
Mike was still feeling pleased and even a little proud of how much he had changed when the parking garage at Kennedy Airport delivered a painful reminder of reality.
“How much?” Mike had just retrieved his car from the terminal garage, a used Chevrolet his adoptive parents had given him when he got his driver’s license at sixteen.
Sitting behind the wheel, he stared wide-eyed at the attendant after hearing the parking fee.
“How much did you say?” The attendant was a large, heavyset white woman.
Without changing expression, she looked at the amount displayed on her computer and repeated it.
“Two thousand one hundred dollars.” Mike sucked in a sharp breath.
“Wait, wasn’t it twenty dollars a day?” He had been in a hurry to get to London, so instead of taking a cab, he had driven himself to the airport.
Before leaving the car, he had checked the posted parking rates.
He distinctly remembered seeing a daily maximum of twenty dollars.
Even after a full month, that should have come to around six hundred dollars at most.
How had it somehow become twenty-one hundred?
Was this robbery?
The attendant glanced at Mike’s shocked expression.
“That’s the rate for the outdoor long-term lot.
You parked in the White Garage, which costs seventy dollars a day.
If you’d parked in the Blue or Yellow Garage, it would’ve been eighty or ninety a day.
Hurry up and pay.
Credit cards are accepted, and if you can’t pay, the car doesn’t leave.” Her son-in-law had arranged this job for her.
He paid the airport a large amount every year for the concession, so if the parking fees weren’t high enough, how was he supposed to make money?
And more importantly, how was she supposed to make money?
Mike almost laughed from sheer disbelief after hearing her explanation.
“Fine.
I’ll pay.” As he spoke, he rolled up the window.
A short while later, a stack of hundred-dollar bills appeared in his hand.
Mike lowered the window again and passed the money to the attendant.
She froze for a moment, clearly not expecting him to keep that much cash in his car, but quickly recovered and began counting the bills.
She inspected them carefully to make sure none were counterfeit.
All twenty-one hundred-dollar bills were real.
Completely and unquestionably real.
There was just one problem.
They were real while Mike was still here.
Once he drove out of the airport, however, those twenty-one hundred-dollar bills would change as if by magic into twenty-one blank pieces of paper.
After all, what normal person carried several thousand dollars in cash around with them?
In New York, someone walking around with even a hundred dollars in cash could practically be considered wealthy.
More importantly, Mike didn’t have that kind of cash on him in the first place.
And even if he did, he still wouldn’t have paid that ridiculous fee.
Why should he?
He had parked there for only a month, and they wanted twenty-one hundred dollars from him.
At that point, they might as well have robbed him outright.
Still, Mike had no interest in arguing with an airport parking attendant.
So he used the Reality Stone.
He simply transformed twenty-one blank pieces of paper into twenty-one genuine hundred-dollar bills.
At this moment, the money was completely real.
But once Mike left the parking facility and stopped supplying the energy needed to maintain the transformation, the bills would revert to twenty-one blank sheets of paper.
By then, however, Mike would already be gone.
Even if the parking company wanted to cause trouble for him afterward, they would have no grounds to do so.
The security cameras would prove it.
When Mike handed over those twenty-one hundred-dollar bills, every single one of them had been completely genuine.