No, a Black Saint!
[BONUS CHAPTER] 23: Chapter 23: A Saint?
No, a Black Saint!
[BONUS CHAPTER] How could Mike describe the feeling?
It was like a poor man who had struggled his entire life suddenly walking into a room overflowing with gold, silver, and treasure.
He could see all of it and even touch it, yet no matter what he did, he couldn’t carry any of that wealth out of the room and actually spend it.
That was exactly how Mike felt, and it was incredibly frustrating.
For more than a month, he had been trying to figure out why, despite using the Reality Stone to awaken his Cosmo, he still couldn’t merge the power of a constellation into it.
Once a Saint awakened the Sixth Sense, they could begin using the truly extraordinary power of Cosmo.
Likewise, once a Saint gained a constellation of their own, they could use powers unique to that constellation even without awakening the Sixth Sense.
Pegasus Ryusei Ken was one example, and Rozan Sho Ryu Ha was another.
Those were powers tied specifically to their respective constellations.
As the only Saint in the Marvel Universe, Mike could see and even sense the abilities of all forty-eight Bronze constellations, as though any of them could potentially become his.
But no matter what he tried, he couldn’t turn that possibility into reality.
Then, at some point, Mike finally realized why.
His Cosmo was fake.
Not fake from his own perspective.
His Cosmo was completely real to him.
He could clearly feel the blood-red Cosmo within his body, surrounded and sustained by the Aether.
The problem was that, on the scale of the universe itself, it was still fake.
What did the Reality Stone actually do?
At its core, it turned falsehood into reality, allowing something that existed only in thought to become real.
But that ability still had limits.
Mike had used the Reality Stone to alter himself, turning the impossible act of awakening Cosmo within his body into reality.
And because he continuously maintained that altered state, his Cosmo continued to exist as something real.
But just as he had explained when refusing to give the Reality Stone to Malekith, his Cosmo only existed because of the Stone.
As long as the Reality Stone remained with him, his Cosmo remained real.
If he lost the Reality Stone, his Cosmo would disappear as well.
The only exception would come in the future, once he awakened the Eighth Sense and truly stepped into the realm of the gods.
At that point, his Cosmo would finally become a genuine reality on the scale of the Marvel Universe itself.
Until then, however, the truth of his Cosmo existed only around Mike personally.
Put simply, the constellations were too far away.
By the time the presence of Mike’s Cosmo reached those distant stars, it was already too far from the Reality Stone’s influence and reverted from something “real” back into nothingness.
It was the same principle as the twenty-one hundred dollars he had paid at the airport three months earlier.
While Mike was still at the airport, those twenty-one hundred-dollar bills had been completely genuine.
But once he left the area, the money lying in the cashier’s booth reverted to its original form and became twenty-one pieces of white paper that only looked like banknotes.
In any case, that meant one thing was certain: Mike could never use the same method he had known from Sanctuary in his second life to become the Saint of a constellation here.
But Mike had lived three lives.
He might not have had many outstanding qualities, but he was good at judging circumstances and adapting when necessary.
And more importantly, his imagination was pretty good.
If his Cosmo became unreal whenever it traveled all the way out to those constellations, then why not reverse the process?
There was a saying that fit perfectly.
If he couldn’t go to the mountain, he could make the mountain come to him.
Mike could sense the forty-eight Bronze constellations shining across the universe.
And if he could sense them, that also meant those constellations had sensed him in some way.
Otherwise, there would have been no connection between them at all.
So instead of trying to reach the forty-eight Bronze constellations, why not make them reach him?
The problem was figuring out how to make those constellations, which were currently observing him from across the universe, actively respond.
When Mike first came up with the idea, he had no clue how to put it into practice.
Then, one evening a week earlier, he and Heidi had been eating dinner when she turned on the television.
A science program called Getting to Know the Constellations happened to be playing.
At first, Mike paid little attention.
Then the program began explaining the individual stars that formed Taurus, including their names and positions.
At that exact moment, inspiration struck.
Mike could clearly remember the sensation of something shooting upward from the base of his spine and reaching the top of his head in an instant.
He had been so excited that he almost wanted to burst into song.
Because he finally had an idea.
Normally, in the Saint Seiya universe, once a Saint became the bearer of a constellation, that constellation would project itself into the Saint’s Cosmo.
Then, whenever the Saint fought and manifested their Cosmo, the shape of that constellation would appear with it.
Put simply, the relationship between a proper Saint, their Cosmo, and their constellation worked like this: First, the Saint awakened their Cosmo.
Then they earned the recognition of a constellation.
After that, the constellation imprinted its projection into the Saint’s Cosmo.
Mike planned to modify that process.
He wanted to reverse the order.
For example, he could first imprint the shape of a constellation into his own Cosmo.
If that artificial imprint resonated with the real constellation, then perhaps he could use the constellation’s power through that preexisting connection.
Of course, doing something like that could also offend the actual constellation.
After all, a proper Saint earned the constellation’s recognition through their own effort before inviting that constellation into their Cosmo.
What Mike was planning was more like forcing his way in without permission.
But he couldn’t think of any other method.
So he decided not to worry about it.
He would imprint the constellation first and deal with the consequences later.
If the constellation accepted him afterward, then everyone would be happy.
If it didn’t, he could simply try another constellation.
No matter how badly things went, it still couldn’t be worse than what he had done in London, where he had gambled his life on the possibility that the Reality Stone could manifest his Cosmo.
And that gamble had worked.
So Mike was going to gamble again.
This time, he intended to bet big.
If he succeeded, even if it didn’t suddenly make him rich enough to own a seaside mansion, at the very least the power of a constellation should help accelerate his progress toward awakening the Sixth Sense.
And if he lost?
Then he lost.
He could always win it back next time.
That was why Mike had spent the past several days studying everything he could about the forty-eight Bronze constellations.
He had also decided which constellation he would attempt to imprint into his Cosmo first.
And that constellation was— …