Phoenix.
Phoenix.
Phoenix.
The Phoenix constellation was the best, and Mike refused to hear any arguments against it.
The moment he realized he could reverse the usual process by imprinting a constellation first and earning its approval afterward, the image of a phoenix engulfed in blazing flames naturally appeared in his mind.
After all, among the forty-eight Bronze constellations, only a handful truly stood above the rest.
Mike wasn’t biased against the others.
It was simply a fact that Pegasus, Phoenix, Dragon, Cygnus, and Andromeda belonged to the protagonists.
Anyone who disagreed could take it up with Masami Kurumada.
So even though Mike was now in another universe and theoretically had access to the power of any of the forty-eight Bronze constellations, if he had to choose one for himself, he would still choose Phoenix.
Pegasus was undoubtedly the main protagonist’s constellation, but there was one problem.
Pegasus suffered far too much.
Yes, Pegasus had a long record of exploding with power in desperate situations, but whenever you asked how those desperate situations happened in the first place, the subject suddenly became much less appealing.
Besides, Pegasus was simply too righteous for Mike.
Choosing a constellation wasn’t just a matter of looking for one without a Saint and claiming it.
The process was really about finding a constellation that matched the Saint’s own nature.
The greater the compatibility between Saint and constellation, the more power the Saint could draw from it.
The reverse was also true.
As for Dragon, Mike had no intention of sacrificing himself for someone else at the slightest opportunity, and he definitely didn’t have a habit of mutilating himself or blinding his own eyes.
Cygnus didn’t fit either.
Mike might not be especially talkative, but he wasn’t cold and emotionless.
He only looked distant on the outside.
Deep down, he was still capable of plenty of warmth.
At the very least, whenever he watched television with Heidi and saw the male and female leads finally get together, he would sometimes wonder what kind of woman would be his ideal partner and what his future wife might be like.
Mike wasn’t against romance.
He simply hadn’t met the right woman who could make his heart race yet.
And there was even less to say about Andromeda.
Mike was a man.
Completely and unquestionably male, the kind of man who was attracted to women.
Even imagining himself standing on tiptoe and swinging chains around to bind someone made a chill run down his spine.
He knew Shun wasn’t actually what people stereotyped him as, but that didn’t make the image any easier for Mike to accept.
Once he eliminated those options, Phoenix was the obvious choice.
And what defined Phoenix?
Pride?
Mike was certainly proud.
He clearly remembered all three of his lives, including this one, so naturally he possessed a strong sense of pride.
That was even more true because his second life had been spent in Sanctuary.
When Loki looked at humans on Earth as though they were ants, Mike saw Loki in much the same way.
The only difference was that Mike currently lacked the ability to reach Asgard and crush him underfoot.
What about resilience and an unyielding spirit?
Mike considered himself plenty resilient.
If other transmigrators had been thrown into the Saint Seiya universe, he doubted many of them could have endured Sanctuary’s training the way he had.
Calling it hellish wouldn’t even be accurate.
Purgatorial was closer.
And then there was rebirth through fire.
That one barely needed explaining.
Mike had already been reborn three times.
If that didn’t count as rising from the ashes, what did?
So Phoenix it was.
Mike made his decision.
He intended to force the Phoenix constellation into his Cosmo first and worry about gaining its approval afterward.
At that moment, within Mike’s inner universe, the Aether that had completely fused with his Cosmo floated like countless particles of dust drifting through space.
Then those particles began moving.
As though drawn by an invisible force, the Aether surged inward from every direction toward a single point, almost like a new star being born in the universe.
Without the Reality Stone, Mike would never have been able to reverse the process this way.
There was no chance he could simply imprint the Phoenix constellation into his Cosmo from nothing.
But the Reality Stone could make it possible.
Its fundamental ability was to turn imagination into reality.
And because the Aether had already fused completely with Mike’s Cosmo, it gave him the possibility of using that power to outline and imprint the image of Phoenix within his inner universe.
The process would take time.
Of course, Mike could have forced the Aether to complete the Phoenix constellation instantly with a single thought.
The price would have been his life.
Everyone knew that the greater the scale of reality altered by the Reality Stone, the greater the burden placed on its user.
Mike’s Cosmo might be called a “microcosm,” and in the Marvel Universe it wasn’t even truly real on a universal scale.
But to Mike himself, it was completely real.
More than that, his Cosmo was his own universe.
It was just as vast and boundless to him as the real cosmos outside.
That meant using the Reality Stone to imprint the Phoenix constellation inside his Cosmo was effectively no different, from his perspective, from creating the Phoenix constellation across an actual universe.
How difficult was that?
Put it this way.
Even after Thanos obtained the Reality Stone, he only dared to impose his wish of erasing half the life in the universe after collecting the other Infinity Stones and using all of them together.
If Thanos had tried to accomplish that wish with the Reality Stone alone the moment he obtained it, he would have died.
There would have been no other outcome.
And if he had actually tried it, his corpse would probably have looked more mummified than the oldest mummy in Egypt.
Mike didn’t possess the other Infinity Stones, so he had no choice but to proceed slowly.
One star at a time.
That level of cost was something he could endure.
His Cosmo’s total energy was infinite.
Although Mike could only actively use a limited portion of it because he had yet to awaken the Sixth Sense, the Reality Stone wasn’t restricted in the same way.
To put it simply, Mike had never once felt his own usable strength weaken even though the Reality Stone had been continuously drawing energy from him ever since he obtained it.
That was because the Stone drew power directly from his Cosmo itself, not from the limited amount of Cosmo energy Mike could consciously control.
So he would light the stars one by one.
Once the final star making up the Phoenix constellation lit within his Cosmo, the real Phoenix constellation in the universe would be forced to notice him and come looking.
Whether it accepted him willingly or became furious because Mike had taken its image without permission was a problem for later.
If Phoenix refused him, then he would simply erase the imprint and choose another constellation.
Mike didn’t particularly care.
There were plenty of constellations in this universe, but only one Saint.
If Phoenix refused to choose him, Mike had only one thing to say.
That would be Phoenix’s loss.
Not his.