A week later.
Deep within the Arctic ice cap, an endless white wasteland stretched beneath a gray-blue sky all the way to the horizon, making it almost impossible to tell where the ice ended and the heavens began.
A blizzard raged relentlessly across the frozen world.
Mike stood on a relatively flat sheet of ice as winds at thirty degrees below zero swept across his face, cutting into his exposed skin like knives.
He slowly exhaled, and his breath instantly condensed into a cloud of white mist before the howling wind tore it apart.
Then he moved.
His right foot slammed against the ground, cracking the ice beneath him, and his entire figure vanished from the spot in an instant.
Whether it was punching speed or movement speed, a Bronze Saint could reach the speed of sound.
Three hundred and forty meters per second.
Mike raced across the ice cap, his body slicing through the freezing air and leaving a brief white trail behind him.
His target was a three-meter-tall outcrop of ice-covered rock roughly five kilometers away.
Yet while he was still around five hundred meters from it, Mike threw a punch.
The three-meter ice-covered rock five hundred meters away immediately began to change.
First, the layer of ice covering its surface cracked apart, followed by the rock underneath.
Only then did the sharp sound of displaced air explode through the distance.
Boom!
The ice-covered rock burst into countless fragments, scattering in every direction like artillery shells and hammering against the ice with a dense series of cracks and impacts.
Mike immediately pushed off again.
This time, his target was an even larger and thicker formation in the distance.
The ice beneath his feet exploded as he launched himself forward, cracks spreading outward like a spiderweb.
His body shot through the air like a cannonball, moving so quickly that even the freezing wind seemed to fall behind him.
The instant Mike raised his right fist again, a blood-red glow enveloped its surface.
He punched.
The shockwave carried by the force of his fist struck the larger ice formation first.
Cracks spread across its surface, extending, intersecting, and tearing through it until, with an even more terrifying roar, the entire formation collapsed and shattered into countless chunks of varying sizes that scattered across the ice.
With a heavy thud, Mike landed and lowered his fist.
His feet slid across the ice for dozens of meters before he finally came to a stop.
He exhaled the stale breath from his lungs, closed his eyes, and focused inward on his newly awakened Cosmo.
What he saw within himself was clear.
His Cosmo had now completely merged with the Aether.
Blood-red Cosmo energy continuously surged outward, traveling through his blood vessels and reaching every part of his body.
Mike could clearly hear the blood rushing through his veins.
He could also hear his heart pounding like an engine that had lain dormant for years only to be filled with fuel and brought roaring back to life, each heavy beat sounding like a small mountain crashing down.
After arriving in the Arctic and spending an entire week training without interruption, his Cosmo had finally recovered to the peak level he had possessed as a Bronze Saint candidate.
From this point onward, progress would require slow and steady work.
For example, he needed to find himself a constellation.
He also needed to continue deepening his understanding of the five senses until, through that understanding, he awakened the sixth sense that would allow him to truly be called a Saint.
As for now, his recovery training was finished.
Mike opened his eyes again and glanced at the marks he had just left across the ice while testing his restored strength.
Then he looked away and began walking out of the Arctic.
An hour later, he was inside an igloo built by an Inuit hunter.
Outside, the bitter wind still drove heavy snow across the frozen landscape, while inside the igloo, the aroma of roasting meat filled the air.
Mike had come across this igloo by chance after arriving in the Arctic.
It belonged to an Inuit man he had met there.
At the moment, Mike was eating roasted meat and chatting in the man’s own language with the Inuit hunter, whose name was Natik.
Mike had never known the Inuit language before.
But now his Cosmo had awakened.
Once a Saint awakened his Cosmo, learning an entirely new language was about as difficult as drinking a glass of water when thirsty.
After listening to only a few sentences, Mike had already learned the language.
He could understand it and speak it fluently.
Since it was currently March, the bitter cold had yet to retreat, but the long polar night had already ended.
The Inuit therefore used this precious window of time to go hunting.
That was also why Mike had been able to encounter Natik at this time of year.
The meat sizzling over the fire was from a polar bear Natik had hunted that very morning.
Now that his special training was finally complete and his combat strength had returned to the level of a Bronze Saint, Mike possessed at least some ability to protect himself.
Finally able to relax for the moment, he happily chatted with Natik while listening to the hunter recount amusing stories about his polar bear hunt that morning.
However, when Natik mentioned that he had also seen a mirage on his way back, the relaxed look on Mike’s face disappeared.
Mike raised an eyebrow and looked at the still-enthusiastic Natik.
“A mirage?” “Yeah.” “What kind of mirage?” Mike pressed him for details.
As everyone knew, scientifically speaking, a mirage was an unusual optical phenomenon caused when light underwent significant refraction or total internal reflection while passing through layers of air with different densities, making distant scenery appear in the sky or on the ground.
But this was the Marvel Universe.
Marvel didn’t care about science.
In the Marvel Universe, if you dreamed about another version of yourself, there was no need to doubt it.
That person was another version of you who genuinely existed somewhere else in the multiverse.
The same principle applied to mirages.
Here, a mirage wasn’t merely the projection of distant scenery into another location.
Quite the opposite.
What you saw in a mirage was actually scenery from another world.
If you happened to stand directly before such a mirage and discovered that you could walk into it, there was no need for doubt—you could genuinely pass through it and enter the world shown on the other side.
And at this particular point in time, the fact that Natik had seen a mirage here in the Arctic could mean only one thing.
With the Convergence of the Nine Realms drawing near, a passage leading to another realm of Yggdrasil had appeared somewhere in the Arctic.
Natik listened to Mike’s questions, thought for a moment, then began describing the mirage he had seen while hunting earlier.
“It’s hard to explain.
It was very dark, and completely barren.
It gave me this kind of…” “Dead, lifeless feeling?” “Exactly!” Natik’s eyes lit up as he looked at Mike.
“You saw it too?” Mike didn’t answer.
Instead, he turned toward the entrance of the igloo and looked outside, his gaze settling on the ice cap roughly five kilometers away.
The mirage Natik had seen really was the realm of the Dark Elves.
Svartalfheim.
Because— Malekith the Dark Elf had already arrived!