Chapter 158: The Other Side of the Starry Sky
A brilliant, dazzling pillar of rainbow light originated from Earth, instantaneously hurtling outward across countless diverse planets and stellar domains. All sights and scenes rapidly receded at superluminal speeds.
Enveloped within the rainbow radiance, Kyle’s human figure could be vaguely discerned. He remained unconscious and in a deep faint, yet his left palm still tightly and fiercely clenched the Space Stone.
Kyle’s entire body was being eroded by the violent energy of the gemstone. Blue light seemed to flow through his body alongside his blood, clearly visible through his skin, tracing his inner organs and circulatory pathways.
*Clatter, clatter…*
Venom, which had been symbiotically attached to Kyle’s body surface, emitted a sharp, bizarre wail. Unable to sustain the morphed form of the Night Suit, it reverted to its original state resembling a mass of black liquid.
The black liquid slowly retreated from Kyle’s left arm to his shoulder, then from his shoulder across half of his right body, as if it could no longer endure the scorching, annihilative sensation brought by the gemstone’s energy, and finally detached itself entirely to become independent.
Upon separating from the body, Venom also gathered and adsorbed all the equipment and items originally worn by Kyle—including the Vibranium arm guards, the sodalite-carbon steel sword, the energy pistol, and the sling ring—fixing them to its own outer side with liquid tendrils.
It now resembled a tortoise shell pieced together from several items of equipment, curling its true form hidden within and entering a deep slumber.
The Space Stone flashed once, then went completely dim, vanishing within the palm of the unconscious Kyle, while the blue glow of the gemstone's energy similarly faded and fell dormant within his body.
The Bifrost departed the solar system. Crossing the galaxy amidst a surreal and hallucinatory play of light and shadow, it finally reached the far shore, losing its brilliance.
Kyle and Venom paused in the pitch-black starry sky, then plunged one after another into the swirling black hole looming ahead.
Meanwhile, in a certain desolate, abandoned, and ownerless region of a planet.
Rotting corpses and broken garbage from various biological species across different planetary worlds were piled high into mountains of trash, flowing into rivers of refuse. The entire landscape was blanketed primarily in garbage.
A small team of five biological humanoids wearing filthy protective cloaks and ugly masks, holding burlap sacks and laser firearms, was meticulously searching like scavengers to recycle any valuable alien trash they could find.
Abruptly, all five scavengers raised their heads, gazed straight up toward the sky, and then excitedly dropped to their knees on the ground, cheering and raising their hands high.
The sky was overcast with gloomy clouds, and while a few small colored wormholes had been scattered about, one of them was rapidly expanding, forming a crimson wormhole vortex with a radius of a hundred meters.
Accompanied by a howling, spinning storm, the aperture of the wormhole vortex continuously spewed out various kinds of garbage of all sizes, resembling a grand and imposing rain of trash.
For scavengers, "fresh" garbage that had not yet been scavenged was naturally akin to a heavenly gift.
*Bang!*
Among it was half of a damaged fighter craft, which crashed down and piled up into a new garbage mountain. The five scavengers on the edge danced with joy, ignoring the ongoing trash rain, and swarmed in together to rummage through it.
"I originally thought the competition pressure in the outskirts wouldn't be so high, but looks like we got beaten to the punch again? And such a massive scale of fresh garbage, there must be good things inside."
Less than thirty meters away from the new trash mountain, a tiny figure was concealed behind a plastic barrel. A pair of greenish beastly eyes watched those scavengers who had seized the advantage, sighing and muttering, "Five of them, all armed with firearms. Too difficult to deal with."
"Forget it, forget it." The small shadow shrank back, preparing to leave, when its tiny footsteps suddenly halted. It turned out that the newly formed trash mountain they had been watching was undergoing an unexpected turn of events...
On the newly formed pile of trash, the five scavengers were crawling about, clawing through the refuse to continuously flip it over in search of valuable items.
One of the scavengers put down his weapon, raised a broken steel deck plate with both hands, and crouched down close to get a clear look at the items at the base of the garbage mountain, when a large amount of debris violently burst open and flew outward.
Horrified, the scavenger tried to retreat. From beneath the trash mountain, a bare hand shot out like lightning, its five fingers clamping around his neck like iron pliers.
"There's a living creature!" The other four scavengers were greatly alarmed, drawing their firearms and entering a state of extreme alert.
"Muffled cough." Choked by the neck, the scavenger struggled violently with all four limbs in panic. The garbage on the mountain cascaded downward in a clatter, and the owner of that hand slowly revealed his true appearance.
A head of cool, striking silver hair, azure-blue eyes, bronzed skin, and the tall, perfect physique of a human youth clad in nothing more than a pair of boxer shorts.
The muscles in his left hand bulged like blocks of steel, and with sheer brute force alone, he lifted the scavenger entirely off the ground by his throat.
"What kind of creature are you?"
"Let go of our man right now!"
The four scavengers surrounded him with weapons raised, shouting warnings in the Galactic Common Tongue.
Listening to the unfamiliar language, the newly awakened silver-haired youth looked dazed, as if still suffering from cross-domain jet lag. He shook his head, still not grasping the situation, and after taking a few deep breaths, the confusion in his eyes finally vanished completely.
"I actually succeeded..." Kyle muttered to himself. With a loosening of his five fingers, the nearly suffocating scavenger rolled down and collapsed onto the trash mountain.
Tearing off his mask, the male scavenger breathed heavily in the aftermath of surviving a disaster. His face possessed standard facial features, but his skin was pale, rough, and bizarrely textured, entirely inconsistent with Earth humans.
This made Kyle even more certain that the beings before him were undoubtedly thorough alien species, and that this place was no longer his original Earth.
"Are you a warrior?" The remaining four scavengers did not lower their guard; instead, their hostility grew even more intense. With their gun barrels aimed at Kyle, they inched closer step by step up the garbage mountain.
On Earth, it seemed it had been a very long time since anyone dared to point a gun at him like this.
"A warrior? So what if I am?" Kyle’s tone turned cold. Involuntarily, he clenched his fists, then paused slightly as he realized he was not bonded with Venom.
Where was Venom? And his weapons and equipment seemed to be gone as well...
"If he's a warrior, we don't have to use him as food. We can sell him for a good price in the duel arena." The scavenger who had removed his mask glared viciously at Kyle and issued an order to the other four armed individuals: "Take him alive!"
At those words, Kyle’s expression turned completely frigid. Looking at the four scavengers closing in, an icy glint surfaced in his eyes.
He had originally intended to make a concession first and gather information about this place, but now it seemed there was no longer any need for that at all.
As it turned out, no matter where one went, there was always only one law in the Marvel Universe—the survival of the fittest!
Kyle suddenly smiled.
Just as the scavengers looked at him in bafflement, Kyle took a heavy step backward. The garbage mountain beneath his feet could not bear the weight and collapsed downward. Like a cannonball fired with explosive force, he lunged violently forward.