Chapter 242-243

Ten thousand years later…

It’s been too long. I was just tired, people weren’t designed to live this long. I’ll go over the broad strokes of what happened during that time and then go over what I accomplished. It only took about another year to get most of Darkseid’s territory under my control. The billions that died every year dwindled back down to similar casualties as when Darkseid ruled.

Humanity began peace talks with the Nova Corps and a partnership pact with the Almerac people. It gave them a foothold to begin exploring space. World War Three happened at about the same time it did in the original world, and the only reason Earth still existed was the intervention of heroes. The talks for an Earth-wide government began, which would eventually become the Earth Federation, which became ‘The Federation’ after most of humanity no longer lived on Earth.

Most of the heroes died from old age, and with the death of Superman the first intergalactic war started with members who were waiting for the last Kryptonian to die to progress their war. They didn’t know about me for some reason, or they didn’t think Clark would have children who were almost as strong as himself. Brainiac didn’t have Kandor shrunken down in this universe. It meant that pure Kryptonians were really extinct, and only hybrids or clones had any Kryptonian DNA in them.

Every thousand years or so, another large-scale galactic war would break out, with each being bigger and more destructive than the last. Sapient races used every technological advancement they had to make their death beams that much more effective on their enemies. I stopped intervening after the second one took place and stopped caring about what happened by the fifth.

The Justice League kept evolving and eventually became a peacekeeping force similar to the Lantern Corps or ‘The Storm Force’ which was the peacekeeping force I created. The bulk of the Justice League still lived on Earth, but as they kept expanding and began including more planets, their name changed to the Legion of Super-Heroes.

It was an odd sight to see from the perspective of a long-lived person. Life loses meaning at a certain point, and apathy takes over. I could see the mistakes most people would make before they would even make them, but at some point had grown so apathetic that I stopped caring what people would do. That was the problem with long life; it might seem like being effectively immortal was a good thing, but it really wasn’t.

I had many children, but most of them were born in the first hundred or so years of my life. Thousands of children a year became about a thousand, then five hundred, the last millennia, I only had a few hundred children every year. I still had about ten million kids by the end of my journey, close to a billion grandkids, and if you calculated the number of people with my blood running through their veins, it would most likely reach over a trillion.

Even sex and love became stale after the first two or three thousand years. I had been cheated on, but at some point, it just didn’t hurt as much after it happened so many times. What would end in murder the first hundred or so times for both people often only resulted in me cutting ties with the woman after finding out. ‘Apathetic god’ was the nickname I picked up after I ruled for over five millennia.

People weren’t supposed to live this long, and it showed. The number of my wives and children who had psychotic breaks and needed to be put down grew with every century that passed. It hurt at first, but as the number of my children grew, so did my disinterest in most. I didn’t love them all equally and anyone who says that about their children is just lying to spare the children who aren’t their favorite’s feelings. It wasn’t a fairytale ending where we all lived happily ever after; some of my children were so strong that only I would have been able to kill them.

I gained more wives as time went on, but just as many started to no longer want to live and ended themselves. Not having sex with me for about a hundred years would let them live out the rest of their long lives naturally, but most took their own life when they decided they were done living. Besides the goddesses I fucked, only Natasha, Stephanie, Raven, and Wonder Woman outlived me.

Natasha became a mother figure for all of my children and had developed a motherly divinity at some point. She had the most children with me and almost never gave up on my children, even when I needed to kill them because they became so evil I needed to put them down. Stephanie became the goddess of wisdom, her mental fortitude the only reason she could keep living as she saw things differently was her ever-expanding wisdom. Raven and Wonder Woman were just built differently than normal humans and the passage of time just seemed easier for them to deal with than other women.

I was content with my own death. I only managed to live as long as I did through sheer willpower at that point. I formed all my divinity and power into an energy source and began to shrink myself down. I traveled to a completely separate universe, one which was on the boundary of what was possible to go to. The alternate universes I could travel to all had one thing in common. They were superhero or villain worlds like Earth 616 or the MCU. Even Invincible and The Boys had their universes, each had the original and hundreds of not thousands of divergent worlds, but I couldn’t spread outside of that type of world.

There was no visiting the Earth I came from or other popular worlds like Dragonball or Rick and Morty. That was what I was trying to bypass. I had kept my original body when I traveled universes, but I thought that if I exploded my lifeforce on the border of the hero bubble, I could potentially be reborn in not only the hero universes but also ones separate from this type of reality.

And so I did. Expanding like my own version of the Big Bang, I sacrificed all of my power to attempt to bypass the barrier. With the last nudge, before I lost consciousness, I felt myself break through. Hundreds, then thousands of me were reborn. Tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of me got the chance to be reborn. Then millions… Billions… An almost infinite amount of me.

More of my energy spread throughout the different universes. The creation of universes was similar to the Big Bang with a single universe expanding out into the known universes and past the threshold into the unknown. Like ripples on a pond, I followed behind the creation of new universes that would shortly appear in them in some form or another. I became an almost constant in most universes.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

My faded consciousness comes back into focus as I look around my surroundings. It’s dark, I’m surrounded by shadows until I look forward. There stood an old man. It was impossible to make out any of his details but I just knew he was old. A flood of forgotten memories comes back to my head. I’ve met this person before.

The blurry face looking at me starts to fade enough for me to recognize his face is smiling as he speaks. “Welcome back, Danny boy… It’s been about ten thousand years since we last met, give or take a year or two. So, now you have a choice to make.”

Chapter 243

Roughly ten thousand years ago…

I was dying. A judge rigged my trial to include crimes I was already found not guilty of, and not only was I dying, but there was nothing I could do about it. I was on death row, and before I would get the lethal injection, I’d die of liver failure. I hated how my life turned out. Frustrated, I was completely frustrated with the mistakes I made…

A chance finally came. They were attempting to digitize the consciousness of people, which would make them effectively immortal as long as the machines they were running on stayed on. It was a pretty even split on who was picked between the terminally ill and those on death row. The biggest problem was the almost one hundred percent insanity that would happen if they stayed and realized what really happened.

It was the Robocop effect. Deep in the subconscious, there was a part of you that needed to recognize itself as human. Any consciousness that would be uploaded and could functionally work would begin screaming the moment it realized they were just thoughts being run through a computer program, and either the program would fail or the ‘consciousness’ would go insane.

So the test had worked in the sense that they could upload a consciousness onto a computer to store it for future use but that ‘person’ couldn’t interact with anything in the real world. Otherwise, it risked going insane when it learned it was only a program and not a person anymore. The shot-in-the-dark idea was having all of the consciousness load into a fictional world and pilot fake bodies until they could figure out how to move us to either robots or function with reality without going insane.

I was put to sleep and I knew something had gone wrong in the process. There was always the chance that we were all forced into a Marvel/DC world but I doubted it. Something bigger and more powerful than technology hijacked our consciousness and sent us there. At least that was what I thought…

I still felt human… The constant pain or sickness I felt was gone, but I could see. Fingers and nose, but as I looked at my finger, they looked vague, and moments after looking away, I forgot what my fingers looked like. I knew they were my fingers, but if you asked me how old I was or describe what I looked like, I would fail the moment I looked away from the thing I was describing.

Looking around I see nothing but darkness, which normally wasn’t a good sign. Piering forward, I finally notice the person with the same foggy haze hiding his appearance. As I looked at him, I could tell he was smiling behind the haze. “Hello, I’m the god of rebirth. I go by many names. Adonis, Osiris, Janus, but as you are an atheist, you can just call me Rebirth, and now, you have a question to answer.”

I tried to speak, but words didn’t come out. I still felt that the question I was trying to ask was understood by Rebirth. “And what question is that?” His smile widened slightly as he answered. “This is the first time a hundred souls have all transitioned at the same moment. Your fates are intertwined because of this. Normally, when a soul is ejected from its home plane we or the soul can decide where to arrive for the reason of realigning the universe onto the correct path.”

I could feel his happiness at the odd situation he found himself in. “For the first time in… Forever, we’re going to leave which universe your souls join by majority vote.” He began to laugh uncontrollably as the haze wavered and showed parts of his face. The parts I could see gave me a strong sense of dread, like viewing him in full could fundamentally change me or destroy me if my willpower wasn’t strong enough.

“It’s like one of your democracies. Everyone is getting to vote… What an awful idea meant to make a decision more of a popularity contest rather than who is the right person for the job!” His laughter began to die down as he wiped a tear from his eye. “Well… Anyways… We have four worlds that have become misaligned with their world's fate.”

He put it into a perspective that I could understand. “I take things that have been misplaced and give them purpose elsewhere.” I thought about what that meant; did we have to accomplish something in the world we’ll be sent to but he answered my unasked question. “No, normally yes, but not with the energy one hundred souls provide. As long as three of you die from something other than old age, I can fix the misalignment of any universe I send you to. The chances of all of you surviving to old age are so insignificant it doesn’t warrant worrying about.”

I felt a screen appear in my mind. Once again, I could see it, but I don’t think my eyes really worked; they were just placeholders. I could instinctively see the screen though which appeared to be an old-school blue screen at first but swapped to an almost see-through one as I disliked the color. I hated having things shoved in my face, and if I couldn’t see in front of me it gave me the feeling that I was about to be ambushed.

Selectable Universes

Game of Thrones

Mushoku Tensei

Marvel/DC

Skyrim

Out of all the choices… I knew that my vote wouldn’t matter. Marvel/DC would get selected because it was the most well-known choice. I could guess Game of Thrones would be next, then Skyrim with Mushoku Tensei getting barely any votes. I picked Marvel/DC because it was my choice anyway. It had the most beautiful women out of all the choices… Well, the most variety, anyway, and suited my preferences the most. I had to wait as the others made their choices.

Marvel/DC: 51

Game of Thrones: 27

Skyrim: 16

Mushoku Tensei: 6

Yep, that's exactly what I thought the numbers would be. Honestly, I was surprised Marvel/DC didn’t win by a bigger margin but we had to look at the people making the choice. Murderers, sexual assaulters, and criminals made up half of the people making the choice. They’d have a much easier time getting away with what they do in a world like Game of Thrones but… If those psychopaths get superpowers, then it will be much worse over a short period of time until they’re killed off.

Rebirth asks me. “Out of curiosity, what do you plan to do with your second chance?” That, at least, meant he wasn’t reading my mind constantly. “No, that wouldn’t be a very polite thing to do. Only scanning your surface thoughts.” Well… I thought about what I wanted to do, and I couldn’t help but smirk. Even with this hazy body, it probably came across as Rebirth’s smirk did. “The superheroines and villains… I guess I should kill the bad guys too if it isn’t too inconvenient.”

“Well. I’m very busy. I’ll leave you to your choices. I hope you accomplish all the goals you set for your life.” With that, he disappeared, and another screen popped up with a list of superpowers to choose from… Which ones should I select?