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"Subjects who completed the protocol have recovered baseline cognition," AER reported. "However, most present severe psychological trauma. Many retch at the sight or mention of people. Several enhanced individuals have attempted self-harm; all were intercepted."
Nolan exhaled slowly. The prognosis made sense.
As zombies, their compulsions had drowned out guilt. Now the hunger was gone and memory remained. Some had devoured strangers. Some… had devoured family.
"I'm not their keeper," he said at last. "Hire trauma specialists real ones. If someone insists on ending it… don't restrain them."
A beat.
Then: "Segregate all Galactus-strain carriers into a single lab. And bring me the zombie duelist from earlier."
Nolan intended to study the Power of Galactus himself.
In this universe, three samples truly warranted his attention: the Zombie Sentinel, Zombie Phoenix, and Galactus. The rest he could read at a glance; they held nothing he needed to learn.
In Nolan's home timeline, Galactus had not yet moved against Earth. When that day came, Nolan preferred to meet him with Galactus's own power in hand.
Here, by contrast, Galactus had died absurdly.
Zombie "heroes," leveraging vibranium and exotic alloys, had cobbled together a cannon whose yield somehow felled one of the Five Abstracts.
Absurd yet this universe often was. The projection they killed was likely at a weakened minimum, augmented by Zombie Phoenix, Zombie Hulk, and others wielding improvised, parasitic techniques.
Wounded by the loop's attrition and a dozen ugly hacks, even a god could be dragged down.
For Nolan, that misfortune was an opportunity.
A fully powered Galactus would have demanded caution and might have alerted the true multiversal entity. Nolan carried far too many multiversal signatures to risk drawing that gaze.
Now, though, fragments of Galactus's might had been distributed among the infected. Easier to harvest. Galactus represented the material principle among the five if Nolan internalized that current, his nascent personal universe could start generating matter natively.
He could do it without it, eventually but this would accelerate everything.
He entered the containment wing.
On surgical plinths lay rows of zombie paragons. Scans showed near-limitless energy reservoirs coiled inside their ruined bodies yet their usage was painfully crude: energy bolts and short-range space hops.
"Reed's barrier shouldn't have stopped even a sliver of this," Nolan muttered, reading the telemetry. "They're swinging a star like a club."
Worse, the power had been divided. Each host held a meager fraction enough to scorch cities, not enough to echo Galactus's true portfolio.
That suited Nolan fine.
A chorus of snarls rolled through the lab. The Galactus-strain carriers were still zombified by design. Cure them now and the parasitic power might destabilize, detonating them from within.
He'd already told Peter: a universal cure had to wait until they safely extracted the Galactus current. Yes, many zombies had sampled cosmic meat but consumption wasn't the conduit. The apparent transfer worked because the zombie virus possessed a pseudo-singularity property, which acted as the carrier for Galactus's power.
Remove the power first; then cure the hosts.
Which aligned neatly with Nolan's goals.
"Begin," he said.
A thousand Nolans unfolded into the room sleek silhouettes stepping out of one another like frames of a film reversed. They were not avatars or illusions; they were cell-born selves, discrete workers budded from his Infinity Body, each armed with a sliver of his will and a genius sharpened by the Mind Stone.
Microscopes and grimoires lit at once. Instruments sang. Circles hummed.
"Anomalous energy located," one Nolan intoned. "Anchored at the interface of zombie pathogen and X-gene."
"Extraction difficulty: high. Binding energy surpasses the reference Elder-Dragon scale."
"Spectral profile: hierarchical; compatible with material-origin constant."
Nolan stood at the center, absorbing the rolling telemetry as each copy dissected, mapped, and modeled.
These were not lesser minds. They thought with him, not for him.
"They survived eating cosmic entities because the Galactus current kept replenishing them," another reported. "After a threshold, they ceased hunting people and started consuming worlds. Confirmed targets include fragments of Celestial culture… and Ego, the Living Planet."
Nolan extended his hand. His personal universe stirred gears unseen turning in the dark. He tuned it to the carrier frequency the copies had solved, the same way he'd once coaxed Dragonforce from slumber.
"Commence pull."
From every gurney, threads of violet-white radiance unwound, quivering free of the viral matrix and drifting toward Nolan like comet tails. Each filament crossed his skin and vanished—swallowed into the abyssal depth of the universe inside him.
Galactus.
One of the Five.
The effect was immediate.
The lab lights dimmed as reality itself seemed to take a careful breath. Gravity flexed gently but undeniably, as if a new center had entered the room.
Inside Nolan, creation shivered.
His inner cosmos, once an elegant framework stabilized by Power, Reality, Space, Time, Mind, and Soul, now felt hungry in a different way: not for energy, but for substance. Lattices formed spontaneously, baryonic seeds condensing where there had only been equations. Matter began to appear where once he'd only rearranged it.
Nolan closed his eyes, tasting the current.
The Material Principle answered him—not borrowed, not rented, but integrated.
"Good," he said softly. "Very good."
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