After some quick research, I realised we were pushing our timeline a little too tightly. By my calculations—confirmed by Julius and even the Watcher—we had roughly a year and a half before the Nine Realms aligned perfectly. That alignment was the only window that would let anyone reach the hidden dimension where the Reality Stone, the Aether, waited.
Thankfully, I had eidetic memory in both this life and my last, and I remembered Thor: The Dark World with ridiculous clarity. Jane Foster had stumbled into the Stone purely by accident, but I knew exactly where that accident would happen. That knowledge alone saved us months of blind searching.
With Julius and the Watcher working alongside me, the three of us deployed a considerable portion of Foundation and system resources into the operation. Our goal was simple: locate the dimensional tear before the Aether chose its next host.
Using the spatial-distortion detection units I bought from the system—because let's be honest, I absolutely did not have time to invent them from scratch—we pinpointed the region that matched the film's depiction. It wasn't perfect, but it was close enough to act on.
We set up a temporary field base and waited.
For months.
The spatial anomalies fluctuated but never fully opened… until, finally, the readings on the scanners spiked. The Realm-Veil was thin enough for traversal, though unstable. So we did what the Foundation always does in situations like this:
We sent in several D-Class.
Most vanished without a trace. No remains. No signals. Just… gone.
But one—one—returned.
Hours later, he stumbled out of the distortion with a dull crimson glow leaking from his skin, veins pulsing with liquid red light like molten metal. The Aether had chosen him as its host.
We immediately shifted from exploration to containment.
Everyone kept their distance, because I knew exactly what the Aether did. It consumed its host's life force to fuel its power and would violently defend itself if threatened. Killing the host by force wasn't an option—not unless we wanted a miniature reality storm tearing the base apart.
So we chose the only effective and controllable method:
We forced the Aether to burn through him.
We secured him inside a reinforced chamber and commanded him—through pain dampeners, obedience protocols, and reality-stabilisation fields—to use more and more of the Aether's power. Every flare of red energy drained him deeper, the Stone eating away at him to maintain its manifested form.
Eventually, inevitably, his body gave out.
The Aether slid free of the corpse like liquid blood mixed with smoke, spiralling through the air until it thrashed against our containment fields. But the traps held. The stabilisers held.
And at last, the Aether—the Reality Stone—solidified into its true form.
A pulsing, hell-red infinity gem.
We sealed it immediately inside a vibranium containment box, triple-layered with anti-reality wards. Even then, the metal trembled faintly as the Stone pressed against its confinement.
But it was ours.
The Reality Stone belonged to the Foundation now.
And this was only the beginning.