Xu Wenwu watched the glowing amber of the Dragon Balls cool, fading into dull, lifeless stone. He let out a slow, measured breath, feeling the cosmic pressure finally lift from the island.
"Two wishes," Wenwu said quietly. "The dragon has grown again."
Ying Li stood beside him, her arms folded against the biting sea wind. She looked at the empty space where the god had just been. "A mass resurrection," she murmured. "The world won't be the same after today."
She wasn't wrong, and they both knew it. The rules of mortality had just been publicly rewritten.
In the realm of Death, nothing moved the way it did in the living world. Time was a completely different construct there—less a flowing river than a settling, infinite sediment.
Death had not been bored, exactly. Boredom required a baseline of expectation, a desire for something else. She simply was, and the souls arrived from the living universe, and the eternal count climbed the exact way it always had since the dawn of creation.
Then, suddenly, a cluster of them violently reversed.
She noticed it the way a person notices a sudden, sharp sound in an otherwise perfectly silent room. It wasn't alarming—just fundamentally wrong enough to be interesting. Individual resurrections happened occasionally. The universe produced rare abilities and artifacts capable of cheating the ledger, and she had always treated them as a minor tithe paid in reverse, the temporary prerogative of whoever had grown magically strong enough to take it. She did not begrudge the powerful their small, fleeting thefts. They all came back to her eventually.
This was not small.
Thousands of souls, ripped backward through the veil simultaneously. She followed the cosmic trace back to its origin without effort, moving the way water finds a crack in stone. One look at the tiny, blue-green planet in a backwater galaxy was more than enough. The absolute information assembled itself in her consciousness.
Dragon Balls. Wishes. Mass Resurrection.
A newly born power.
Smith Doyle.
Death considered this impossibility for a moment that may have lasted an hour or a microscopic instant. Then, she turned her vast, cold attention to a completely different corner of the universe.
Thanos of Titan was alone when she appeared. He had been alone for some time, brooding in the cavernous silence of his sanctuary.
He recognized her immediately. The Mad Titan went perfectly, terrifyingly still, the way he always went still in her divine presence—a deliberate, agonizing containment, locking every ounce of his immense power and emotion safely behind the surface. He had spent centuries brutally perfecting that particular discipline.
"Thanos." Death's voice carried no gender, no warmth, and no cold. It was simply the end of all things. "I am told you intend to collect the Infinity Stones and eliminate half of all life in the universe. For my benefit."
"May their passing bring you absolute pleasure." Thanos kept his heavy eyes cast slightly downward. It was not groveling supplication—just profound caution.
"Something has appeared on Earth," she stated. "Dragon Balls. Wish-granting artifacts. The sheer scope of their power may approach that of the Infinity Stones."
She paused, letting the weight of the cosmic revelation settle over the warlord.
"They could accelerate your great work considerably."
And then, she was gone. There was no transition, no fading light, no farewell. The dark space where she had been standing was simply empty.
Thanos looked at the empty air for a long, heavy moment.
She had come to him specifically. The physical embodiment of Death had left her abstract realm, taken a tangible form, and crossed the vast, echoing distance between dead stars and a living universe—just to tell him about seven spheres resting on a primitive dirt planet. Death did not make that kind of journey for minor, fleeting concerns.
He slowly sat back, turning the terrifying intelligence over in his calculating mind.
He had already known about the Dragon Balls for some time. His deep-space scouts had nervously flagged the anomalous energy spike after the very first sky-darkening event. He had subsequently searched through every ancient archive, every digitized planetary database, and every cosmic library available to his massive armada.
He had found absolutely nothing. No origin point, no magical documentation, no record of the objects existing in any known catalog of cosmic artifacts.
That deafening absence of information had looked exactly like a trap. Odin All-Father was patient and precise, and a localized cache of god-tier, wish-granting artifacts sitting openly on his protected territory, conveniently undocumented, had smelled overwhelmingly like bait designed to draw Thanos into a fatal ambush.
But Death did not lay traps. Death had absolutely no use for them.
Which meant the Dragon Balls were completely real. And the total absence of historical documentation meant they were genuinely new. They were something that had simply not existed in the universe long enough to be formally cataloged by the cosmic powers.
Thanos ruthlessly reviewed what he already knew about Earth, and the tactical picture remained frustratingly complicated. The Space Stone was currently there—confirmed, and bizarrely not retrieved to Asgard's vaults despite Loki's humiliating defeat. The Mind Stone had also remained on the planet after Loki foolishly lost the scepter.
That meant one of two things: either Odin was quietly collecting them on Earth for Thor to inherit, or the geopolitical situation on the planet was infinitely more chaotic and fractured than it appeared from orbit.
He had already decided not to resolve that particular question through brute force. A direct, massive armada strike on a planet under Odin's explicit protection, with the Nova Empire and the rest of the universe watching, would instantly trigger a massive, unified coalition response before he could complete the collection. Thanos needed three or four Stones acquired at blinding speed before the universe could organize a standing army against him. He did not yet possess enough actionable intelligence on the locations of the Reality Stone, the Soul Stone, or the Time Stone to plan that rapid sequence.
The Dragon Balls fundamentally changed the entire calculation.
Not by much—but more than enough to require an immediate tactical decision.
He needed someone on the ground. Someone highly capable, perfectly unobtrusive, and entirely expendable, so that their inevitable exposure or death would not formally announce his grand intentions to Asgard or Kamar-Taj.
He would need to think very carefully about who.