The stars above New York twinkled like ancient eyes, watching the world from their eternal distance. On the third-floor terrace of the Howlett estate, James Howlett stood in silence, gazing upward into the cosmos.
The night sky of the 1920s—untainted by modern pollution or excessive electric glare—was still honest. The Milky Way stretched across the heavens like a painter's careless stroke, and James could trace the constellations as if they were memories etched into his soul.
He came up here often now.
In quieter days, when Asazo was younger and clung to him with fierce curiosity, he'd bring the boy along. They would sit in silence, heads tilted back, watching meteors flash and fade while the world turned slowly beneath them.
Tonight, James didn't sit. He levitated.
No visible propulsion, no wings or repulsor systems. Just force. Internal. Intentional.
The air around him shimmered faintly as his body rose—graceful, slow—carried by the mastery of his own biology. At first, he could only manage slight lifts, pushing against gravity like a swimmer struggling to break surface tension. But with practice—grueling, patient, bloody practice—he had learned to direct his strength inward, then release it outward in a controlled burst. It was subtle, like squeezing breath into glass.
Stellar energy, the Eastern monks had called it. The Dan Jin. The breath between breaths. It was part myth, part martial principle—and very real.
His feet left the floor. He rose meters into the air, then hundreds. The manor beneath him became a miniature diorama—perfect and still—while the world spread out beyond the Hudson River.
James Howlett, the man the world once called Wolverine, had spent the better part of a decade unlearning everything he thought he understood about strength.
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He had once believed the key to power lay in violence. Sharp claws. Fast reflexes. Unkillable rage. But that was a crude tool—brute instinct wielded without finesse.
Now, his body was a laboratory, and he the sole subject.
The first time he'd achieved what the Taoists called "Baodan," the Golden Pill, he had misunderstood everything. He believed he had merely stumbled upon a deeper layer of evolution—a genetic unlocking of the nine nodes along the spine that had triggered an acceleration in his healing factor and skeletal regeneration.
It was true, in part.
But Eastern philosophy offered a different explanation. The Golden Pill was not just biological. It was psychological. Spiritual. A fusion of essence, breath, and spirit—jing, qi, and shen. A perfect loop of unity. In their understanding, the body's transformation could only be complete when the mind aligned with it.
James had dismissed that idea at first. Then questioned it. Then lived it.
He had no master, no scrolls passed down from secret sects. Only scattered manuscripts, smuggled out of temples destroyed in distant wars. And trial. Error. Pain.
But what he eventually realized was profound: mutants were a different equation.
Their transformation came not only through deliberate practice, but also through genetic ignition—events tied to emotions, stress, sometimes even random chance. There were no universal manuals for them.
So when James had first formed the so-called Golden Pills along his spine, what he'd really done was unlock the second stage of mutant evolution—something so rare that most mutants would never achieve it in a lifetime.
He felt it in his marrow—the true source of his gift. Not in his muscles. Not in his skin. But deep in the bone marrow, where blood formed, where regeneration lived. The same marrow that had once accepted the adamantium and turned him into a weapon.
His heart pumped that power outward.
And that discovery opened the door to a new theory of evolution—not just in body, but in practice.
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The Evolution Technique, as he called it, was divided into stages:
The First Stage was control. Mastery of movement. Emotional discipline. It trained mutants to align their bodily instincts with their powers—like teaching a gun to choose its target, rather than fire at random. Most never completed this stage. Asazo had, though. His teleportation, once erratic and short-ranged, now spanned oceans. He could blink across continents in less than a minute. His development was elegant, if not spiritual.
The Second Stage was awakening—an internal reorganization of one's body and spirit that unlocked a deeper layer of their mutant gift. For James, it had meant rebuilding his skeleton from the marrow outward. For others, it might involve cellular regeneration, electromagnetic attunement, or even psychic fusion.
But the risk was staggering. One wrong step, one misfire, and the mutant gene could collapse entirely. Permanently. That had already happened to a test subject in Shanghai—a mutant who'd tried to awaken too fast and instead lost the ability to breathe air without pain.
James had no intention of making that mistake again. He was perfecting the technique not just for himself—but for the next generation.
He floated above the manor, motionless, lost in introspection. His awareness was turned inward now, examining tissue, pressure points, flow of hormone release, synaptic ignition.
If he could master this, he could teach it. If he could teach it, he could protect them.
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A soft shift in the wind drew his attention outward again. He turned, his gaze settling on the distant shores of West Egg, where a blindingly ornate estate—Gatsby's mansion—blazed like a second sun.
The weekend gala had begun.
Floodlights illuminated the night. The sounds of jazz—urgent, drunken, alive—drifted across the bay, carried by the pulse of reckless youth and bootlegged gin. He could hear laughter, glasses clinking, the muffled screams of socialites lost in excess. The mansion was a kaleidoscope of movement.
Decadence, James thought. Not without judgment, but not with disdain either. Just... observation.
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Down below, in the thick of the Gatsby soirée, a different story played out.
Inside the grand marble ballroom, Penser—a tall, stoic Wakandan youth—stood frozen with a tray of hors d'oeuvres in hand, momentarily lost in the chaos around him. The music throbbed through his chest. Men in crisp tuxedos shouted over champagne; women in sequined gowns spun like electric gyroscopes.
Penser's eyes darted around. Not with fear, but confusion. This wasn't his world. Not yet.
"Panser! Black Panser! Come on, man—you're on snacks tonight, remember?" a stocky Black teenager—Deion—clapped him on the back, dragging him from his daze. "You hustle hard here, they tip like it's Wall Street."
Penser nodded silently, adjusting his collar.
He wasn't used to the lights. He missed the orange glow of African sunsets, the soft buzz of cicadas, the way the air tasted of dust and old roots. In his tribe, they hunted rhinos and carved masks by moonlight. Here, he was a shadow in a steel jungle, walking tightropes of etiquette and code.
But he had a mission.
He wasn't here to party. He wasn't here to serve. He was here to learn.
Learn their weapons. Their politics. Their secrets.
Only then could he return home and take his place.
He stepped into the crowd, silver tray in hand, eyes open, ears tuned. Every whisper could be a clue. Every careless admission a key.
Behind him, Deion laughed and slipped another canapé into his mouth.
And above them, on a distant terrace suspended in the stars, James Howlett watched quietly, eyes shining with knowledge hard-earned and painfully kept.
(End of Chapter 56)