Chapter 282: Chapter 282: The Changing World

Extremis had landed like a massive stone in still water, and the ripples were still spreading across the globe.

The first wave was pure hope.

In the months immediately following the launch, A.I.M. was flooded with applications from every corner of the world. Patients who had spent years in wheelchairs. Veterans who had lost limbs. Children born with conditions that medicine had called permanent. The waiting list grew to hundreds of thousands within weeks. A.I.M. scaled manufacturing as aggressively as they could, rapidly opening state-of-the-art treatment facilities in London, Geneva, Singapore, and São Paulo.

The stories of success came in tidal waves, and each one was a small, profound miracle.

By the end of the first year, Extremis had successfully treated over forty thousand patients worldwide. The success rate was a staggering ninety-nine point seven percent. The three-tenths of a percent who didn’t respond fully were complex cases where Extremis couldn’t clearly differentiate between healthy tissue and specific, overlapping damage. Yet, even those patients showed significant partial improvement.

Suffering was rapidly becoming optional.

Then came the second wave.

At a flat fifty thousand dollars, Extremis didn’t just compete with existing medical procedures. It ruthlessly replaced them. The math was merciless. Why pay three hundred thousand dollars for a risky organ transplant followed by a lifetime of immunosuppressant drugs costing thousands per month when Extremis could flawlessly regenerate the original organ for a fraction of the price? Why spend half a million dollars on agonizing, experimental spinal surgeries with a forty percent success rate when fifty thousand fixed it permanently in a week?

Patients did the math. Patients chose Extremis. And the medical establishment began to feel the ground move beneath its feet.

Insurance companies scrambled to restructure. Their entire framework, built over decades around the cost of surgeries and hospital stays and long-term care, was suddenly broken. Plans had to be rewritten. Premiums recalculated. The ones that adapted survived. The ones too slow or too stubborn began to bleed money.

Hospitals were hit the hardest. Massive surgical wings that had run at full capacity for decades began to empty out. Transplant departments saw their patient numbers drop by half. Reconstructive surgeons found their calendars clearing. Trauma centres that depended on the steady flow of complex cases started operating at a loss.

Some hospitals pivoted quickly. They aggressively retrained staff into areas Extremis couldn’t touch Neurology. Psychiatry. The precision specialities that required human judgment, not just biological repair. Those institutions survived. Some even thrived in the new landscape.

The ones that desperately clung to the old, broken model suffered.

Surgeons were the hardest hit on a personal level. Men and women who had spent a decade or more in grueling training, who had built entire careers around abilities that were now obsolete overnight, found themselves adrift. Some retrained. Some moved into research. Some retrained. Some moved into theoretical research. Some left medicine entirely in bitter frustration. The skill was still there. The desperate need for it simply wasn’t.

Progress always carried a cost, but Arthur did not lose much sleep over it. The net result for humanity was overwhelmingly, undeniably positive.

Arthur watched the changes with quiet awareness. Extremis was reshaping the world faster than most people could process, breaking systems that had stood for decades and replacing them just as quickly. It would settle eventually. It always did.

Arthur had other priorities.

His routine with Asgard had evolved. He still went most nights after the children were asleep, portaling back before they woke. The time difference between realms worked in his favour. Asgard’s days didn’t align with Earth’s, so Arthur could fit a full training session with Thor’s group and hours in the Archives into what was a single night on Earth. And as his standing grew, the Asgardian librarians had begun allowing him to bring tomes back to his study in London. That cut his time in the Archives considerably.

The death magic work filled whatever gaps remained. A quiet afternoon when the house was still. An hour between returning from Asgard and the children stirring. Eve ran the searches continuously in the background, flagging targets across the globe as they surfaced. Arthur would assess them, prioritize them, and deal with them when his window opened.

The list grew steadily.

Some were Mephisto’s unfortunate victims. They were exhausted souls chained to bodies that should have died long ago, every single one of them desperate for release.

Others were much darker. Wizards and rogue practitioners who had extended their lives by draining the people around them. Stolen life force and parasitic, bloody rituals. The universe had no shortage of people who refused to leave the party when the lights came on.

Arthur dealt with them all quietly and methodically.

The Mephisto victims were always the same. He’d arrive, read the thread, listen to the story, and when they asked, he’d dissolve the chain and let them go. They never put up a fight. They were universally grateful for their suffering to end so they could finally move on to the afterlife. It said a lot about Mephisto’s sadistic methods.

The others, the necromancers and dark wizards, did not receive the kind Arthur. After seeing what they had done through their memories, Arthur did not grant them the gentle passage he gave Mephisto’s victims. He asked Eve to focus more on these kinds of people. They were the ones Arthur wanted gone first, before they could consume any more innocent souls to fuel their unnatural longevity.

Each release deepened his connection to the threshold. Death Sight was now as natural as breathing. The second tier, threshold authority, shimmered at the edges of his reach. Close, but not quite there yet. It was like seeing the faint outline of a door in a dark room and knowing it would only open when the time was perfectly right.

But power did not mean indiscriminate judgment.

Arthur was not always the executioner. There were some he left completely alone. He found a weary wizard in northern China who had tethered his soul to a remote mountain for eight hundred years. Terrified of death, the man had invented a totally new way of continuing his life. It caused no harm to anyone but himself. Arthur sat with him for an hour, drank tea, listened to his ancient stories, and simply walked away. His time was long past, but his harmless method of extending life was hurting no one. Arthur had no cause to act.

The mark on his chest pulsed in steady rhythm, as if the entity it represented fully agreed with Arthur’s measured, balanced practice.

—

For months, the work had followed a reliable pattern. Targets appeared. Arthur acted.

Until it didn’t.

During one of Eve’s expanded global searches, she flagged something entirely unexpected.

It wasn’t the usual longevity anomaly. Two researchers in California had undergone sudden personality changes after acquiring an unknown artifact from a house they’d recently purchased.

Eve flagged it because the behavioral pattern perfectly matched one of the secondary search parameters Arthur had set up. Horcrux possession indicators. The behavioral signature of a person being slowly consumed by a dark magical artifact.

Arthur Apparated to the location expecting routine cleanup.

He arrived at the house and didn’t bother with polite introductions. A wave of his hand put both researchers into a deep, dreamless sleep on their living room floor. They’d wake in an hour with no memory of his visit. He could deal with whatever he found and sort out their mental damage afterward.

He followed the darkness.

It wasn’t hard. Through Death Sight the corruption stood out like a bonfire in a dark field. It led him through the house and down into the basement, past shelves of ordinary clutter, to a concealed space beneath the floorboards.

A book.

One look at the heavy, iron-clasped cover, and Arthur recognized it.

The memories came from two sources at once. His previous life offered fragments. Vague impressions of a dangerous book connected to Wanda, to chaos magic, to events that had broken reality. His training at Kamar-Taj filled in the rest. The Masters of the Mystic Arts knew all about this book. They knew exactly what it was, where it came from, and what it inevitably did to everyone who dared open it. They feared it above almost all else.

The Darkhold. Chthon’s grimoire. One of the most dangerous artifacts in existence.

Arthur hadn’t expected to find it here. He’d known it existed somewhere in the world, along with its counterpart, the Book of Vishanti. Both had been on his mental list of artifacts to eventually locate and secure. He’d assumed that hunt would happen years from now. Instead, Eve’s algorithm had stumbled onto it completely by accident.

A very happy accident.

Arthur opened it without a shred of hesitation.

The pages adapted to him instantly. The text appeared in English, clean and precise, as though the book had been waiting for him specifically. It read him in the same moment he read it. Found his interests, his knowledge gaps, his ambitions.

And it began offering.

The first pages showed him dimensional theory that went far beyond anything the vast Kamar-Taj archives contained. Impossible pathways between realities. Complex methods of accessing limitless energy from dimensions he’d only theorized about. The information was real.

He turned more pages. Enchantment techniques that could amplify magical output by orders of magnitude. Formulas for creating constructs from dark matter. Spells that could project consciousness across the multiverse. There was even a detailed, agonizingly tempting method to force his body to adapt to Ancient Magic quickly, rapidly progressing toward the permanent Arcane Body Arthur so desperately wanted.

But Arthur was not enticed. Because beneath all the glorious knowledge, woven through every single page like sweet poison through honey, he could feel the deep, rotting corruption.

The book wasn’t just showing him knowledge. It was reshaping the knowledge to match his desires, presenting everything through a lens that made its methods feel natural, obvious, the only logical path forward. Each page pulled deeper. Each revelation made the next one feel more necessary.

Arthur felt the hooks trying to set. The faint, insidious tug of obsession taking root. The beginning of the process that had consumed many of the book’s past owners.

He slammed the book shut.

The information was valuable. Genuinely valuable. Some of what the Darkhold contained would take decades to discover through conventional research. The dimensional theory alone was worth years of study. And the Arcane Body… Arthur had spent months in the Asgardian Archives searching for that exact shortcut with no success.

But the delivery method was the problem. The Darkhold didn’t share knowledge freely. It traded knowledge for pieces of your will, your judgment, your sanity. Even Arthur, with all his Occlumency shields and mental defenses, was not immune to this ancient trap. Every page read was a transaction, and the price was always vastly more than the reader realized until it was far too late to stop.

The Darkhold offered a faster route to certain kinds of incredible knowledge. But the cost was dependency on Chthon’s energy and the gradual erosion of everything Arthur had built.

Not worth it. Not today. And possibly not ever in the way the book intended.

But having it secured was better than leaving it in the wild. One day, with proper precautions and sufficient understanding of Chthon’s chaos magic tradition, he might extract useful knowledge from it safely. On his terms, with his defenses firmly in place, without letting the corruption gain even a toehold. It was a resource to be carefully, ruthlessly managed, not carelessly used.

He applied a thorough Obliviate to both researchers. Smoothed out the behavioral damage the book had inflicted. They’d remember buying a house with an interesting basement. Nothing more.

The Darkhold went into the deepest vault in his London manor. Seven overlapping layers of magical protection. Three distinct dimensional locks.

Arthur also knew this wasn’t the only copy. His fragmented memories suggested at least one more existed somewhere in the world. In the possession of an ancient witch. Someone who had extended her life well past its natural span, which put her squarely on his crusade’s target list anyway. He’d asked Eve to search for Agatha Harkness, but nothing had surfaced yet. No digital or magical trace.

She would surface eventually. Maybe she would target Wanda exactly like she had in the canon.

And that would be her biggest, and absolutely final, mistake.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep