IM/DC Chapter 242 (Patreon)

Ten-thousand years later…

It’s been too long. I was just tired, people weren’t designed to live this long. I’ll go over the broad strokes of what happened during that time and then go over what I accomplished. It only took about another year to get most of Darkseid’s territory under my control. The billions that died every year dwindled back down to similar casualties as when Darkseid ruled. 

Humanity began peace talks with the Nova Corps and a partnership pact with the Almerac people. It gave them a foothold to begin exploring space. World War Three happened at about the same time it did in the original world and the only reason Earth still existed was the intervention of heroes. The talks for an Earth-wide government began which would eventually become the Earth Federation which became ‘The Federation’ after most of humanity no longer lived on Earth.

Most of the heroes died from old age and with the death of Superman, the first intergalactic war started with members who were waiting for the last Kryptonian to die to progress their war. They didn’t know about me for some reason or they didn’t think Clark would have children who were almost as strong as himself. Brainiac didn’t have Kandor shrunken down in this universe, it meant that pure Kryptonians were really extinct and only hybrids or clones had any Kryptonian DNA in them.

Every thousand years or so another large-scale galactic war would break out with each being bigger and more destructive than the last. Sapient races used every technological advancement they had to make their death beams that much more effective on their enemies. I stopped intervening after the second one took place and stopped caring about what happened by the fifth.

The Justice League kept evolving and eventually became a peacekeeping force similar to the Lantern Corps or ‘The Storm Force’ which was the peacekeeping force I created. The bulk of the Justice League still lived on Earth but as they kept expanding and began including more planets their name changed to the Legion of Super-Heroes.

It was an odd sight to see from the perspective of a long-lived person. I could see the mistakes most people would make before they would even make them but at some point had grown so apathetic I stopped caring what people would do. That was the problem with long life, it might seem like being effectively immortal was a good thing but it really wasn’t.

I had many children but most of them were born in the first hundred or so years of my life. Thousands of children a year became about a thousand, then five hundred, the last millennia I only had a few hundred children every year. I still had about ten million kids by the end of my journey, close to a billion grandkids and if you calculated the number of people with my blood running through their veins it would most likely reach over a trillion.

Even sex and love became stale after the first two or three thousand years. I had been cheated on countless times but at some point, it just didn’t hurt as much after it happened so many times. What would end in murder the first hundred or so times for both people often only resulted in me cutting ties with the woman after finding out. ‘Apathetic god’ was the nickname I picked up after I ruled for over five millennia.

People weren’t supposed to live this long and it showed. The number of my wives and children who had psychotic breaks and needed to be put down grew with every century that passed. It hurt at first but as the number of my children grew so did my disinterest in most. I didn’t love them all equally and anyone who says that about their children is just lying to spare the children who aren’t their favorite’s feelings. It wasn’t a fairytale ending where we all lived happily ever after, some of my children were so strong only I would have been able to kill them.

I gained more wives as time went on but just as many started to no longer want to live and ended themselves. Not having sex with me for about a hundred years would let them live out the rest of their long lives naturally but most took their own life when they decided they were done living. Besides the goddesses I fucked, only Natasha, Stephanie, Raven, and Wonder Woman outlived me.

Natasha became a mother figure for all of my children and had developed a motherly divinity at some point. She had the most children with me and almost never gave up on my children even when I needed to kill them because they became so evil I needed to put them down. Stephanie became the goddess of wisdom, her mental fortitude the only reason she could keep living as she saw things differently was her ever-expanding wisdom. Raven and Wonder Woman were just built differently than normal humans and the passage of time just seemed easier for them to deal with than other women.

I was content with my own death. I only managed to live as long as I did through sheer willpower at that point. I formed all my divinity and power into an energy source and began to shrink myself down. I traveled to a completely separate universe, one which was on the boundary of what was possible to go to. The alternate universes I could travel to all had one thing in common. They were superhero or villain worlds like Earth 616 or the MCU. Even Invincible and The Boys had their universes, each had the original and hundreds of not thousands of divergent worlds, but I couldn’t spread outside of that type of world.

There was no visiting the Earth I came from or other popular worlds like Dragonball or Rick and Morty. That was what I was trying to bypass. I had kept my original body when I traveled universes but I thought that if I exploded my lifeforce on the border of the hero bubble I could potentially be reborn in not only the hero universes but also ones separate from this type of reality.

And so I did. Expanding like my own version of the Big Bang I sacrificed all of my power to attempt to bypass the barrier. With the last nudge, before I lost consciousness, I felt myself breakthrough. Hundreds, then thousands of me were reborn. Tens of thousands then hundreds of thousands of me got the chance to be reborn. Then millions… Billions… An almost infinite amount of me.

More of my energy spread throughout the different universes. The creation of universes was similar to the Big Bang with a single universe expanding out into the known universes and past the threshold into the unknown. Like ripples on a pond, I followed behind the creation of new universes and would shortly appear in them in some form or another. I became an almost constant in most universes.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

My faded consciousness comes back into focus as I look around my surroundings. It’s dark, I’m surrounded by shadows until I look forward. There stood an old man. It was impossible to make out any of his details but I just knew he was old. A flood of forgotten memories comes back to my head. I’ve met this person before.

The blurry face looking at me starts to fade enough for me to recognize his face is smiling as he speaks. “Welcome back Danny boy… It’s been about ten thousand years since we last met, give or take a year or two. So, now you have a choice to make.”