My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible - Chapter 441 Trip Back Home

Chapter 441  Trip Back Home

The Mars trip lasted several hours before they decided to return home, as Liam finally gestured toward the spacecraft, and nobody argued.

They had been in space for more than twenty-four hours. They had walked on Mars. They had left footprints on a world that had never held human footprints before theirs.

They had become the first group to step on Mars and the first group to have experienced an actual space trip.

The trip back to Earth would take almost a day, so they had more than enough time to talk about their experiences.

They started talking about what they had experienced in the past 24 hours and the conversation started with Kristy who had recorded the entire experience, even Matt’s spectacular seventh jump attempt, which she had already watched four times and showed no signs of stopping.

She had her phone out, scrolling through footage, and the others drifted toward her one by one until half the group was watching over her shoulder.

“I’ll edit all of this and send it to the group chat,” she said.

“Please include the slow motion of Matt eating Martian dust,” Alex said.

“Already flagged it,” Kristy said.

Matt leaned over and looked at the timestamp. “You flagged it while I was still lying face down, didn’t you.”

“Before you finished saying you were fine, yes.”

The group laughed. Matt looked at the footage and then looked away with the expression of a man choosing dignity over engagement.

“But you all know that I didn’t eat anything, because of the visor, right?”

“Technically, you did. But you don’t have to worry as I won’t post any of it,” Kristy said, as she lowered her phone. The lightness in her voice had shifted into a more deliberate tone.

The others nodded. It hadn’t needed to be said, but saying it aloud made it real in the same way Stacy had needed to say the obvious thing about the crater.

“Some experiences aren’t for sharing,” Stacy said. “Not with people who weren’t there.”

“This is exactly the kind of thing that becomes a decade-long inside joke,” Matt said. “Twenty years from now, one of us is going to say ‘remember Mars’ in the middle of some completely unrelated conversation and we’re all going to lose it.”

“Remember when Matt said he was fine to the ground,” Harper added.

“I was fine,” Matt said.

“You were horizontal,” Elise said.

“Horizontally fine.”

The laughter settled, and Alex leaned back in his seat with a thoughtful expression.

“If someone had told me three months ago,” he said slowly, “that I would spend a day flying through space in a privately owned spacecraft, wearing an exosuit built by an AGI, standing on Mars…” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have been rude about it. I would have just looked at them for a long time and then changed the subject.”

“And now?” Lana asked.

“Now I’ve done all of those things and the part that affected me most was a patch of green grass in a universe that isn’t ours.” He paused. “Which is not something I expected to say.”

A few of them smiled at that. The Heartstone patch had done something to all of them that was harder to explain than the spacecraft or the exosuits. It was small and quiet and alive.

“I can’t but wonder how the world would react if the existence of multiple universes became public knowledge, and with actual confirmed fact with evidence… what do you think would happen?” Kristopher asked.

“Global meltdown,” Alex replied to the question.

“The multiverse theory has been floating in academic circles for decades,” Kristopher continued. “People have played with the idea. But playing with an idea and being confronted with proof are completely different experiences. If it came out that there’s a cultivation universe, a mana universe, that the entities in human mythology are real and operating in adjacent realities…” He exhaled slowly. “Every religious institution on Earth would reacts. Every government would reacts. The psychological impact on the general population alone would be destabilizing.”

“Humanity would feel small,” Lana said.

“Humanity would feel irrelevant,” Alex corrected. “Which is worse.”

The group sat with that for a moment.

None of them had any intention of sharing what they knew. They hadn’t even told their parents about Liam’s identity as the owner of Nova Technologies, not even when asked directly, not even when their parents had clearly suspected. This was a larger secret by several orders of magnitude, and it required no discussion.

Kristopher looked at Liam. “Tell us about the universes,” he said. “What are the people like? What do they look like? Are they as violent as the stories make them sound?”

Liam was quiet for a moment, organizing his thoughts. “I haven’t had much exposure to the mana universe yet,” he said. “But the cultivation universe, yes. Enough to have a picture of it.” He paused. “They’re not different from us in the ways people imagine. Same intelligence. Same capacity for loyalty, for cruelty, for ambition, for kindness. The same traits humans have, just more concentrated and more visible.”

“Why more visible?” Stacy asked.

“Because the structure is different. On Earth, systems exist that moderate behavior. Law, consequence, social pressure. In the cultivation universe, the strong rule and the weak get oppressed. There’s no moderating layer. Whatever people are, they get to be it fully.”

“So it brings out the worst,” Elise said.

“And the best,” Liam said. “Both, equally. You see real loyalty there because loyalty actually costs something. You see real courage because the alternative is death. The emotions run the same as ours, just without anything softening them.”

Harper smiled faintly. “It sounds like Earth with the volume turned up.”

“That’s not wrong,” Liam said. “The mana universe is similar from what I’ve seen. Different aesthetic, but the same fundamental human nature operating under different pressures.”

Lana had been watching Liam carefully during this. She leaned forward slightly. “How strong are you,” she asked, “relative to what’s out there? Give us an actual comparison, not deflection”

Liam smiled at the “not deflection” qualifier. He thought about how to frame it honestly.

“On Earth,” he said, “I could cause extinction-level devastation without breaking a sweat, and without the help any technology.”

The cabin went quiet immediately after he said that.

His friends stared at him. They had known he was powerful, but extinction-level was a specific phrase with specific implications, and it landed on all of them at the same weight.

“You could end humanity,” Matt said, just making sure he’d heard correctly.

“Yes.”

Matt absorbed that. “And you’re telling us this very casually.”

“You asked,” Liam said.

Kristopher said nothing for several seconds. “Where does that put you relative to what’s in the other universes?”

“Weak,” Liam said. “In the cultivation universe, I’m still in the early stages of what’s considered the mortal realm. In the universe that contains gods…” He paused. “Barely considered a speck of dust.”

His friends exchanged looks.

The expressions were complicated in a way that was difficult to categorize. There was something almost unfair about the information. On one hand, their friend could end human civilization without effort. On the other hand, the universe contained beings that made that fact irrelevant. The scale kept expanding no matter how far out they looked, and every time it expanded, the previous scale shrank into insignificance.

Matt laughed, but it was the rueful kind. “I was going to ask if we could visit the cultivation universe sometime,” he said. “But now I’m thinking I’ll wait until I can at least survive the atmosphere without dying immediately.”

“Actually, I’m thinking of creating a technology that can help you all to increase your strength. I’m still working through the design,” Liam said. ” And it’s going to be a higher version of a product we plan to announce soon. It’s a health sector product.”

Kristopher raised an eyebrow. “You mean you plan to destroy the health sector and you haven’t mentioned it until now?”

“We haven’t announced it yet.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

Kristopher shook his head with a slow smile. “The world barely has time to absorb 10 terabytes per second internet with zero distance limitation, and Nova Technologies is already sitting on something that dismantles healthcare.”

“Big pharma is going to lose their minds,” Elise said.

“They’re going to do everything they can to block it,” Stacy added.

“It won’t be any fun if they just accept it,” Liam said.

The conversation continued from there, drifting between topics with the ease of people who had nothing left to be shocked by for the rest of the day.

They talked about the flight sequence and who had actually been most graceful through the shaft, which became a debate that produced no consensus.

They talked about what Liam’s announcement timeline looked like and what the world’s reaction would be. They talked about Matt’s jump footage in considerably more detail than Matt considered necessary.

Outside the windows, the stars held their positions, fixed and indifferent, and Earth grew slowly in the distance.