I fell in Marvel with Essence Gacha but I’ve never heard of Marvel

After getting pulled into more and more bizarre situations, including that towering giant called a Celestial, Lex had finally decided that he needed to train. It had only been a couple of days since his life had turned into a constant parade of increasingly ridiculous supernatural incidents, but that was more than enough time for him to realize that simply possessing powerful abilities wasn't the same thing as actually knowing how to use them. The Essence of Transcendent Self and the Player's Handbook gave him an absurd foundation for growth, and Lex still had no idea where the upper limits of those powers actually were, but he had already seen enough to know that there was plenty of room for him to improve. For now, he wasn't looking for some ultimate breakthrough or trying to immediately reach the highest level of power imaginable; he simply wanted to start pushing himself and see what happened when he actually trained seriously.

The first thing he needed was somewhere suitable for that.

More specifically, he needed an uninhabited planet, preferably one as far away from Earth as he could reasonably get. There was no point in finding a training ground only to discover that his first serious experiment had accidentally flattened a city, shifted a continent, or attracted another cosmic being to Earth because his powers had decided to announce themselves to the universe. Lex had already learned that lesson with the Celestial, and although he had no intention of becoming paranoid, there was a difference between being cautious and being stupid.

So, obviously, Lex took out the Spacehog.

He wasn't going to use the other spaceship he had acquired, because that thing was enormous enough that he was fairly certain it would need an entire crew just to start the damn thing. The Spacehog, on the other hand, was technically a spaceship but looked much more like an oversized motorcycle, which made it considerably more convenient for someone who had absolutely no idea what he was doing when it came to piloting spaceships. Lex climbed onto the vehicle and looked over the controls for several seconds before deciding that the best way to learn was probably to simply start it.

“Let's see what happens.”

His hand moved toward the controls, and the Spacehog responded immediately.

Vrooooommm…

The engine roared to life with a deep mechanical growl that seemed almost absurdly loud for something that was about to leave the planet. The motorcycle-like spaceship vibrated beneath Lex as its systems activated, and although he had no idea what half of the controls were supposed to do, Raphael apparently did. She began feeding him instructions directly through his mind, explaining which controls to use and how to maneuver the vehicle, allowing Lex to follow along without having to spend several hours figuring out the controls himself.

“Wait, we actually still don't have a star map, right?” Lex asked as the Spacehog began accelerating upward. “How are we supposed to get anywhere?”

<Star maps are useful when traveling to a specific planet. Our destination is simply any uninhabited planet, and such planets are abundant.>

“Oh yeah.”

Lex twisted the throttle.

The Spacehog responded immediately, its engine roaring louder as the motorcycle-like craft accelerated through the atmosphere. The sensation was considerably more exhilarating than Lex had expected, especially once the ground began shrinking beneath him and the familiar blue of Earth's atmosphere gave way to the darkness of space. He grinned beneath himself as the Spacehog continued climbing, the sheer absurdity of riding what was essentially a motorcycle into outer space not lost on him in the slightest.

<We are now sufficiently distant from Earth to activate the Warp Drive.>“Let's gooo!”

Lex's shout disappeared into the vacuum the instant it left the Spacehog, leaving him yelling enthusiastically at absolutely nobody as the vehicle activated its Warp Drive. Space itself seemed to distort around him, stars stretching into brilliant lines before the entire universe appeared to fold away, and then, almost as quickly as it had begun, the Spacehog emerged on the other side of the galaxy.

Lex stared at the unfamiliar stars surrounding him.

“Okay. That was awesome.”

He immediately stored the Spacehog inside his inventory. There was no reason to keep riding it when he could simply fly under his own power, especially now that his Kryptonian abilities gave him more than enough protection to survive the vacuum of space. Lex turned his attention toward the surrounding system and began searching for a suitable planet, eventually spotting one relatively nearby.

It looked unpleasant.

That was perfect.

Lex flew toward the planet, simultaneously beginning the first part of his training by consciously using more and more of the abilities he had inherited through the H'El Template. He wasn't simply flying toward his destination anymore; he was deliberately paying attention to the sensations within his body, experimenting with his speed, strength and other Kryptonian abilities as he went. He had already possessed these powers for a while, but there was a significant difference between having an ability and actually becoming accustomed to using it instinctively.

Eventually, Lex descended toward the planet.

The first thing he noticed was the storm.

The entire world seemed to be caught in a perpetual atmospheric nightmare, with enormous clouds twisting across the sky and violent winds tearing through the landscape. The gravity was approximately six times that of Earth, while the atmosphere was composed primarily of hydrogen and helium, with essentially no oxygen present. For an ordinary human being, the planet would have been an instant death sentence, but Lex merely looked around with mild curiosity.

He didn't need oxygen.

He didn't care about the pressure.

The increased gravity wasn't enough to meaningfully inconvenience his body either.

And despite the enormous storms raging across the planet, Lex was perfectly fine.

“Not bad.”

He looked around at the barren landscape.

“It's basically just a giant rock with weather trying to kill everything.”

That was exactly what he wanted.

There was one more reason Lex had chosen to come this far away from Earth, however, and that reason was the bloodline card sitting in his inventory.

The last time he had equipped a bloodline, the appearance of the Celestial had been enough to threaten Earth, and Lex had no intention of repeating that experience. The bloodline he was about to use was only a 4★ card rather than the 5★ Bloodline of Io, so there was no reason to assume the commotion would be anywhere near as severe, but “less severe” didn't mean “completely harmless.” If something did happen, Lex would rather have a smaller cosmic incident occur several galaxies away from Earth than risk another giant appearing over New York.

What if this time it was simply a smaller giant?

Being cautious was the way to go.

Lex retrieved the Riordanverse Bloodline Card and activated it, selecting the Gaia Bloodline from the available options. Raphael had already researched the bloodlines available to him and determined that Gaia was particularly suitable for Lex, especially considering the existence of his World's End Flower Garden, so there was little reason for him to choose anything else.

The moment Lex selected the bloodline, he felt something change.

There was no explosion.

No cosmic disturbance.

No giant appearing in the sky.

Instead, Lex simply felt a connection form between himself and something vast, ancient and natural. It was faint, almost imperceptible at first, but it was undeniably there, like a thread connecting him to the natural world around him. Lex waited for several seconds, expecting something more dramatic to happen.

Nothing did.

“Huh.”

He looked around.

That was it?

After everything that had happened with the Bloodline of Io, Lex had been expecting Gaia to at least throw some sort of dramatic introduction at him. Instead, the planet remained exactly as it had been before, with its violent storms continuing to rage across the landscape as though nothing had changed.

“Well, that was anticlimactic.”

Still, there was no reason to assume the bloodline was useless simply because nothing dramatic had happened. Lex was currently standing on a planet separated from Earth by an enormous distance, and considering Gaia's connection to Earth itself, there was every chance that he simply couldn't feel the full extent of what he had gained from this far away.

He would find out eventually.

For now, he had more immediate things to worry about.

Training.

The first ability Lex wanted to work on was Telekinesis.

He possessed the Omega Rank Telekinesis he had gained genetically, as well as the additional Telekinesis inherited through the H'El Template. Both were genetic abilities that relied on his mental power, meaning their origins were different but their underlying resource was similar. They could also work together, although their effects weren't multiplicative; if one could exert ten units of telekinetic force and the other could exert another ten, combining them gave him twenty rather than one hundred.

That distinction mattered.

Lex also had the Force, but he deliberately set it aside for now. The Force was fundamentally different from his genetic Telekinesis because he wasn't imposing his mental power directly upon an object when using it; he was manipulating the Force itself. It could accomplish similar results, including telekinetic effects, but the mechanism behind it was completely different, and Lex wanted to understand how far he could push his own mental abilities before mixing another power system into the experiment.

He closed his eyes.

Then he extended his senses.

The planet unfolded inside his mind.

Rocks.

Dust.

Mountains.

Storm systems.

The deeper layers beneath the ground.

Lex could sense through matter, but that didn't mean doing so was effortless. Density, distance and the nature of the material all affected how much concentration he needed, and the farther his awareness extended, the more mental processing was required to maintain a clear picture. For now, however, the planet was almost entirely an empty landscape of stone and dust, making it an ideal environment for experimentation.

He began with a handful of rocks.

Lex reached out with his Telekinesis and lifted them simultaneously, carefully observing how his mind handled the task. He then expanded his awareness, grabbing more and more objects until hundreds of individual pieces of debris were suspended around him. Rather than treating them as one mass, he deliberately separated his attention between them, creating multiple trains of thought to handle the different objects simultaneously.

This wasn't really multiple versions of Lex thinking independently.

It was still Lex.

The different trains of thought were simply separate processing streams, similar to having multiple cores inside a processor. His mind could create an effectively limitless number of these trains, allowing him to divide his attention across an enormous number of tasks, but that didn't mean each individual train possessed limitless processing power. Each one still had a ceiling, and if he tried to force too much information through a single train, the strain became noticeable.

Lex pushed further.

The rocks moved farther away.

He continued expanding his telekinetic awareness, using the scattered debris as both targets and reference points. He could sense through the planet itself, mapping sections of the terrain through the objects he had under his control, and gradually he began attempting something more ambitious.

He wanted to control everything.

Not simply everything within arm's reach.

Everything.

Lex expanded his mental reach farther and farther, using individual trains of thought to manage distant objects while creating additional processing streams whenever possible. For a while, the process worked remarkably well, but eventually he encountered the first real limitation.

Distance.

A single object could be controlled from much farther away without too much difficulty, but when several objects moved beyond a certain range, maintaining precise control over all of them through the same train of thought became increasingly difficult. One or two distant objects were manageable, but attempting to maintain dozens of them simultaneously began placing too much information into a single processing stream.

He experimented with assigning multiple trains of thought to the same object.

That didn't work either.

It wasn't because the different trains were independent personalities or somehow incapable of cooperating. They were all still Lex, and there was no meaningful individuality separating one thought process from another. The problem was simply that two processing streams attempting to perform the exact same task weren't magically becoming one stronger processing stream; they were still separate streams trying to process the same information.

If they thought in exactly the same way, they were effectively doing the work of one stream.

So Lex had discovered the current bottleneck.

His mental processing power was enormous, but each individual train of thought had a limit.

The answer was simple.

He needed to push that limit.

Normally, attempting to force the mind beyond its natural capacity for hours, let alone days, would have been a remarkably effective method of destroying oneself. For Lex, however, the usual consequences simply didn't apply. The Essence of Transcendent Self meant that his body, mind and spirit could recover from damage at an absurd rate, while his mental stamina was effectively limitless.

There was no meaningful physical penalty for pushing himself.

There was only time.

So Lex pushed.

And pushed.

And pushed.

Hours passed.

Then an entire day.

Then another.

Lex remained on the planet, maintaining his telekinetic control while continuously increasing the range, precision and number of objects he could handle simultaneously. Whenever he reached the limit of a particular train of thought, he pushed against it until that limit began to move, then continued repeating the process. His concentration never truly broke because he didn't need to rest, and even when his mind reached a point where a normal person would have collapsed from exhaustion, Lex simply continued.

Four days passed.

For four days, Lex did nothing but train his Telekinesis.

By the end of it, his awareness had spread across the entire planet.

He could feel the world through the objects scattered across its surface, maintaining a telekinetic connection with enough of them to create a rough mental map of the planet. The storm systems were no longer simply something he could observe from a distance; they became part of the immense landscape of information occupying his mind, while rocks, mountains and countless pieces of debris became points of reference beneath his control.

It wasn't perfect.

There were still limits.

But the difference between where he had started and where he was now was enormous.

Lex slowly opened his eyes.

His hand curled into a fist.

Then he raised it.

The planet moved.

It wasn't much.

There was no catastrophic upheaval, no sudden cracking of the world or massive change to the surrounding landscape. The planet simply shifted, its orbit changing by approximately 3.2 centimeters as Lex exerted his telekinetic power against the enormous mass of the world itself.

Three point two centimeters.

That sounded pathetic.

For an entire planet, however, it was anything but.

Lex stared at the world beneath his telekinetic influence for several seconds before slowly grinning.

“Okay.”

He looked around at the violent storms covering the planet.

“I'm definitely getting stronger.”