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

Waking to the smell of garlic and toasted bread, Lex eventually found his way into the kitchen, where Grayfia was standing at the stove and grilling several garlic-cheese sandwiches in a pan. The kitchen was already warm from the cooking, with the rich smell of butter, melted cheese, roasted garlic, and toasted bread filling the room, while Grayfia herself looked unusually relaxed in the simple clothes she had chosen for the morning rather than the more formal outfits she sometimes wore around the mansion. Lex walked up behind her, gave her a light smack on the ass as he reached around her for one of the finished sandwiches, and immediately took a bite before she could complain.

“How's it?” Grayfia asked, glancing over her shoulder with an amused smile as she continued working on the next sandwich.

“Absolutely amazing as always,” Lex answered after swallowing, his expression making it obvious that he wasn't exaggerating. “So juicy that I could eat it all day… or night.”

“The sandwich or my ass?” Grayfia asked, the corner of her mouth lifting as she looked at him.

“Both, of course.”

Grayfia shook her head with a quiet laugh, although she didn't seem particularly bothered by the answer. Their interactions had become so casual over the past few weeks that neither of them really thought much about moments like this anymore, and the same familiarity had gradually spread throughout the mansion as the group settled into something that felt less like a collection of powerful individuals living under one roof and more like an unusually chaotic family.

“So, any plans for today?” Grayfia asked while placing another sandwich onto the plate.

“Don't know,” Lex admitted, dipping the corner of his sandwich into some sauce before taking another bite. “Maybe I should visit Jubilee. She called like three times last night, so maybe she's missing me or something. I'll give her a surprise.”

“Should I come as well?” Grayfia asked, glancing toward him. “I haven't been out much, and while I love handling the house, I'm starting to feel like going somewhere today.”

“Sure,” Lex replied easily. “You can come.”

He dipped another piece of sandwich into the sauce and paused long enough to look at Grayfia with genuine appreciation. “Your sauces are definitely the best.”

Grayfia's expression softened slightly at the compliment, and before she could answer, another familiar presence wandered into the kitchen. Donna entered wearing one of Lex's shirts, the oversized garment hanging loosely around her body and extending far enough down that it was obvious she had stolen it from his wardrobe rather than purchased anything resembling it herself. Her hair was still somewhat messy from sleep, and there was a comfortable lack of concern in the way she moved through the kitchen, as though walking around the mansion wearing Lex's clothes had long since become perfectly ordinary to her.

“So, how has your photography been going?” Lex asked her.

Donna's expression immediately became more complicated, and she leaned against one of the counters while answering. “Oh, they fired me. Well, technically they didn't fire me since I was more of a freelancer, but because I was in Europe for like a month, they hired another freelancer, and he's apparently giving them really good stuff, so they don't want to buy my photographs anymore.”

“Just ditch… what was that place called again? The Daily Bugle?” Lex asked.

“Yeah.”

“Then ditch them and go for another newspaper.”

“I did,” Donna replied, sounding considerably less enthusiastic. “No one's looking for anything right now.”

There was enough disappointment in her voice that Lex immediately looked over at her properly, noticing the way her shoulders had dropped and how she seemed to be trying to pretend the whole thing wasn't bothering her. He had become accustomed to seeing Donna as confident and capable, particularly when she was fighting, but the mundane parts of her life could still hit her in ways that superhuman strength couldn't simply solve.

“Aww, don't make that face,” Lex said, trying to cheer her up. “If you want, I'll just buy a newspaper and you can work there.”

Donna stared at him for a moment before punching him in the shoulder.

“If it's your company anyway, why would I need to work?” she demanded, frustration creeping into her voice. “If it's about independence, how would that even work when it's your company? That's idiotic logic.”

Lex immediately raised both hands defensively. “This household has a lot of domestic violence.”

“Aww, who's bullying my boyfriend?”

Sharon's voice came from the hallway, and a moment later she stepped into the kitchen with the relaxed confidence that had become characteristic of her whenever she wasn't in the field. She was dressed in another one of her loose blue T-shirts, the comfortable shirt hanging over a pair of simple shorts, and Lex couldn't help noticing once again that she somehow seemed to own an endless supply of nearly identical blue shirts. They were never exactly the same, however; one had a small emblem, another had writing across the front, and another had some sort of faded design, but they all shared the same loose fit and general color.

“Donna,” Lex answered immediately, moving behind Sharon and using her as a human shield.

“I didn't even hit you that hard,” Donna complained, although the pout on her face made it clear she was only pretending to be offended. “But the way you're behaving is making me actually want to hit you.”

Grayfia sighed as she finished arranging the sandwiches and looked between the three of them. “I've heard Regina is making a BDSM chamber, so perhaps you two can experiment with your preferred methods of violence there and leave my kitchen alone.”

Lex stared at her for a second before deciding that there was absolutely nothing he could contribute to that conversation. Instead, he quietly took another piece of uncooked wild-boar meat from the refrigerator and escaped toward the garden, leaving the women behind him.

The moment he stepped outside, he barely made it several meters before the sleeping Fluffy stirred. The enormous polar-bear dog had been curled up comfortably in the garden, but the smell of the meat reached him almost instantly, and his head lifted from his paws as his nose began working furiously. A moment later, Fluffy lumbered to his feet and hurried toward Lex with considerably more enthusiasm than one might expect from something that had been sleeping only moments earlier.

Fluffy loved fish above almost everything else, but roasted wild-boar meat had somehow earned a respectable place among his favorite foods, especially when Lex prepared it himself. Lex switched on the outdoor grill and placed the large piece of meat onto the grate, immediately filling the garden with the rich smell of roasting meat as the surface began to sizzle. While he waited, Fluffy pressed his enormous body against Lex's side and happily leaned into him, his tail moving lazily as though the entire purpose of his existence at that moment was simply to receive food and affection.

Thinking about it, Lex decided that he might as well take Fluffy with him. It had been quite some time since he had actually taken the creature out for a proper walk, and considering how much Fluffy seemed to enjoy exploring whenever he got the opportunity, bringing him along to visit Jubilee sounded like a good excuse to change that.

Once the meat was properly cooked, Lex gave Fluffy his portion along with a few treats and watched the polar-bear dog happily devour his breakfast. With that taken care of, Lex remembered another thing he had been meaning to examine and returned his attention to the Player's Handbook.

More specifically, he wanted to investigate the Great Space Mall Invitation he had received from the Inventory.

The Player's Handbook had already given him several interesting things, and the invitation wasn't even the only item he had yet to investigate. There was also a Fortune Compass among his belongings that he wanted to test eventually, but the invitation had been sitting there long enough that curiosity finally won out.

The card itself looked almost disappointingly ordinary at first glance. It was a thin metallic rectangle, cool and smooth beneath his fingers, with what appeared to be an image of deep space displayed across its surface; however, after staring at it for a few seconds, Lex realized that it wasn't an image at all. Tiny stars drifted across the surface, nebulae slowly twisted through the darkness, and distant galaxies moved with such subtlety that he had initially mistaken the whole thing for a particularly elaborate picture.

Across the front were the words Great Space Mall Invitation, written in a language Lex had never encountered before, yet somehow understood perfectly the moment he looked at them.

He didn't even have to consciously activate the card. The moment Lex thought about using it, the metallic rectangle unfolded in his hand like a mechanical flower, expanding into a thin sheet of shimmering light that wrapped around his body. There was no sensation of movement, no familiar distortion associated with teleportation, and no moment where his stomach dropped as his surroundings changed; one instant he was standing in his garden, and the next he was somewhere completely different.

Lex glanced around.

He wasn't entirely certain he had been teleported at all. If the Essence of Transcendent Self considered the process a form of teleportation or spatial displacement, he would normally expect it to register the change, yet nothing had triggered within him. Whatever method the invitation used, it seemed to bypass the conventional process entirely.

The place he had arrived in was enormous.

There was no enclosed ceiling overhead, at least not in the normal sense. Instead, the entire upper expanse of the mall displayed an endless cosmic panorama, with stars scattered across blackness and immense galaxies stretching into the distance as though the building had somehow been constructed beneath the universe itself. Beneath Lex's feet stretched an immaculate floor of alternating black and white marble tiles, polished so perfectly that the cosmic light above reflected faintly across its surface.

It was an open, almost impossibly spacious environment, with distant storefronts and structures scattered throughout the enormous interior. Strange signs floated in the air, displays hovered without visible support, and creatures from races Lex couldn't immediately identify moved through the mall alongside beings that looked surprisingly human. Despite the sheer scale of the place, everything seemed organized, clean, and strangely peaceful.

And standing directly in front of Lex was a fairy.

She was a small, feminine figure standing at roughly four feet ten inches tall, with a delicate but distinctly humanoid appearance rather than the tiny, doll-sized body Lex had apparently been imagining. Her black dress flowed around her figure like liquid fabric, its material slightly translucent in places and covered with faint patterns resembling distant stars. Two transparent wings extended from her back, shaped somewhat like elongated crystalline leaves with tiny points of light scattered throughout them, giving them the appearance of miniature windows into a night sky.

Her hair framed a youthful face with bright, expressive eyes, and the entire outfit seemed almost too fluid to be normal clothing. Lex could already tell that the dress wasn't made from ordinary material because tiny ripples of magic moved through it whenever she moved, subtly changing the fabric's appearance.

“Greetings and welcome to the Great Space Mall, where you can buy anything and everything, including me,” the fairy announced with a professional smile. “I'm Lucy Gemroot, your fairy guide, but I'd prefer it if you call me Lulu.”

“Well, hi, Lulu. I'm Lex,” Lex introduced himself, giving her a curious look. “I hope you don't get offended, but I thought fairies were quite small and you look… well, human-sized.”

“You might be mistaken,” Lulu replied, folding her arms. “The one you're imagining is probably a pixie. Fairies are usually between three and five feet tall. I'm, of course, at the perfect fairy height of four feet ten inches.”

“Well, if you say so,” Lex replied, apparently satisfied enough with that explanation. “So what can I buy here?”

Lulu stared at him for a moment before rolling her eyes.

“Ah, you're a bit of a dumbwit, I see. Let me repeat myself. You can buy absolutely anything and everything here.”

“How about an Essence?” Lex asked, mostly to make sure.

Lulu's confident expression immediately faltered.

“Ah… well… I…” Her shoulders stiffened as though she had suddenly realized she had walked into a conversation she wasn't prepared for. “No, those aren't available. But how do you know about Essences?”

“Where do you think I got the invitation?”

Lex casually held up the metallic card.

Lulu's eyes widened.

“Huh?”

Her gaze locked onto the card, and the color of her dress suddenly changed. The black fabric shifted toward a soft pink as if the magical material itself were reacting to her embarrassment.

“Huhhh… a Cosmos Card?” she whispered, staring at it in disbelief. “Why… why did they assign me? I don't even have one billion years of experience!”

The professional fairy guide who had confidently insulted Lex less than a minute ago suddenly looked like she was on the verge of having a complete breakdown. Her eyes began watering, her lower lip trembled, and before Lex could figure out what was happening, tears started rolling down her cheeks while her dress changed from pink to a bright yellow.

“Ahh… hi, it's alright,” Lex said, suddenly finding himself completely out of his depth. “Don't cry.”

He had dealt with demons, gods, aliens, cosmic entities, armies, supervillains, and things that could destroy planets, but somehow a crying fairy was proving to be one of the situations he had absolutely no idea how to handle.

Lex searched his memory for something useful and eventually settled on the first solution that came to mind.

“Do you want some chocolate?”

Lulu stopped crying almost immediately.

Her eyes dropped toward the chocolate Lex had produced from his Inventory, and the expression on her face transformed with almost supernatural speed.

“Ooo… a chocolate.”

She accepted it and immediately began eating.

Lex watched her for several seconds before silently acknowledging that whatever people on television had been saying about giving children chocolate to cheer them up apparently worked on fairies too.

Twenty-three chocolates later, Lulu finally seemed to have recovered.

“Are you feeling alright now?” Lex asked.

“Yis, sir. Lulu is fine, sir. Lulu is ready to help, sir. Sir.”

“Ahh… can you drop the ‘sir’?”

“Yes… sir.”

Lex slowly raised a hand and covered his face.

“Never mind.”

After recovering from that exchange, Lex pulled out his MU Bank card. “Do you guys accept this card?”

Lulu's eyes immediately fell upon it, and her expression changed again, although this time there was no confusion. There was pure disbelief.

“Ehh… another Essence…”

She stared at the card, then at Lex, then back at the card.

“Sir… do you want me to call my superiors? Please do. You're, like, such a big VIP. Please call my manager. She should attend to you.”

“Nah, it's alright,” Lex said, waving her off. “So, do you accept it?”

Lulu looked genuinely distressed by the question.

“I'm sorry, sir, but no. Our mall only accepts the currency of the mall.”

“Oh, well, worth a shot,” Lex said without much concern. “So how do I get the currency?”

“Oh, yes. Come with me.”

Lulu recovered enough to return to her guide persona and led Lex across the marble floor. Her small wings fluttered occasionally as she moved, although she didn't appear to need them to fly, and the star-like patterns within the transparent membranes shifted whenever they caught the light from the cosmic ceiling.

“You need to place your hand here,” she explained when they reached a large table-like structure. “It'll scan you, and the Mall AI will look into your world, access the world you've been to, your strength, weaknesses, abilities, circumstances, and everything else it can determine, then generate Quests based on that information. Once a Quest is completed, you'll receive Mall Points that you can use to purchase things here.”

The scanning table was considerably larger than Lex had expected. A massive handprint had been built into its surface, large enough that it looked as though it had been designed for someone several times Lex's size.

“I'm sorry, sir… wai—”

Lulu stopped herself and glanced at the display.

“It's still set for the previous customer.”

She hurried around the table, tapped several controls on the opposite side, and the enormous handprint resized itself until it was properly proportioned for Lex.

“There. Now place your hand on the handprint, sir.”

Lex placed his palm against it.

The table lit up.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then Lulu's expression changed.

Her eyes widened so dramatically that Lex almost wondered whether something had gone wrong with the scanner.

“WHAT?!”

The dress around her body began rapidly cycling through colors, shifting from yellow to blue, then green, purple, pink, and back again as though her magic had completely lost control of itself.

“One… two… three… four… five… six…”

She stared at the information appearing before her, her voice becoming increasingly incredulous with every number.

“You've got six Essences?!”

Lex merely looked at her.

Lulu's eyes continued moving across the information displayed by the scanner, and whatever she saw next made her expression go completely blank.

Her lips parted.

“...Heir to the Primordial God King…”

The words came out as little more than a stunned whisper.

Then the fairy's eyes rolled upward, her wings went limp, and her entire body simply collapsed backward.

Lex stared at the unconscious fairy lying on the marble floor.

“…Well, that probably isn't good.”