Chapter 113: System Upgrade — and the Homestead Feature
The notification arrived at seven-fourteen in the morning, while Ethan was on his second cup of tea.
「DING!」
「System upgrade complete!」
「New feature unlocked: HOMESTEAD」
He opened the interface.
Blank.
Just a clean empty screen with a single prompt: Set Homestead location.
Ethan stared at it.
Is this one of those farming games, he thought, where you plant virtual crops.
"System. What does the Homestead do."
The explanation came efficiently: the Homestead was a designated anchor point that could expand its interior space indefinitely. Family members with authorization could return to it from anywhere — any location, any universe — instantaneously. It functioned as a cross-dimensional safe room, a meeting point, a place that was always reachable by the people he'd designated as his.
Ethan thought about this for a moment.
Oh, he thought. That's actually very good.
"And the limitations?"
Family members from other universes can exist within the Homestead space but cannot leave it into the host universe without the On Your Right skill. Homestead exterior dimensions are fixed. Interior space can be expanded using Friend Points (1 FP per square meter). Homestead location can be changed for 10 Family Points.
Ten Family Points. Ethan made a mental note that this was never changing.
"Set the Homestead here," he said. "The Lucky Dragon, ground floor."
「Confirm?」
"Yes."
The light expanded outward from where he was sitting — warm, brief, perceptible only as a slight shimmer in the air — and then settled. The restaurant looked exactly the same. It also, apparently, now had a dimensional anchor point tied to it.
He spent a moment with the expansion interface. One Friend Point per square meter, metric, which he noted with some satisfaction was not per square foot. He had approximately two hundred and ten Friend Points banked.
He spent twenty.
The restaurant's interior expanded. Not visibly from outside — the exterior walls hadn't moved — but there was simply more space inside now, a smooth twenty additional square meters materializing as naturally as if they'd always been there. The tables didn't shift. The lighting didn't change. It just quietly had more room.
"Huh," Ethan said.
He looked at the other new features.
The skill was what made him stop.
[ Fortress Lv.1: Generates a defensive barrier within a 100-kilometer radius of the Homestead. Energy: 10,000/10,000. Auto-regenerates 100/24hrs. Energy absorption from Space Stone: 2× regeneration rate. ]
Ethan read this twice.
Then he looked at the silver case on the shelf — the Tesseract inside it, currently powering this regeneration at double speed.
He thought about Fury's three-day deadline.
He thought about what a hundred-kilometer barrier around Hell's Kitchen would mean when Loki eventually arrived with his army.
He thought about what it would mean for Pierce's contingency planning, and for Carol Danvers when she came back, and for every subsequent threat that would find the neighborhood first.
I am going to have to lie to Fury, he thought, with genuine regret. I specifically don't like doing that. He paused. I'll offer him something else. Something that's also useful. That's not the same as lying, exactly.
He filed this under problems for later today and returned to the Homestead interface.
The authorization feature was the most significant part. He could designate any Family member to use the instant-return function — wherever they were, whatever universe they were in, they could come home if they needed to. No cooldown. No limitation on frequency.
He thought about Fisk and Vanessa. About the truck that had come out of a side street with no headlights.
He thought about Little Ye at school.
He thought about Peter Parker — the younger one, ten years old, living two floors up, who had no idea that the restaurant he was eating breakfast in was now a cross-dimensional safe house.
"I'm going to need a bigger dining table," he said, to no one in particular.
He authorized everyone.
It took about twenty minutes to work through the full list, pulling up each Family member's entry and granting the return function. Pietro. Wanda. Caine. John. Winston. Marcus. The Vongola Primo. Fisk and Vanessa and Richard. Wade — still stranded in the Raimi universe, a fact Ethan realized with a fresh wave of guilt he immediately suppressed. Tony. Otto Octavius. William Baker / Sandman. Peter Parker, Tobey version. Harry Osborn. Frank Castle.
Fifteen authorized. Sixteen if he counted the Deadpool Dog situation, which was ambiguous.
He looked at the authorization list and thought: most of these people have never met each other.
Pietro and Otto Octavius had been in the same room briefly. Sandman and Doc Ock knew each other. But Vongola Primo and Tony Stark? John Wick and Harry Osborn? Frank Castle and basically anyone?
The possibilities were either excellent or catastrophic and probably both.
"Alright," Ethan said. He stood up. "Let's have a party."
He was going to need to call some people first. And figure out the table situation. And warn John that more people were coming, which John would receive with the stoic patience of a man who had decided that the world doing things to him was simply the nature of the world.
But before any of that: the Space Stone situation.
He was going to have to call Fury.
Offer him something, he thought. Make it a trade. That's not breaking the agreement, it's renegotiating the terms.
He looked at the Tesseract.
It looked back at him, glowing faintly, powering his shield at double speed.
"I'm going to figure out how to frame this diplomatically," he told it.
It continued glowing.
☆☆☆
-> 20 Advanced chapters Now Available on Patreon!!
-> https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Inkshaper
(Just remove the hyphen (-) to access patreon normally)
If you like this novel please consider leaving a review that's help the story a lot Thank you