The Comprehensive Evolution of American Comics

Time returned to its normal flow.

"Crack!"

Wolverine froze in place as soon as he turned around. He had no memory of why he was in this place, only that he had been induced by a giant to raise a peculiar short hammer, and then he lost consciousness.

When he came to again, he was in this unfamiliar environment, with a completely unfamiliar, bloated, bronze-colored robot standing in front of him.

"Who are you?" Wolverine instinctively extended his claws. "Why am I here?"

"You should ask yourself," Yang Le pointed to Wolverine's feet. "Why did you pick up that hammer?"

Wolverine looked down and found that the strange hammer had shattered into several pieces. If it weren't for the bizarre patterns carved on it, he might have thought these were just ordinary roadside stones.

Explanation is always a time-consuming endeavor, but fortunately, Yang Le had a simpler method.

The clockwork on Clock King's head began to rotate counterclockwise, and a ray of light burst out from the clockwork, enveloping everything around it. Wolverine instinctively protected himself with his hands, but after a while, he found that he was not injured.

He looked up, intending to ask Yang Le what he was doing, but he was stunned by the surrounding scene. Around him, several Frost Giants had appeared out of nowhere.

Besides the Frost Giants, there were also many human soldiers, desperately fighting the giants with all kinds of modern weapons, but the situation didn't seem promising.

Wolverine was stunned by the sudden appearance of this scene. When he came back to his senses, he found that a grenade was heading in his direction. He didn't have time to dodge at this distance and could only rely on his body to withstand it.

The expected pain did not come. The grenade passed directly through Wolverine's body and then exploded on a giant's calf.

Wolverine then realized that everything around him was just an illusion, visible but intangible.

This was one of Clock King's abilities, to replay past events in the form of images. It was the ability Yang Le used most often after becoming Clock King. He couldn't help it; this ability was just too useful.

Except for those great beings unaffected by time, no one could hide secrets from Clock King.

But although he used it the most, Yang Le actually used this ability very few times. He would only use it when he really couldn't find any clues. Most of the time, he still wanted to use his brain more.

Yang Le didn't want to become the kind of person who, at critical moments, was urged by super intelligence to use super powers.

Although Wolverine mostly acted like a brute, he actually had a brain. He didn't need Yang Le to explain; he could understand what he was seeing.

This was all thanks to the grenade just now. At the landing point of the grenade was the corpse of a giant whose leg had been blown off. The giant in the image who was blown up by the grenade perfectly overlapped with the corpse on the ground, proving that the two were the same person.

As mentioned before, Yang Le did not restore the corpses scattered on the ground, so Wolverine could see countless pieces of evidence proving the authenticity of the images when he watched them.

These bloody pieces of evidence impacted Wolverine's heart. He finally understood why he had lost consciousness before. Just like when he went berserk in the past, this time he lost his mind again. He had his sanity taken away by that hammer.

As the Wolverine, he was afraid of becoming the executioner who took the lives of these people. The reason why Wolverine stayed away from people was not only because he was afraid of being hurt but also because he was afraid of hurting others.

But after watching the images, he was relieved because he was frozen during the entire battle until the giant who had bewitched him died, and he was freed.

As soon as he was freed, he was immediately subdued by the robot in front of him, without any chance to hurt others, just like a background character in a movie, with no remarkable scenes.

But that was good.

"Understand?"

The image finished playing, and Yang Le retracted the light screen. Sometimes, he himself felt that the Clock King, the king of time, was more like a projector in his hands, and an old-fashioned film projector at that.

"Thank you," Wolverine retracted his claws. "If it weren't for you, I don't know what would have happened to me."

"It's nothing. Helping you is also helping myself," Yang Le bent down and picked up the shattered pieces of the Twilight Hammer on the ground.

He thought that this thing would recover after being disconnected from the Serpent for a few seconds, but he didn't expect it to really turn into a pile of broken stones. Did the Serpent stop sending energy into it after realizing that the Twilight Hammer had a problem?

That wasn't impossible. Rather than using power on these disposable pawns, it would be better to cut losses in time and save it for the final, real battle.

Yang Le picked up the Twilight Hammer fragments with doubts. Just as he was trying to figure out the Serpent's thinking, he discovered something even more shocking.

Time... seemed to have a slight fluctuation?

The fluctuation of time came from the Twilight Hammer fragment in front of him. As Clock King, Yang Le was exceptionally sensitive to anything related to time.

Time itself is an invisible and intangible thing. The only way normal creatures can observe time is by noticing the traces time leaves, such as the series of problems brought about by human aging.

But time is also a closely connected thing, regardless of distance. As long as someone touches time, Yang Le will have a certain feeling.

Yang Le sensed something different in the fragment in front of him. After careful consideration, he realized that the fragment seemed to represent the 'fruit' of something.

Cause and effect, first cause, then effect. This is an iron law that cannot be changed under normal circumstances, but now a situation that breaks the iron law has appeared.

It was mentioned earlier that the order of cause and effect often cannot be changed, but for those who control time, they can often first touch the fruit and then trigger the cause.

For example, right now, Yang Le was holding the fruit of a certain event, and what this fruit was goes without saying.

There is only one fruit that can be related to the broken Twilight Hammer of the future, and that is the Serpent's defeat. After the Twilight Hammer loses its true master, it naturally becomes a pile of waste stones.

And now, this fruit was brought by Yang Le to the stage where the cause was still in progress with time rays, so what would happen?

Normally speaking, a big thing would happen, but as Clock King, Yang Le could repair this loophole, but there was one thing that Yang Le could not repair.

That is the prophecy that is closely related to this cause and effect.