Her mind kicked into overdrive. Sensing pocket dimensions—that fell under the mystical-spatial category.
So which Marvel heroes operated in the mystical-spatial domain?
Iron Man?
Pass.
Hulk, Black Widow, Hawkeye, the rest of the Avengers—all pass.
Gradually, several terms surfaced in Maya's mind: the Bifrost of Asgard, the Space Stone, the Sorcerer Supreme.
One name ultimately clicked into focus: Doctor Strange—Stephen Strange.
So what had she actually been sensing? Could it be the Mirror Dimension—the one Doctor Strange used in combat?
To test this theory, President Maya surged her Chakra once more, channeling it along the direction of her perception, slamming into that hazy "wall" again and again and again.
And while Madam President threw Chakra at the problem with brute-force abandon—hammering the labyrinth's walls with all the subtlety of a battering ram—far away in the Himalayas at Kamar-Taj, a bald woman sitting in cross-legged meditation opened her eyes.
She wore a simple gray monk's robe. Her features were austere, her scalp bare, but her eyes blazed with vitality. Her skin was smooth, her bearing carried a quiet authority and an unusual magnetism.
She was the most powerful human being on Earth—the Sorcerer Supreme, the Ancient One.
The Ancient One had been projecting her consciousness outward, surveying the cosmic starfield, scanning dimensional boundaries for anomalies—when something brushed against Earth's Mirror Dimension.
Normally, this wouldn't have warranted attention. Plenty of mutants, Inhumans, and enhanced individuals on Earth could develop spatial abilities. The Ancient One considered herself Earth's guardian against extradimensional threats, but she didn't go around policing every spatial-capable being. Her mission was to protect the planet from the dark forces lurking across multiple dimensions.
Except this particular disturbance didn't stop. It was getting worse. Usually when a spatial-powered individual slipped through a dimensional fold, it was like someone walking past her front door—there one instant, gone the next, over in the blink of an eye.
But this one seemed to be searching for something. Or maybe trying to brute-force entry into a dimension. From the Ancient One's perspective, this was someone knocking on her door—continuously, with escalating force.
Not that any of it posed the slightest threat to Earth's safety or to her personally. But it was annoying. The relentless hammering was starting to disrupt her meditation.
The Earth was the Ancient One's backyard. She came and went as she pleased. In a blink, she materialized in Maya's bedroom, directly opposite the girl.
Even with her eyes wide open and her senses pushed to maximum, President Maya detected nothing. She had no idea a bald woman had appeared directly opposite her. She was still radiating pale-gold Chakra, still convinced that if she just hit the "wall" hard enough, she'd punch through into the Mirror Dimension like Doctor Strange.
The Ancient One's brow furrowed as she studied this unfamiliar energy. Hmm. It appears to be a fusion of spiritual force and cellular energy, laced with traces of the universe's primordial power. No extradimensional signature, and it doesn't match any of my usual adversaries. But how is this energy being produced?
Pondering this, the Ancient One unconsciously raised her right hand, her index finger drifting toward the girl's forehead...
But just before the fingertip made contact with Maya's brow, a red-haired, white-robed woman stepped between them.
The woman had beautiful scarlet hair cascading to her ankles. Her features were exquisite—brows like brushstrokes, skin like carved jade, lips naturally rouged, cheeks flushed as if painted. Her whole bearing was elegant and ethereally lovely, and she appeared to be around seventeen or eighteen.
The only flaw was this: beneath those long lashes, the woman's dark-crimson phoenix eyes were utterly vacant. Devoid of light, devoid of spirit—like a beautiful jade doll.
Finding her memory-reading attempt blocked, the Ancient One merely raised an eyebrow and withdrew her hand.
The beautiful woman neither moved nor spoke. The Ancient One pressed her finger instead to the Eye of Agamotto at her chest. With the soft click-click-click of interlocking gears turning and opening, a faint green glow flickered through the Sorcerer Supreme's eyes.
After a long moment, the Ancient One regarded the still-straining Maya with a complicated expression. Then a pale golden beam of light shot from her eyes straight into Maya's forehead. The beam passed through the red-haired woman without the slightest resistance—as if the figure were nothing but a phantom.
That done, the Ancient One vanished, returning to Kamar-Taj in the span of a heartbeat. The instant she departed, the red-haired woman also disappeared.
Maya—the person at the center of all this—noticed absolutely none of it. She didn't know that her ignorance had disturbed the Sorcerer Supreme. She didn't know her memories had nearly been read.
She'd still been trying to crack open the Mirror Dimension when—suddenly, in that exact moment—something clicked.
She'd been going about this wrong. The layered, labyrinthine space she'd been sensing was the Mirror Dimension.
The reason she could sense it but couldn't enter wasn't a lack of force. It was that her spatial comprehension was still too shallow. Put simply: her spatial attribute wasn't high enough.
And her original goal—finding an independent pocket dimension—was achievable after all.
She'd been unable to find one not because her method was wrong, or even because her spatial attribute was too low. It was because there were almost no independent pocket dimensions left near Earth.
These pocket dimensions were like air bubbles trapped in glass, and the space around Earth was the glass wall itself.
Everyone knew that the more bubbles in glass, the more fragile it became. To preserve the stability of Earth's spatial fabric, someone had systematically removed those "bubbles."
The theory of spatial traversal worked the same way. Once your spatial comprehension reached a certain threshold, you could pass back and forth through the "glass" like a beam of light.
At the same time, that layer of "glass" was also a mirror. When you penetrated the "mirror" and crossed to the other side, you'd opened and entered the Mirror Dimension.
So how had she suddenly achieved this epiphany? Actually—no, that wasn't right. Epiphanies could illuminate problems you'd been struggling with, but they couldn't conjure knowledge out of thin air.
Madam President wasn't an idiot. If the pocket dimensions around Earth had been cleared out, then who had cleared them?
The Sorcerer Supreme—the Ancient One.
She was the only one with both the power and the responsibility to do it.
The conclusion was obvious: the foundational spatial theory that had appeared in Maya's mind was a gift from the Sorcerer Supreme.
Which meant the Ancient One had been in her bedroom. Just now.
President Maya let out a wry, helpless laugh. And here she'd been so proud of her superhuman perception—so sure that nothing in the world could evade her senses. She could probe down to the cellular level, examine genetic material inside individual cells. Wasn't that enough to justify a little swagger?
It was not. It was really, truly not enough.
To a supreme powerhouse like the Ancient One, peering at genetic material inside cells was nothing. The Ancient One operated on scales that ranged from cross-dimensional traversal at the macro end to shrinking down to the atomic level and delving into the quantum realm at the micro end.
Maya couldn't blame herself for the oversight. Her horizons had simply been too narrow. She'd been completely ignorant of what true power looked like.