My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

The Dimensional Space tour ended the way the best things always did—gradually and without anyone wanting it to stop.

Liam led them across the red terrain at a low altitude, pointing out landmarks as they went. The spot where he had planted Gaia’s Heartstone came into view from a distance, and even from the air, the contrast was striking, as a patch of green sat against the red landscape, vivid and alive, the color almost aggressive against the cracked earth surrounding it.

His friends descended without being asked.

They landed at the edge of the green and stood looking at it. The grass was short and dense, a deep, healthy green that seemed to generate its own light. Small flowers had begun pushing through in clusters, white and yellow against the green.

"You grew this?" Stacy asked.

"A relic I got from the magic universe grew it. ," Liam said. "It terraforms whatever ground it’s planted in"

"How much will it eventually cover?" Lana asked, her eyes moving across the patch with the measuring look she used on everything.

"Everything," Liam said. "Eventually, the entire Dimensional Space."

Lana looked at the red horizon stretching in every direction and said nothing. The math was self-evident.

The stream ran along the eastern edge of the green, and it wasn’t water. It was faintly luminous, somewhere between silver and white, and the air above it had a quality that was cleaner and denser.

Matt crouched at the edge of it. "What is this?"

"Condensed spiritual energy," Liam said. "Formed by a relic I got from the cultivation universe."

Matt reached a hand toward the surface.

"Is it safe to touch?" he asked.

"Should be."

Matt dipped two fingers in and he pulled them back immediately, not wanting to risk anything more. He rubbed his fingers together, staring at them.

"Nothing happened..."

Alex crouched beside him and did the same thing. His expression shifted from curious to analytical in the space of a second. He pulled his hand back and looked at Liam. "What does prolonged exposure do?"

"For someone without a cultivation base? Very little. Maybe some mild physical recovery. For a cultivator, it would increase their strength ."

Alex looked at the stream again. "And you’re filling an entire planet-sized space with this."

"Yes."

Alex said nothing, as he stood back up.

Elise had walked further along the stream, following its curve. She stopped at a point where the green was thickest and looked back at the group. "There are more flowers here," she called. "They’re different."

They walked over. She was right. A second variety had appeared, deeper in the patch, with petals that were a pale blue that shifted toward purple at the edges. Nobody had a name for them because they weren’t from anywhere with names.

Kristy photographed them for a long time.

Matt looked out across the red terrain beyond the green, then back at the small living patch at his feet, and shook his head slowly.

"You’re building a world," he said. "An actual world outside our universe." He paused. "For fun."

"For necessity," Liam said. "But also for something to come back to."

Matt considered that. Then he nodded, accepting it completely.

They stayed at the green for another twenty minutes before Liam felt it was time to go, as the day had already given them more than enough. He let them linger until the lingering turned natural, then told them to gather round.

They held on without question and they vanished.

***

They appeared in the bay area of the moon base.

His friends looked around for a moment, reorienting, and then looked at Liam.

"Are we done?" Matt asked. His tone made clear he wasn’t hoping for yes.

"Not yet," Liam said, and walked toward the space shuttle. "Come on."

They followed without needing a destination.

The boarding platform raised them into the spacecraft’s belly and they settled into their seats with ease. The restraints clicked into place and the holographic displays came alive.

"Where are we going?" Harper asked.

Liam gave the flight system its command before answering.

"Mars."

The bay door opened ahead of them. The spacecraft moved forward and lifted, clearing the base’s outer structure and rising into the black lunar sky. The moon’s surface fell away beneath them, gray and ancient and still.

His friends watched through the windows as the distance opened up. Nobody asked how long the trip would take. They were beyond that kind of question now.

The answer, as it turned out, was twenty hours, even with them flying at their fastest speed.

Thankfully, the spacecraft has enough rooms for them and its not lacking anything.

Mars appeared ahead gradually, growing from a point of light into a disc, and then into a world.

Its color was the first thing. They had seen photographs and footages. But photographs didn’t prepare them for the specific quality of it, the way the rust red atmosphere absorbed and scattered the distant sunlight, the way the surface shifted through a range of ochres and browns and deep, shadowed reds that no image had ever fully captured.

"It’s beautiful," Elise said quietly. "I didn’t expect it to be beautiful."

"It has its own kind of beauty," Liam said.

The spacecraft entered approach, curving into the upper atmosphere with barely a shudder. Through the windows, the surface resolved into detail. Craters and plains and the enormous scar of Valles Marineris cutting across the equatorial region like a wound that hadn’t healed in four billion years. Olympus Mons rose from the western horizon, its caldera lost in the upper atmosphere, its scale refusing to fit inside any single window frame.

"That’s Olympus Mons," Alex said, almost to himself. "It’s three times taller than Everest."

"Twenty-two kilometers," Lana confirmed, her eyes on the window.

Nobody said anything else, as the spacecraft landed on the northern plains, a flat expanse of rust-colored soil that stretched to every horizon without interruption.

The circular platform descended with its familiar mechanical hiss, carrying Liam and four of his friends to the surface while the others waited for the platform’s return.

The moment Liam made contact with Martian soil, he looked up.

The sky was wrong in the best possible way. It was a pale, dusty amber that deepened toward the horizon, with the sun sitting small and cold and distant in the upper arc, giving light without warmth. It looked like a sky from a painting done by someone who had never seen Earth.

The platform rose and returned, bringing the remaining four down.

And then all eight of them were standing on Mars.

"Visors stay up," Liam said. "The atmosphere isn’t breathable."

Nobody had forgotten and the suits had already confirmed it.

Matt looked down at his boots. The soil was fine and loose, and where he’d shifted his weight, a small depression had formed.

He lifted one boot and set it down deliberately.

"I’m leaving footprints on Mars," he said, with a quieter voice. "There are human footprints on Mars right now that aren’t ours, and now there are ours too."

"Actually," Liam said, "ours are the first."

Matt looked at him. "What?"

"The missions that landed here were unmanned. No human has physically stood on Mars before today."

The group absorbed that information.

Stacy looked down at her own footprints. Then she looked across at the others, at the marks they’d each left in the rust-colored dust.

"We’re the first humans to stand on Mars," she said.

"Yes."

Nobody moved for several seconds when Liam said this.

Then Kristy raised her phone and started filming the footprints.

The spell broke naturally after that, the way it always did, and what replaced it was something freer.

Matt bent down and scooped a handful of Martian soil, let it fall through his gloved fingers, and watched it drift in the low gravity. He scooped another handful and threw it upward. It scattered slowly, each particle following its own lazy arc back to the ground.

"Low gravity," he announced to nobody in particular, and immediately jumped.

He went higher than expected and came down slower than expected and landed in a way that sent a small cloud of dust rolling outward from his boots. He looked at the cloud, then at his feet, then at the others.

He jumped again.

Within thirty seconds, everyone was jumping.

Even Kristopher.

The dust clouds they raised drifted and settled slowly, and the low gravity turned every movement into something slightly dreamlike, a half-second delay between action and consequence that made everything feel like it was happening underwater.

Lana ran a short distance and her stride was long and bouncing, each step carrying her further than it should.

Harper found a small rock formation twenty meters from the landing site and climbed it, moving carefully, testing each hold. He reached the top, which wasn’t high, and stood there looking out across the plains with his hands at his sides.

"You can see the curvature from here," he called back. "The horizon curves faster than Earth."

Alex had moved further out, past the rock formation, and was crouching over a section of ground that had caught his attention.

Stacy and Elise had wandered toward a small crater, shallow and wide, its interior the same rust-red as everything else. Stacy stood at the rim and looked in. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just old.

"A meteorite made this," she said. "A long time ago, something came from somewhere else and hit this exact spot."

"That’s what craters are," Elise said.

"I know. I just wanted to say it out loud."

Meanwhile, Matt had discovered that if he took a long enough run-up in the low gravity, he could cover a significant distance in a single bound. He was testing this, extending his run each time, tracking the distances with growing satisfaction.

On his seventh attempt, he miscalculated the landing angle, hit the ground wrong, rolled twice, and came to a stop face down in the Martian dust.

He lay there for a moment.

"I’m fine," he said to the ground.

Kristy had filmed all seven attempts. She reviewed the footage while Matt stood and dusted himself off, and then played the final one back at half speed. The slow-motion impact was, by any objective measure, spectacular.

Matt watched it over her shoulder and his expression moved through indignation and then into reluctant appreciation. "Send that to me," he said.

"I will," Kristy said.

Liam stood apart from the group and watched them move across the Martian surface. The amber sky pressed down from above. The sun sat small and distant in its arc. The footprints they’d left were already multiplying, a growing record of eight people who had come from somewhere else and brought their noise and their laughter and their low-gravity experiments to a planet that had been silent for longer than humanity had existed.

He looked at his friends, scattered across the plain, jumping and exploring and filming and falling over, and felt the warmth in his chest that had been building since the morning.

He ran forward, pushed off the ground, and launched himself into a running jump that carried him thirty meters through the thin Martian air.

Matt saw it, tracked the arc, and his eyes went wide.

"RACE," he shouted, and immediately launched himself forward in pursuit.

The plains of Mars, silent for four billion years, filled briefly with the sound of eight people chasing each other across the rust-colored dust under an amber sky, their boots raising small clouds with every step.

It was, by a significant margin, the best day any of them had ever had.