It was as though a giant blue hand had wiped away his quantum entanglement with another proton.
...What none of them realized was that, in the final moment, Dr. Manhattan, due to Soren's wish, intervened.
Everyone thought the collider would break through the time dimension and reverse Earth's timeline, but instead, Dr. Manhattan erased the proton representing Soren, the one he had brought from another universe, entirely from existence.
Thus, the spacetime web, distorted by the removal of that single proton, began to rebound.
Every trace of Soren's existence was being automatically corrected by the timeline: first, the inanimate objects affected by him, then the living organisms, and finally, the memories of humans.
The mighty river of time does not halt for the will of any single individual.
Under the flow of time, every life is as small as a proton, and the correction of the timeline was a global tsunami that swept over every particle, smoothing it out.
...Everyone who had ever seen Soren, who had intersected with him in any way, began to lose their memories of him.
Those memories were erased, as if they had never existed.
...All memories related to Soren vanished from Earth in that instant.
...Every fact that had been altered due to his existence was rewritten, redirected down a new path.
This was neither the original path from before Soren arrived, nor the one after his arrival, but rather a newly corrected path, automatically formed by the timeline after the previous two were severed.
In this new, radiant timeline the once-ruined Metropolis stood tall again, shattered stones and broken glass reassembled into soaring skyscrapers.
Rivers flowed eastward, planets reversed their orbits, fallen leaves returned to branches, and the charred remains of the Parthenon faded from memory.
The billions of people who had perished reappeared, their hearts beating once more.
In this timeline, as memories were restored, it was as if all the catastrophes had never happened.
The past, in ways unimaginable to them, had compensated for the present.
When the entire timeline of Earth was finally repaired, fireworks lit up in unison over Times Square in New York.
Crowds who had been queuing all night to buy tickets for the New Year's celebration erupted into cheers.
They popped champagne bottles, unleashed party sprays, and raised thousands of hands into the air.
Thousands of bodies danced and leaped as human voices and songs merged into one joyous cacophony.
Humanity welcomed the first second of January 1, 2021, with collective exhilaration.
A new year had begun.
As the clock struck the first second of January 1, 2021, in this freshly mended timeline, Clark Kent, clad in his blue suit, his cape as crimson as blood, descended from the murky Gotham sky to land beside a gargoyle, watching the world below.
He gazed at Batman, who stood silently on the gargoyle like a bronze statue, and frowned slightly: "…Bruce, am I forgetting something?"
...
On March 18, 2021, Clark Kent, now a thirty-three-year-old Superman, broke down in tears in his parents' barn, staring at an old, faded photograph.
He knelt on the ground, holding the picture in one hand, while his other hand trembled as it reached up to touch his tear-soaked eyes.
It was as if he were caressing the face of someone he had lost forever.
...Those were the bluest eyes in the world.
He would have spent a lifetime's worth of love, devoutly kissing and worshipping those eyes.
The eyes of his beloved, left behind for him, in the fracture of time and space.
"Clark?" Martha, seeing her son sobbing uncontrollably, knelt down and gently embraced him.
She didn't know what had happened, but whatever it was, it had shattered Clark's heart.
"My child… what's wrong?" Martha held him close, her weathered hands cradling his tear-streaked face.
She saw the grief and sorrow flooding his eyes, and it broke her heart as well. "If you need our help, you can always tell us… we'll always be your mom and dad."
Clark grasped her wrist, and from deep within his soul, he cried out the word he had recalled countless times in his dreams: "Mom."
The overwhelming joy of something lost and found, and the unbearable pain of eternal loss, surged together in his heart.
For a long time, he couldn't speak, gazing through tears at his parents.
They were astonished by his sudden tears, looking at him with concern.
The two elderly figures had slightly hunched backs and faces lined with the wrinkles of time, yet it was the gentle and loving gaze that only parents possess that made his heart tremble.
He had once buried them himself in hell.
He had attended their funeral; he had desperately searched for their remains among the ruins of Metropolis…
Those nightmares were all real, hell he had personally endured.
But now, now, in this world that had never known disaster or nightmare, they were back by his side.
Yet… what about Soren?
In this world, everything was as it should be, perfect and flawless.
He lived a life loved by everyone, filled with happiness and joy, according to the memories of this reality.
He grew up in Smallville, spent his last teenage years at Metropolis University, joined the Daily Planet, met Batman, made a whole group of friends, founded the Justice League, and was elected as its president.
He switched effortlessly between two identities, sometimes soaring into the blue sky as Superman, other times a senior reporter at the Daily Planet…
But Soren was nowhere to be found.
In every trajectory of his life, Soren had vanished.
The Luthor estate in front of Kent Farm had not seen the arrival of the Hargreaves family; there was no boy with the last name Hargreaves in his Metropolis University yearbook.
He had resolved the Black Zero incident all by himself, and among the founders of the Avengers, there was no trace of the being known as Soren.
It was as if Soren, his Soren, had simply vanished from this world.