After departing from the Watchmen universe, Manhattan was aware of the DC Universe being filled with hope inside humanity and traveled there to find a place among those people and start a new life. But at some point, his visions showed him an arms race among metahumans that caused an incoming " World War III ", leading Manhattan to have a confrontation with Superman, and then he saw "nothing". This revelation led Manhattan to modify the DC Universe's mainstream timeline to fix the fissures caused by the several Crises across the Multiverse ; unaware it was the doing of Perpetua to free herself from the Source Wall. However, those actions would not get the expected result and would lead to the creation of The New 52.