S.H.I.E.L.D., Don't Try to Pass Yourself Off as the Strategic Deception Bureau

Duva looked at Coulson's innocent expression and felt that the man was utterly insincere.

"Coulson, we may not be friends, but at the very least, I don't want you trying to fool me with such terrible rhetoric."

Duva gave Coulson a strange look. "You're S.H.I.E.L.D.—the S.H.I.E.L.D. with a long history, whose countless operations directly influenced human history. Not the organization rumored to have been founded only in the last century... Do I really have to spell it out?"

Duva had investigated this world. If there were no Mutants, things would have been easier, but with Mutants involved, matters concerning the Eternals and Deviants became far more complicated.

Across the multiverse, the origin of Mutants was the same in most cases: the Deviants.

Therefore, barring a very few exceptions, Duva had reason to conclude that the Mutants in his universe had likewise originated from the long-extinct Deviants.

The Celestials conducted experiments on many life-bearing planets, creating the opposing races of Eternals and Deviants at the same time. At intervals, they would pass judgment. Races that passed survived; those that failed were exterminated.

The Skrulls were a typical example. As another branch of Deviants, they wiped out the Eternals on their planet and passed the Celestials' evaluation, becoming one of the three great interstellar empires that now shook the galaxy.

Then the Skrulls got carried away. They and their Skrull Gods wanted to do to the Kree what the Celestials had done to them, but it all fell apart. With their power, the Kree rose at an astonishing speed and became their greatest enemy.

The Eternals and Deviants on Earth had likewise been created by the Celestials.

Before Ikaris and his fellow Eternals, there had been an even older generation of Eternals and Deviants—ones that had ruled Earth before humanity, built a flourishing civilization twenty thousand years ago, and directly influenced Earth's history! Many years ago, when humans were still primitive people, the Celestials had already selected Earth as a large-scale testing ground. They created the perfect-gene Eternal Ones—the Eternals, Thanos's ancestors—and the infinite-mutation-gene Aberrants—the Deviants, who could barely be considered the ancestors of Mutants.

Earth twenty thousand years ago had been an era when Eternals and Deviants ruled everything. The Deviants of that time were intelligent lifeforms capable of developing technology, constructing cities, and building interstellar warships. They were entirely different from the "Deviants" Ikaris and the other eleven Eternals fought, which were more like giant wild dogs.

The two races went to war for supremacy over Earth.

The outcome was astonishingly similar to that of the Skrulls—the Deviants, with their infinite mutation genes, won.

The perfect-gene Eternals lost and fled Earth as a race, relocating to Titan. During their migration, they were attacked by the Kree Empire, one of the galaxy's three great empires. Vast numbers of their people were placed on Kree dissection tables for live experiments, giving rise to another branch of humanity—the Inhumans, who now lived on the Moon under the leadership of Black Bolt, a Skyfather Level powerhouse.

The Deviants won a bitter victory, but before they could truly enjoy its fruits, the Celestials deemed them defective products and exterminated them.

Yet although the Deviants went extinct, their mutation genes fortunately survived among the pitifully weak humans of the time. After generations of reproduction, they became Mutants.

This was a major event from twenty thousand years ago that changed the course of all Earth's history. Without it, there would be no Mutants today. Conversely, as long as Mutants existed, it meant that this world must once have had Deviants with infinite mutation genes, who had since gone extinct.

As for the chain reactions that followed—the disappearance of both races leaving a power vacuum on Earth, allowing the great hell demon Zarathos to invade; the descent of countless Spirits of Vengeance amid fiery rain to fight the demons; one of those Spirits of Vengeance later merging with some motorcycle-riding man and becoming Ghost Rider...

Major events such as the rise of the Mutant Apocalypse, the World Tree gods joining forces a thousand years ago to fight a formation of Celestials, Zhang Heng of the Eastern Han making a Celestial give birth, Da Vinci forging the Sun Armor and entering the Sun to drive out an infant Celestial, and the split between S.H.I.E.L.D. China Branch and S.H.I.E.L.D. could all be traced back to the conflict between the Eternals and Deviants.

Mm, Thanos slaughtering Titan and nearly wiping out this group of Eternals that had originated from Earth was no exception.

Thus, when Duva learned that Mutants existed on Earth in this universe, he had long prepared himself mentally. He had also been continually gathering information, searching for traces hidden in the corners of history.

And how could S.H.I.E.L.D., one of the two branches of the global superhuman organization known as the Holy Shield Brotherhood, founded by Zhang Heng and others and traceable all the way back to the Eastern Han, possibly know nothing about the Deviants? Fine, even if S.H.I.E.L.D. knew nothing about the true Deviants exterminated by the Celestials twenty thousand years ago—after all, humanity had been little more than a junior underling to the Eternals and Deviants back then—could they also know nothing about the low-level, wild-dog-like Deviants that a Celestial named Arishem had released onto Earth over the past several thousand years? These eleven Eternals were newly created tools, weapons repeatedly memory-wiped and reused by Arishem to deal with low-level Deviants. They had constantly killed all kinds of Deviants. Could S.H.I.E.L.D. really have failed to monitor any of it, leaving behind no records whatsoever? Don't joke around.

At that, Coulson's expression completely changed.

"This isn't right." Coulson frowned and stared into Duva's eyes. "I don't understand. We checked all the records and confirmed that you were indeed an intelligent scientist, but there was no way you could have come into contact with information at this level!"

"Why not?"

"Because of your platform. You've never stood on a platform worthy of the name, so there's no reason you could have obtained things buried in history."

"Then, Coulson, is there a possibility that everything you found out about me was simply what I wanted you to see?" Duva smiled without quite smiling.

Coulson fell silent. He still firmly believed Duva was talking nonsense, but that logically conflicted with the fact that Duva possessed secret information.

After a while, Coulson concluded that he could not pry Duva's own secrets from his mouth, so he shifted his probing toward the Deviants. "If I'm not mistaken, Ikaris isn't one of those giant reptilian Deviants?"

"If you mean the group of Deviants that appeared over the last several thousand years, then they really aren't the same thing." Duva's answer sounded somewhat baffling.

But Coulson understood instantly, and immense shock surged into his eyes.

Ridiculous. Duva even knew about that group of Deviants who had briefly dominated Earth? That had happened twenty thousand years ago! Even S.H.I.E.L.D., with its long inheritance, knew little about that period of history! "I'll report our conversation truthfully. So this is one of the sources of your confidence. I just wonder whether you have a stable intelligence source, or whether you personally experienced many of humanity's major historical events?"

Coulson had become thoroughly interested in Duva. After returning, he intended to comb through S.H.I.E.L.D.'s files and search historical records for traces of Duva.

Yes, he suspected Duva was some historical figure with an extraordinarily long lifespan, who had somehow lived all the way into modern society.

That was hardly unusual. For example, the demon-type Mutant Red Devil, whom Magneto valued highly, was an old fellow who had lived for five or six thousand years, surviving from the era of Apocalypse to the present day.

Duva shrugged and made a gesture telling him to go ahead.

Coulson considered his words. "Since Ikaris isn't a Deviant, that's the best outcome. Otherwise, things would become troublesome. You know what I mean, right? The true ancient Deviants went extinct, while another group of Deviants appeared over the past several thousand years—let's continue calling these reptilian creatures 'Deviants.' That's good."

Duva nodded in understanding. If Ikaris truly had been one of the orthodox intelligent Deviants from twenty thousand years ago, with infinite mutation genes, then the problem would have been enormous.

Don't forget that Earth also had a group of dangerous Mutants. They would likewise investigate their own origins to prove that Mutants were nobler than humans, and they might already have uncovered some clues.