The sign of disaster is the disappearance of seventeen minutes.
Atomic clocks, electronic timepieces, and even mechanical watches on people's wrists all over the world were collectively slowed down by seventeen minutes at a certain moment without any warning. It was not a shutdown, but time itself, which seemed to have been stolen during those seventeen minutes.
S.H.I.E.L.D. immediately detected this strange "time loss" phenomenon.
"It's not a hacker attack, it's not an instrument failure," Bruce·Banner's voice was filled with incredible tremors, "It's that the time stream itself has... wrinkles. A seventeen-minute timeline was cut out of our continuum, but traces of its existence were left."
Nick Fury's one eye is as sharp as an eagle. "Influence?"
"It's just an abnormality in the time record at the moment," Maria·Hill reported quickly, "But the time structure is damaged, and no one knows what will happen next. It may be a local time loop, cause and effect confusion, or even... the collapse of the timeline."
Strange and Wang rushed to the command center with extremely solemn expressions. "Kamar-Taj and Eye of Time observed a huge time vortex," Strange made seals with his hands, and golden sparks outlined a distorted timeline image. "Someone... or something, is performing 'surgical' modifications on the earth on the time level. The purpose is unknown."
Avengers acted immediately. Tony and Banner tried to use scientific and technological means to stabilize the local time field; Natasha and Clint investigated the public reaction in the time anomaly area; Steve coordinated the global response to possible chaos; Thor tried to use divine power to sense abnormal points in the time flow.
However, the disorder of time itself made their efforts ineffective. Communication was intermittent, actions were often delayed or advanced inexplicably, and memories were slightly misaligned.
Soon, more specific anomalies appeared. New York Manhattan Time within three blocks began to cycle, repeating the scenes of the lost seventeen minutes. The people inside were like insects trapped in amber, unable to control themselves. London The exhibits in a museum sometimes looked newly unearthed, and sometimes turned back into thousand-year-old artifacts. Tokyo People on the streets were of random ages. Fluctuating, old and young.
"The source must be found!" Strange struggled to maintain the operation of Eye of Agamotto, trying to smooth out the time wrinkles. "It keeps jumping on the timeline and cannot be locked!"
Just when Avengers was overwhelmed and almost driven crazy by this ubiquitous and traceless time chaos--
Malibu Beach.
Xiao Han had just raised his drink cup halfway when he suddenly stopped. He tilted his head slightly, as if he heard some extremely subtle dissonance.
It's not a sound, it's a feeling. The flow of sunlight around him, the heat transfer from the sand beneath him, and even the almost stagnant operation of his own biological clock all produced an extremely small "stutter" and "burr feeling" that he couldn't ignore.
It's like a perfectly smooth silk with a few unsightly knots.
He frowned, Super-Senses - especially the perception involving microscopic physics and energy flow - instantly locked onto an abnormal "ripple" that permeated the space. This was not an energy attack, but an "irregularity" in the time structure itself.
"Yingying." He whispered with obvious displeasure.
He didn't even do anything deliberately, he just subconsciously "stretched" his absolutely stable, almost Biological Force Field Eternity slightly, like a giant gently smoothing out the wrinkles on his robe.
As a result, those "burrs" and "stuck" caused by the tampering of the timeline were silently "ironed out" under the influence of this absolutely stable existence field.
Manhattan's time loop came to an abrupt end, and the people trapped in it were at a loss. London The exhibits in the museum returned to normal. Tokyo The ages of people on the streets stabilized. The beating frequencies of all timers around the world were resynchronized.
The flow of time is restored to smooth continuity.
Avengers was stunned in place, feeling that the sense of time suddenly returned to normal, and was at a loss.
"The time flow... is stable?" Strange checked Eye of Agamotto in disbelief, "Those wrinkles... have been smoothed out? How?"
Tony looked at the various readings that had returned to normal, and suddenly looked in the direction of Malibu: "It's him? But he... how can he interfere with time?"
"He may not need to 'interfere'," Banner murmured, coming up with a bold conjecture, "If his existence itself, his biofield, represents an ultimate 'unchanged' and 'stability'... then will any 'changing' anomalies, including temporal disturbances, be naturally...'repelled' or 'corrected' when they are close to him or perceived by him?"
This speculation sent a chill down everyone's back. It meant that they were facing an existential suppression at the level of universal laws that transcended the scope of understanding.
At this moment, Xiao Han just felt that the world had returned to "smoothness" and that little "shock" feeling had disappeared. He finished the drink with satisfaction, adjusted his lying position, and continued to enjoy the sunbath without any "lag".
As for what happened in the seventeen minutes when it was lost and returned? Who did it? Why?
He has no interest.
In the command center, Fury's voice broke the silence, with unprecedented seriousness:
"Set up a special team immediately. I want to know what was modified in those seventeen minutes. Also, comprehensively re-evaluate all the data of 'Sun's Son'. His impact on this world may be far beyond our imagination."
Far away in time and space, a hidden existence that manipulates the timeline and intends to tamper with history expressed silent astonishment. Its methods were actually broken in this way, and it could not even understand how the other party did it.
It silently raised the threat level of "Earth" to the highest level and made a note in the operation log:
"The target timeline has a 'fixed anchor point' that cannot be resolved. Any attempt to modify it may trigger an unpredictable 'rejection reaction'. Recommendation: Shelving the intervention plan for the timeline indefinitely."