Chapter 916: Have Been Here (Part 1)

"Hello, sir, I don't know what you are talking about. This is a human base located on Mercury. We are just a civilization that has just stepped out of its home planet and is learning how to extract resources from stars."

"I'm very sorry, we don't have the ability to send you home right now, but the door of human friendship is always open to you."

Shiler stood beside the hospital bed and smiled at Luonan, but Luonan was completely unmoved. He turned his head and looked at the few humans outside the observation room.

One of them looked very young, wearing a hoodie printed with cartoon patterns, looking in from the observation window with some curiosity.

Another person was wearing a uniform, holding a red and blue shield, and was arguing about something with another person wearing armor. Several other people wearing researcher uniforms were holding data and comparing data with each other.

The outside of the entire ward looked very normal. Everyone had things they should be doing, and the communication between them was very smooth. Just looking at this scene would make people think they were really saved by strangers and then sent to a hospital.

But Luonan sat up from the hospital bed. He revealed a cold smile and then said coldly:

"Skrulls, you are always so clever, but you don't know that huge flaws have already been revealed from your words, deeds, and scene layout. This trap is so childish that I find it laughable."

"You call yourself a human, yet you could accurately call out my race name the first time you saw me, and you could even distinguish my military rank."

"In the entire universe, there are many civilizations that have heard of the Kree Empire's prestige, but most of them are only looking at the leopard through a tube. Only one race knows us very well because we once engaged in a war that lasted for a thousand years, right? Running dog of the Skrull Empire?"

Luonan appeared very relaxed and refused to show any sign of weakness. He leaned against the wall behind the hospital bed and said, "This is just the first serious mistake you made, and the second flaw is that you call yourself human."

"Human... Human..." Luonan recited this race name with ups and downs several times, and then said, "Perhaps, in more distant cosmic space, not many people have heard of this race, but among the civilizations in the Local Group, who hasn't heard of humans?"

"There are too many cosmic demons from Earth, and too many powerful cosmic existences have entanglements with Earth. But what is very curious is that this is a very weak race that has yet to step out of their home planet. This has become a cosmic legend in the Local Group. Even the indigenous races at the very end of the spiral arm have heard of such legends."

"Yes, from the perspective of you Skrulls, no matter how backward a civilization is, how backward can it be? Isn't it backward enough that they can't mine the sun? Isn't it primitive enough that they can only build bases on Mercury?"

Luonan laughed disdainfully and said, "But all of this is you taking things for granted, because you have been away from the era of barbarism for too long. After you fled from your home planet's star system like a stray dog, too many historical fragments were left in the universe, which makes your excavation of history rely only on conjecture."

"You think that a weak race like humans can probably only build such a base near the sun, can only come up with a life-support system to let ordinary humans survive, and can only use primitive lamps hanging on the ceiling for lighting..."

"But what you don't know is that humans should be a race that has not yet walked out of their home planet, just like the Kree in the past. Let alone building bases on planets close to the sun, they even spend a long time just throwing chemical-fueled rockets onto the satellite closest to their home planet..."

"The heat of a star is not worth mentioning to you, but it is extremely fatal to humans. A life-support system capable of maintaining survival in an extremely high-temperature environment is a foundation-cannot-be-more-basic technology for Skrulls, but it is as difficult as ascending to heaven for humans."

Seeing Shiler's increasingly dark complexion, Luonan pressed on and said, "... Not to mention, your omissions in details."

"What I am using is an undamaged Kree Empire officer translation system, which has recorded tens of thousands of languages used by civilizations in the interstellar society, especially the Local Group, naturally including human languages."

"But what you don't know is that humans are a multi-lingual civilization. Although we have recorded many languages used by human civilization, members of a multi-lingual civilization often use certain transliterated vocabulary from other languages during the process of communicating with their companions, especially some emerging vocabulary, which cannot be perfectly translated by the translator after voice and tone changes."

"But just now, when I was lying here listening to you say hello, the conversations of everyone outside the observation room were translated very completely by the translator. There was not a single word that was difficult to translate, nor were there any unique modal particles."

Luonan spread his hands and said, "What does this explain? This explains that the human civilization vocabulary library you use is the same as ours, so you don't know those localized vocabularies either."

Luonan shook his head and said, "This is you Skrulls, a typical example of being too clever for your own good."

"You want to disguise yourself as weak humans to lower my vigilance and win my favor, but who doesn't know that the special abilities possessed by the shapeshifting Skrull race allow them to disguise themselves as any race in the universe?"

"Do you think I would have no precautions against this?" Luonan looked at Shiler and said, "Rather than letting me believe that a weak race like humans ran thousands of miles to the Kree Empire's star sector and saved me from a spaceship that has no atmosphere and is still producing dangerous explosions, it's better to let me believe that the Skrull Empire has fallen to the point of sneaking around using suicide attacks to raid other people's starports..."

"... Enough, you thief!" Shiler's complexion became colder. He squinted his eyes and looked at Luonan, saying, "Shut your mouth and stay here honestly."

"Thief, thief, thief... That's all you know. For thousands of years, you have been repeating this word, as if you were just an innocent victim." Luonan's tone lowered, and he continued:

"The education you received makes you never understand that the so-called gifts you give to other races are not helping the universe become more prosperous, but are creating more massacres and genocidal tragedies."

Luonan crossed his fingers and placed them together. He lowered his head and said, "The reason for that thousand-year war, you think it's because the Kree stole your technology and bit back."

"But in reality, if you were really so powerful and kind, you shouldn't have made a choice between the Kree and the Cotati."

"You let us each build a wonder to judge the potential of civilization development. We built a great Blue City, and they built a Cotati Garden."

"Which of these two buildings is better is no longer verifiable, but you chose the Cotati as the winner, not because their garden was really more beautiful, but because they were willing to flatter you and were willing to put down their weapons and become unarmed gardeners."

"What you chose was not the seeds of civilization with more potential, but the running dogs that were more helpful to you."

"You think that you helping the Cotati is providing more newborn power for the universe and making the universe more prosperous, but you haven't thought about what the Cotati will do after they possess more advanced weapons than us."

"Will they shout ideals like you?" Luonan shook his head and said, "No, they will only take the resources and technology you gave them and raise their butcher knives against us. The more you give, the more Kree will be slaughtered."

"The Kree are not lambs waiting to be slaughtered. In the face of this foreseeable tragic future, we must exhaust all our efforts to resist and resist the impending fate of destruction."

"We take your spaceships and technology, not as theft and plunder; this is the price you should pay, the price you must pay for your forever high-and-mighty attitude and the arrogance that will eventually destroy you."

Shiler looked at Luonan, and the people outside the observation window also stopped their conversations and movements. They all looked at Luonan somewhat silently. Luonan did not cast his gaze on them, but just said:

"If you don't give enough, then don't give at all. All civilizations are struggling in the darkness. If there is no savior, then they won't resent anyone, and resentment has no meaning."

"But if you descend upon their heads, give them hope, and let them have a short-lived prosperous life but fail to truly save them, it will only make them fall into deeper despair."

The eyes under Luonan's eye sockets were trapped in deep darkness. He looked at Shiler and said, "Skrulls want to be the kind father of the universe, but the resources and technology you scatter in large quantities can't exchange for anything other than raising a group of evil wolves like us."

"If you are not truly selfless and still have to make choices between helping other civilizations, choosing the one most beneficial to yourself, then you will only harvest one thousand-year war after another, and in the end, you will inevitably perish because you are not selfless enough, nor are you selfish enough."

Shiler was silent for a while, then gently pushed his glasses and said, "Perhaps, the Skrull Empire is not unaware that when it helped the Cotati civilization, it had already dug a grave for the Kree civilization."

"Perhaps, when it had to choose one civilization that was more beneficial to itself from two civilizations due to the predicament of reality, and abandoned the other, letting itself fall into strategic considerations and judgments of gain and loss, the so-called ideals you heard were nothing but a slogan."

"However, when you saw the Skrull Empire's main ship crash into the Kree Empire's first starport without any declaration... were you feeling happy?"

Shiler saw that when he asked this question, Luonan's fingertips stiffened slightly.

"Because such a shameless act will completely put an end to their home planet era that still had ideals."

"From the moment they took the initiative to incite war to show their power, the former Skrull Empire was already dead."

"Then, Mr. Luonan..." Shiler looked at Luonan and said in a tone like a murmur, "I just want to ask you one question..."

"Before this, before you couldn't be sure of this point, before you felt that he might still be alive and might still be able to complete his ideals, what exactly were you afraid of?"