The Shogun

Chapter 12 : The Fable

Then

"Midoriya, where do you think quirks came from?" Chisaki asks as he goes through one of Izuku's books and the hero-aspirant looks at him as if he was caught with his hand in the jar of biscuits. It has been somewhat a month since he came across Chisaki face to face and in order to keep the lie of him planning to be a genetic scientist going, he was forced to meet the masked man whenever he was in the compound. At one point, his secret of planning to be a hero came very close to being exposed, when he asked him why he was learning to fight if he was planning to be a scientist, but Mori-san swooped in the nick of time and basically concocted a lie that he was training Izuku to be a spy for the Shie Hassaikai at whatever place he was planning to go to. Izuku wanted to object at first, but the lie went well with why he was not on the members list that Chisaki himself approved of the training and not only that, he himself was tutoring the boy whenever he was around. In fact he even encouraged the teen to pursue UA. The lie basically gave him a second life at this compound.

At first, Izuku had no idea why anyone would want to spy on UA in the first place but who was he to argue with? It took him two days to transfer all the data on his hero notebooks into newer ones and in the evening, he, Mori-san, Sakuragi-san and Oyabun sat around the burning pile of his books and basked in its warmth.

"Ummmm...." Izuku starts to which Chisaki cuts him off and says, "Midoriya, if you are planning to be a scientist then you should know about this".

"Wasn't it from the glowing Chinese baby in Qing Qing city around two hundred years ago?" Izuku asks to which Chisaki simply lets out a chuckle and says, "Oh yeah.... The Luminescent Baby story... The story I had heard so many times. But tell me Midoriya... how did that baby get that quirk?"

"Umm..." was all Izuku could stammer at that point. He hated to admit it but this was the first time he even bothered to think about it. Quirks seemed so natural, that it never made sense for him to question their existence. It was just like the air he breathes, it was ever present. Seeing someone without a quirk was definitely a weird thing and this is coming from him, a quirkless person.

"I mean, think about it, Midoriya. If that baby was truly the source, then it would have taken more than five hundred years to have 80% of the population be the quirked ones. There must be something unnatural about it. I mean I can understand if someone is born with telekinesis or pyrokinesis, but parts of machinery jutting out from one's body strongly resemble a creature that doesn't come close to a human in the evolution tree just seems not right. How is that even possible to be natural unless an external force is involved?"

"You mean to say that quirks are man made existence?" Izuku asks, without realizing the fact that his eyes were widening with every single second passing.

"Not intended, but yeah", was the reply Chisaki gave.

"But why would anyone do that and how was this even given to people in the first place?" Izuku asks to which Chisaki leans forward a bit and says, "I can give a definite answer to the first one and a theoretical answer to the second one".

"What is the answer to the first question?" Izuku asks.

Chisaki takes a deep breath and explains, "Ok let's take nuclear power as an example. I don't exactly know who discovered it, but let me tell you that they never imagined what that discovery would have led to. We got two prominent outcomes from that discovery. One, it led to creation of nuclear reactors and second it led to creation of nuclear bombs. One led to mankind's salvation and the other led to mankind's destruction. Same thing has happened with quirks. Humans were trying to tap into something that was out of their understanding, maybe a new drug or new virus and maybe as an inconvenience, it was spread to the entire humankind".