Fate's Choice: Livestream at the Start Summoning Billions of Ravens

Qinling Mountains, underground base.

Seventy-two hours.

Zhou Dazhuang spent the longest three days of his life in a sealed laboratory.

Hypnotic aids are top-secret equipment of the military's psychological warfare department. Originally used for interrogation training and counter-interrogation simulations, they were temporarily modified into a violent version of a knowledge-imparting machine.

The Twenty Articles of Shang Yang's Reforms, the complete organizational structure of the Qin army from the rank of soldier to the rank of general, the Qin legal provisions recorded in the Yunmeng bamboo slips, Li Si's "Memorial on Expelling Foreign Guests," and the original text of the edict issued by Qin Shi Huang in the twenty-sixth year of his reign to standardize weights and measures...

The amount of information was equivalent to the total amount of information required for a normal person's three years of graduate studies, but it was compressed into 72 hours of uninterrupted cramming into the mind of a private.

By the end of the first day, Zhou Dazhuang had vomited three times.

The next day, he had a nosebleed, but he was able to recite the complete names and corresponding benefits of the eighteen ranks of military merit in the Qin army.

At four o'clock in the morning on the third day, he cursed the attending physician with a vulgar language in the ancient Qin dialect while half asleep.

At eight o'clock in the morning, Zhou Dazhuang sat up from the hypnosis chair, his eyes were bloodshot, and he had lost four pounds.

He reached out and took the tiger tally.

The light emanating from the gold-inlaid patterns was different from three days ago. It wasn't the tentative flickering anymore, but a warm light that flowed evenly, spreading along the lines of his palm to his wrist. The temperature was just right, not too hot to touch.

"stand."

No request, no hesitation, just one word.

One kilometer away, inside the chest cavity of the bronze terracotta warrior numbered T-001, the gear set rotated simultaneously, and the flow rate of the dark red liquid in the copper tube suddenly increased.

The bronze figurine raises its right foot and places it on the ground, then its left foot.

It stood up.

The joints move smoothly and silently; the 2,200-year-old brass mechanism has no jamming whatsoever.

All the surveillance cameras recorded the scene simultaneously, and a suppressed cheer erupted in the conference room; some people were clapping.

But the applause lasted for less than five seconds.

Because the bronze terracotta warriors did not stop.

It walked around the support and went to the weapons display area next to it, where a bronze hand grasped the handle of a bronze halberd and took it off the shelf.

Then, it began practicing the halberd.

The movements are simple and unadorned. The first move is a standard Qin army-style thrust, followed by a sweeping motion, a parry, a pullback, and a thrusting motion—a complete set of continuous halberd techniques.

The killing intent was palpable, and each thrust was accompanied by a precise braking sensation, with the tip of the halberd stopping precisely at the imagined enemy's throat.

It is not a program-driven mechanical repetition.

It is "practicing".

The same movement had slight differences in amplitude on the first and second attempts, and the third attempt was a fraction of a second faster than the first two.

Academician Qi stared at the playback footage from the high-speed camera, his lips moving for a long time before he finally managed to squeeze out a sentence: "This thing is learning on its own."

No one responded.

Because all the surveillance screens in the base were forcibly switched at the same time.

The image features only one person: Zhou Dazhuang.

His eyes were tightly closed, his face was contorted in pain, veins were bulging on his forehead, and his jaw was clenched tightly. The reading on the brainwave monitor was skyrocketing. The upper limit of a normal person's brainwave amplitude is 100 microvolts, but Zhou Dazhuang's reading had already exceeded 340 and was still going up.

At the same time, in the chest cavity of the bronze terracotta warrior a kilometer away, all the translucent bronze tubes running through its body suddenly lit up, and the dark red liquid inside the tubes surged and accelerated, its brightness jumping from a dim rusty red to a bright blood red.

"Heart rate 187! Blood oxygen has dropped to 89!" The attending physician rushed to the control panel.

Chen Jianguo rushed into the corridor and yelled into the walkie-talkie, "Terminate the test! Take the tiger tally from him..."

"We can't get it off!" came an even louder shout from the lab. "The tiger tally is stuck to his hand, we can't pry it off!"

On the screen, blood began to seep from Zhou Dazhuang's nostrils, and the liquid in the copper tube became brighter and redder, flowing faster and faster, as if some kind of living circulatory system was being forcibly activated.

The attending physician quickly injected Zhou Dazhuang's arm with a third sedative, and this time it finally worked.

The crimson light on the tiger tally dimmed inch by inch, and the sticky feeling in his palm loosened. The two medics took the opportunity to pry his fingers apart one by one, take out the tiger tally, and put it into a lead shielded box.

Zhou Dazhuang's eyes darted wildly under his eyelids, and his heart rate slowly dropped from 187 to 92. At that point, he slumped into the hypnosis chair as if his strings had been cut, and he completely lost consciousness.

Six hours.

He lay there for a full six hours.

Chen Jianguo didn't leave. He moved a folding chair to block the laboratory door and changed the water in his thermos four times.

Academician Qi and his team were analyzing the operational data of the T-001 bronze terracotta warrior next door. Occasionally, a few hushed arguments could be heard in the corridor, interspersed with the sound of keyboards being typed.

At 9:17 p.m., Zhou Dazhuang's eyelids twitched.

The first thing he did upon waking wasn't to open his eyes, but to clench his fist. His five fingers grasped at empty air; he didn't find the tiger tally, and only then did he relax.

"What time is it?"

"It's nine o'clock at night, and you've been unconscious for six hours." Chen Jianguo stood up, the metal leg of his folding chair scraping against the floor with a short, sharp sound. "Tell me, what just happened to you?"

Zhou Dazhuang sat up slowly. He stared at his right palm for a long time. There was a red mark made by a tiger tally on his palm, and the shape of the gold-inlaid pattern was clear.

"I was pulled inside."

"Where should I pull it in?"

Zhou Dazhuang thought for a long time before finding the right words.

"Military formation."

What he described sent a chill down Chen Jianguo's spine—it wasn't a picture, it wasn't a sound, it was a sensation that was directly injected into his nerves.

Tens of thousands of consciousness nodes are arranged in a tight square formation, each node being a bronze terracotta warrior, cold, emotionless, and purely fighting in will.

They are waiting for orders, and also scrutinizing the person who gives them.

"I only activated one, and this is how it feels." Zhou Dazhuang wiped his nose with the back of his hand, dried blood staining his skin. "If more than forty thousand woke up at the same time..."

He didn't finish his sentence.

Academician Qi pushed open the door and came in, clutching a stack of printing papers in his hand, the edges of which were still warm.

"The brainwave data analysis is complete." He slammed the paper on the table. "The conclusion isn't pleasant. Controlling the bronze terracotta warriors consumes the talisman holder's mental energy. The activation load of one terracotta warrior is about three percent of an average person's limit."

Chen Jianguo did the math: "Then those 40,000 are..."

"Twelve hundred times." Academician Qi took off his reading glasses and wiped them. "It's not linear growth, it's geometric progression. Because there's a linkage protocol between the bronze terracotta warriors, the more there are, the higher the coordination cost. Roughly estimated, if more than a thousand are activated simultaneously, Zhou Dazhuang's brain will burn out."

The lab was silent for a few seconds.

Zhou Dazhuang tilted his head and thought for a moment: "If I practice more, will I be able to carry more?"

No one answered his question because everyone knew the answer. Maybe it was possible, but no one dared to gamble on the limits of a living person's mind.

Chen Jianguo dialed an encrypted number in Beijing, reported his findings, and received only one response: "Protect him, take your time."

He hung up the phone, looked at Zhou Dazhuang's young face still covered in scabs, and swallowed back the rest of his sentence.