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

Cargill's Chief Bio Officer, Anne Black, walked over to the screen and picked up the laser pointer.

"Rust-7 is a genetically edited variant of Rhizoctonia solani."

She tapped the molecular model diagram on the screen with a laser pointer.

"Its mycelium is only one-fifth the diameter of a typical Rhizoctonia solani, and it can penetrate the epidermal cell walls of most plant roots."

"Moreover, once it enters the vascular tissue, it does not trigger an immune response in the plant because we have knocked out its three main antigen genes."

Speak like a human.

Jean-Pierre picked up his coffee cup.

"It is an invisible killer. Plants will not show any symptoms for 72 hours after infection and will continue to photosynthesize and bear fruit as usual."

"Starting from the fourth day, the xylem vessels of the root system will be blocked by mycelium, and the nutrient transport efficiency will decrease by three percent per hour. On the seventh day, the plant will wither from the roots, and on the tenth day, the entire plant will die completely."

Annie turned off the laser pointer and added a sentence.

"In our greenhouse experiments, Rust-7 had a 100% lethality rate on 27 types of grass crops."

Morrison adjusted his glasses.

Is there an antidote?

Anne looked at West, who nodded almost imperceptibly at her.

"There is no publicly available antidote. We designed the strain with a special kill switch, and only Cargill's laboratory has the biological key to turn it off. As for conventional bactericides, copper-based agents, and methyl thiophanate, they are all ineffective."

Jean-Pierre slammed his coffee cup down, the bottom of the cup hitting the table with a dull thud.

"You want to spread this stuff in Peru."

This is not a question, but a statement.

West did not deny it.

"I will not use any of Cargill's personnel."

He turned to Morrison.

"Doug, do you have any usable channels in the southern mountains of Peru?"

Morrison's lips pressed into a straight line. He took out his phone from his inner pocket, scrolled through his contacts for a moment, and then said a name.

"The remaining armed forces of the Shining Path, led by Carlos Mendoza, harbor deep hatred for the Cusco government because a third of their coca plantations were encroached upon by the expansion of the Andean Eden oasis last year."

Is it reliable?

"If you deposit fifty million dollars into his anonymous account, he's reliable enough to assassinate the president for you."

"There's no need to assassinate anyone."

West took three thumb-sized aluminum capsules from the drawer and placed them on the table one by one.

"Miniature weather seeders, military grade, can release spores at an altitude of 500 meters when mounted on agricultural drones. Three of them are enough to cover the upwind side of the core production area."

"Our weather model has been tested, and the prevailing winds this season blow from the northwest to the southeast, with a radius that can cover all the cultivated golden corn fields."

Maria's pen stopped on the paper.

"West, you need to understand, if this gets found out..."

"What can be found? A newly emerging plant disease in nature? The FAO database adds hundreds of new fungal records every year."

West pushed the three capsules to the center of the table.

"I have removed all traces of human editing. The GC content of the gene sequence completely mimics that of natural Rhizoctonia solani. Even if the Peruvians send the sample to Harvard for sequencing, the report will only conclude that a new type of soil-borne disease has been discovered."

No one spoke in the meeting room.

Seventy-two hours later.

Fifty kilometers southeast of Cusco, Peru, on the edge of the rainforest.

Three DJI T50 agricultural drones, without any markings, took off under the cover of night, the hum of their propellers completely masked by the croaking of frogs and chirping of insects in the rainforest at night.

The GPS flight path is preset at an altitude of 520 meters, a wind speed of 4.7 meters per second, and a direction from northwest to southeast.

When the first drone flew over the coordinate point, the valve of the aluminum alloy capsule opened.

Nothing is visible to the naked eye.

The spores of Rust-7 are less than five micrometers in diameter, smaller than flour particles. They drift with the wind and fall silently into the vast cornfield below, which gleams golden in the moonlight.

The three drones completed the entire seeding mission within forty minutes and then returned along the same route.

The next morning.

Inside the Peruvian National Laboratory for Bio-Agriculture, 31-year-old soil microbiology researcher Sofia Rojas was collecting soil samples from the core production area as usual when she soon discovered something unusual under the microscope.

"Jesus, come and take a look at this."

Her mentor, the lab director Jesus Paredes, immediately leaned over to the eyepiece.

On the glass slide, an unfamiliar mycelium is rapidly penetrating into the intercellular spaces of the corn root system.

These hyphae are extremely fine and have a low refractive index. If Sofia hadn't used high-magnification fluorescence staining, a conventional optical microscope would not have been able to detect their presence.

"What is this?"

Paredes' voice trailed off.

Sofia fed the sample slices into the PCR instrument and ran a rapid gene sequencing test. When the results came out, she stared at the screen for a full two minutes.

"It belongs to the Rhizoctonia genus, but its genome and the homology of all known species in the database are less than 83%, so this is a completely new species."

How pathogenic is it?

"There are signs of blockage in the root vascular bundles. I ran an infection model..."

She turned her laptop toward her tutor.

"At this rate of mycelial expansion, nutrient transport in infected plants will be completely interrupted within seven days."

Paredes immediately picked up the phone and dialed the Minister of Agriculture directly.

"Minister, we're in big trouble."

Four hours later, the Peruvian National Emergency Agricultural Security Conference officially convened.

Agriculture Minister Alberto González sat at the head of the conference table, his face ashen. Sofia's report was projected onto the screen, the glaring red area marking that the infection had spread to 42 percent of the core production area.

"Conventional disinfectants are completely ineffective."

Sofia's report was concise and to the point.

"We tried nine different fungicides: methyl thiophanate, carbendazim, flutriafol, and more, but this strain showed complete resistance to all of them."

González rubbed his temples, a half-written press release spread out in front of him, titled "Emergency Statement Regarding the Discovery of an Unknown Plant Disease in the Cusco Region."

As for the second half, he left it blank, unsure how to proceed.

Sofia continued analyzing the strain's drug resistance mechanism, while other officials in the meeting room whispered among themselves, some already contacting the World Health Organization's office in Lima by phone.

No one in the conference room noticed that the image on the real-time monitoring screen on the wall had changed; golden veins were quietly lighting up on the main stems of the first batch of golden corn that were infected on the edge of the production area.

The lines spread slowly along the stem surface. Although the speed was not fast, the coverage area continued to expand. After a few minutes, all the dense stomata on the leaf surface had closed, and transpiration and photosynthesis were reduced to zero.

Judging from their appearance, these corns are "dying".

However, the changes underground are completely opposite to the process of any plant dying.

The root system is shrinking.

It wasn't a withering and shrinking process, but rather a proactive and orderly regeneration. Countless roots, like an octopus retracting its tentacles, were pulled one by one from the fungus-contaminated soil.

The main root is also pulled upwards from a position 60 centimeters underground. The cap-like structure at the root tip secretes a layer of oily substance, which isolates the mycelium attached to the surface along with the soil particles.

The entire corn stalk rises from the ground.

Then came tens of thousands of them.