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

Solomon picked up the Iridium satellite phone on the table and dialed.

busy tone.

He tried a different one, but it was still busy.

Part Three.

Part Four.

All I hear is busy signal.

A crisp sound came from the end of the corridor; it was the sound of smoke billowing from the mainboard of the security control console, followed by the sound of capacitors exploding.

Forty-seven seconds.

The building's fire alarm system did not broadcast a fire alarm; instead, it played a continuous, low-pitched metallic scraping sound.

The sound poured in through the ventilation ducts on each floor, vibrating inside the skull and making one feel uncomfortable even in the gaps between the bones.

With this sound, the alloy explosion-proof roller shutters at the twelve entrances of the Goldman Sachs building began to descend.

Hydraulically driven, with two-centimeter-thick manganese steel alloy panels, it was originally designed to seal off the building in the event of a terrorist attack.

They started up on their own now, without anyone pressing the red button hidden in the security room.

The revolving door in the lobby on the first floor stopped first.

Then the roller shutter slid out from the hidden groove in the ceiling, not fast, but with a despairingly steady motion.

There were still more than thirty traders queuing to buy Starbucks in the lobby. They threw down their coffees and rushed toward the door. In the last gap, only two of them managed to roll out sideways.

The roller shutter door is floor-to-ceiling.

The sound of the latches snapping shut came from the soles of my feet.

Thirty seconds.

The same thing is happening simultaneously in seventeen financial landmarks, including Morgan Stanley Tower, Citibank headquarters, JPMorgan Chase Global Center, and Merrill Lynch Building.

More than 20,000 financial professionals in suits were confined to their cubicles.

The demolition team from the Fifth Precinct in Manhattan arrived at the main entrance of the Goldman Sachs building within four minutes.

The hydraulic shears' jaws snapped into the bottom edge of the roller shutter door, the motor roared for half a minute, and the jaws broke two bolts.

A two-centimeter-deep scratch appeared on the roller shutter door.

Even the paint hasn't completely peeled off.

Sixty seconds.

Zero.

The red numbers disappeared from the curved screen of the Nasdaq building.

A holographic image of a coin appeared in the center of the screen, and after rapidly flipping seven times, it came to a stop.

Lincoln's profile.

Below the coin, a line of gold English letters appears one by one.

Fortune is not calculated, but tossed.

Wealth doesn't need to be calculated, it just needs to be thrown away.

At the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 47th Street in Manhattan, the flow of people stopped 30 seconds ago, not because of traffic control, but because something was glowing in the gap of the sewer grate in the middle of the intersection.

A coin.

1999 edition, Philadelphia Mint, Lincoln's profile facing upwards, with noticeable wear on the edges.

It floated up from the gap in the grille and stopped at a height of forty centimeters above the ground.

The moment the coin came to a stop, the material of the asphalt road surface with a radius of three meters beneath it changed in an instant.

The black modified asphalt completed its transformation from amorphous to crystalline state within half a second, becoming a transparent and smooth glass-like substance with neatly cut edges and a thickness of about fifteen centimeters.

A Wells Fargo armored truck went out of control.

The driver applied the brakes the moment he saw the change in road surface, but the ABS screen went black three seconds earlier, along with the entire instrument panel.

The three-and-a-half-ton Ford F-550 crashed head-on into the glassy ground at a speed of forty kilometers per hour.

The bulletproof tire was the first to break.

Michelin XZL military-grade tires are designed to withstand direct hits from 7.62mm rifle bullets, disintegrating at the molecular level at the moment of contact with the glassy edge.

The tire did not burst; instead, it turned into powder.

Immediately afterwards, the axle broke, and the front of the car, due to inertia, crashed into something unseen.

The hood folded into a V-shape, and coolant sprayed out and spilled all over the ground, but the coin didn't even shake.

The Goldman Sachs building has 42 floors.

Solomon stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, clutching a pair of Swarovski binoculars. Through the lenses was the floating coin and the glass altar beneath it.

"Get it."

His personal bodyguard, Alexei, a former FSB Alpha Group member, weighing 103 kilograms and with a combat-ready physique, pulled an axe from the fire cabinet and walked toward the window.

When the axe blade was still an inch from the bulletproof glass, Alexei's wrist was bounced back by a force.

The axe handle broke in the middle, the wood fibers at the break curling outwards, and the part with the axe head flew out and smashed onto the conference table, knocking Solomon's Tiffany cufflink case onto the carpet.

The text on the screen has changed.

A new line of gold letters emerged from beneath the holographic image of the coin.

"Anyone with more than a thousand dollars in bank deposits will die if touched."

Bilingual (Chinese and English)

You're very kind.

Solomon put down his telescope.

His personal accounts at UBS and Credit Suisse, as well as trust assets in the Cayman Islands, totaled more than $800 million.

Goldman Sachs' total assets on paper are $1.6 trillion.

Any analyst randomly picked from this building under his management earns more than a fraction of a thousand yuan a year.

This coin has nothing to do with them.

The more than 20,000 people trapped in the seventeen buildings had nothing to do with this coin.

It is waiting for someone else.

The door to the driver's cab of the armored truck was kicked open from the inside.

A Latino man in a blue-gray cleaning uniform fell out of the passenger seat, scraping his knees and elbows, and tearing a seam on the right shoulder of his uniform.

His name is John Nunez Cruz.

Thirty-four years old.

This morning at eight o'clock, the white female manager of the human resources department at Morgan Stanley told him that he had been laid off and that he should leave his employee badge at the front desk when he left.

His Wells Fargo account balance, as of 9 a.m. today, was $617 and 38 cents.

John got up from the ground, wiped the cooler off his face, and looked up to see the coin.

It twirled slowly in the sunlight, casting a small patch of golden light onto his face.

He took the first step.

His right knee had been jolted by the impact, causing him to limp slightly. A section of the right shoulder seam of his blue-gray cleaning uniform had come ripped open, revealing the faded cotton lining underneath.

The coin spun at a height of forty centimeters above the ground.

It turned slowly and leisurely, and golden spots of light fell on John's face, moving in small patches across his cheekbones, the bridge of his nose, and the old razor scar on his chin.

The surroundings were unnaturally quiet.

Fifth Avenue in Manhattan was eerily quiet on a weekday morning.

John stretched out his hand, his five fingers spread wide, with detergent crystals still embedded in his fingernails from scrubbing the bathroom floor tiles on the 37th floor of Morgan Stanley that morning. Between his index and middle fingers was a scabbed crack left from scrubbing the oven with a steel wool pad last night.

His hand passed through the air.

There was no resistance.

There is no barrier.

There was nothing there.

The coin stopped spinning the moment the fingertip touched the metal.

It's cold.

This was John's first reaction.

The coolness didn't belong to the June sun in New York; it crept from the fingertips into the wrist, spread along the veins on the inside of the forearm, and reached the back of the head three seconds later.

The patina that had accumulated over the years on the coin's surface began to peel off.

The rust did not fall; instead, it disintegrated, the rusty shell shattering into countless tiny particles that floated briefly in the sunlight before vanishing without a trace.

The clean surface of the coin was revealed.

A Lincoln profile, 1999, LIBERTY, IN GOD WE TRUST.

A metallic clang rang out.

The sound was unusually sharp, and the moment it pierced the eardrum, the glass curtain wall of an office building two hundred meters away cracked from top to bottom, revealing a long line.

John gripped the coin tightly.

No words or images appeared in his mind, only a clear set of rules.

Those rules, without needing translation, were directly ingrained in his understanding, becoming an innate instinct.

[Front view, swallowing money.]

[On the contrary, it's deadly.]