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

Three exterior wall panels on the tenth, eighteenth, and twenty-sixth floors of the east facade of the Morgan Stanley Building popped open simultaneously, revealing three silicon carbide reflective lenses with a diameter of forty centimeters.

Three high-energy laser beams, invisible to the naked eye, converged and aligned within 0.03 seconds, focusing on the blue-gray figure on the sidewalk.

John felt the heat on his skin.

It was very brief, perhaps only a fraction of a second.

Then the optical path twisted.

The three laser beams were refracted at a 90-degree angle at a distance of 20 centimeters from John's body surface, and returned along the same path without any deviation.

The silicon carbide laser emitter on the tenth floor of the Morgan Stanley Building shattered instantly due to overload after receiving the beam it emitted.

The reflected energy pierced through the outer wall and struck the reinforced concrete load-bearing column on the tenth floor.

The concrete protective layer on the surface of the load-bearing column shattered and peeled off, exposing the red-hot steel bars inside.

A crack nearly two meters wide appeared on the exterior wall of the building between the ninth and eleventh floors.

Broken concrete blocks fell from a height and hit the roof of a police car outside the cordon.

Phillips heard the sound of structural stress coming from above in the machine room on B1, the groans of steel bars under extreme stress.

He turned off the lever.

My hands are shaking.

John stood there, looking down at his cleaning uniform.

It's not broken.

Not even a speck of dust fell.

He placed the coin between his right thumb and forefinger.

The posture is not quite right; the index finger is positioned slightly off-center.

He grew up in the Bronx and learned to flick coins from an old Dominican man on the street corner when he was a child, but that was more than 20 years ago.

John stared directly at the Morgan Stanley Building.

The crack snaked from the ninth floor to the eleventh floor, tearing the building's walls apart.

There are 3,400 people in the building, and each of them earns more in a year than he could ever earn in his lifetime.

Front view, swallowing money.

The opposite: death.

Use your thumb to apply force.

The coin bounced up.

Spin.

The sound was very crisp, like metal cutting through the air, and it bounced back and forth several times in the Manhattan skyline.

The entire Wall Street fell completely silent in that instant.

Tens of thousands of people watched this scene through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the seventeen buildings.

Solomon, on the 42nd floor of Goldman Sachs, put down his telescope, because he no longer needed it.

Each of the still-lit screens was playing a video of the coin spinning, the source of which was unknown. The video was taken from directly above, and the image was so clear that the lines of Lincoln's mustache could be counted on the coin's surface.

The coin reached its highest point, approximately 1.2 meters above John's head.

It begins to fall.

John reached out the back of his left hand to receive it.

The coin landed on the back of his hand with a dull thud.

John covered it with his right palm.

He didn't look at it right away.

Breathe.

a bit.

Two times.

Slowly move your right palm away.

On the back of his hand, George Washington's profile is facing upwards.

front.

All the lights in the Morgan Stanley Building went out.

The lights did not go out due to a power outage, but rather gradually descended into darkness from the top floor to the bottom floor, room by room, and piece of equipment by piece.

The darkness was extinguished in an orderly fashion, starting from the sixty-second floor and spreading downwards floor by floor until the entire building was swallowed by darkness.

In the B1 server room, the industrial control screen in front of Phillips was shattered into static.

The rows and rows of server units behind him saw their cooling fans reach their maximum speed within two seconds, causing the capacitors on the motherboards to bulge, smoke, and spew out colloid.

Black smoke billowed from the gaps in the server rack, and the smell was a pungent mixture of burnt epoxy resin and copper wire coating.

127 offices worldwide.

New York, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney, Frankfurt.

Morgan Stanley's data nodes in every financial center were all reset to zero within nine seconds.

The hard drive array was formatted even cleaner than it was in its factory state, with even the underlying firmware erased, leaving only a string of meaningless hexadecimal code that kept looping.

$640 billion.

The process of this figure evaporating from Morgan Stanley's books lasted less than thirty seconds.

Where did this money go?

Thirty million debtors worldwide received bank text messages on their mobile phones at the same time.

In Chicago's South Side, a Black single mother who had been 14 months behind on her mortgage received an extra $21,300 in her Chase Bank account, exactly 1.2 times her total debt.

In Manila, a Filipino man who had worked as a construction worker in the Middle East for eight years but had all his wages stolen by his contractor saw his BDO account balance go from negative 12,000 to positive 21,000.

In a São Paulo favela, a 19-year-old Brazilian girl owes three credit card companies a debt of $7,000.

Her phone lit up five times: three settlement notifications, two deposit reminders, and finally, a four-digit balance.

Thirty million short messages.

The moment when thirty million zeros become a positive number.

The tenth floor of Chelsea Football Club.

Connor stared at his phone screen; the Citibank Private Bank app refreshed its page.

Account balance: $0.00.

His knees buckled.

This is neither fear nor anger, but a more primitive physiological response. When the message of "all is zero" reaches the nerve endings, the circuit controlling the muscle tension in the lower limbs is automatically interrupted.

Connor knelt on the carpet. He couldn't afford to buy the Glock 19 that was lying on the windowsill, along with the eleven bullets left in the magazine. He could only cover his chest with his left hand.

pain.

This is not heartbreak in the literary sense, but real myocardial ischemia and coronary artery spasm. Long-term high-pressure work, six cups of espresso and a pack of Marlboro every day have made his cardiovascular system extremely fragile at the age of forty-seven, unable to withstand any severe stimulation.

The loss of $23.7 million is enough of a shock.

He lay on his side on the carpet.

Deutsche Bank staff rushed over, loosened his tie, and shouted for an ambulance.

John stuffed the coin into his pocket.

He turned around to face the depths of Wall Street.

Goldman Sachs is on the left, Citigroup is on the right, and JPMorgan Chase stands at the far end.

The footsteps were very light, and the rubber soles of the work boots made a creaking sound with each step on the glassy pavement.

Police sirens sounded behind us.

The NYPD's First Precinct patrol car turned off Broadway and had only gone about 30 meters when its engine stalled.

The police car glided a short distance before stopping in the middle of the road. The door opened, and two policemen jumped out and raised their pistols at John.

"Stop! Hands up!"

John didn't stop.

The two policemen exchanged a glance, then looked at the line of gold letters still hanging on the Nasdaq screen behind them.

Anyone with over $1,000 in bank deposits will die if they touch this place.

Their gun barrels slowly lowered.

The starting salary for a first-class NYPD officer is $42,500.

Even if I just received my salary but haven't paid the rent, I still have far more than a thousand in my account.

It wasn't that they didn't want to pull the trigger, but the rules clearly stated: don't touch anything over a thousand dollars.

What would happen if the bullet hit him?

Nobody wants to risk their life to prove it.

John continued walking.

His shadow was stretched long by the morning sunlight, casting a slanted line across the street on Wall Street, sweeping past the roller shutters of seventeen buildings.

Behind every roller shutter door, someone is watching him.

London.

South bank of the Thames, 400 meters east of Tower Bridge.

The crowds on the riverside promenade have been there since 2 p.m.

A piece of black granite appeared out of nowhere on the open ground next to the bridge pier base. It was about 1.2 meters high, with a rough surface and no carving marks.

A sword is stuck in the very center of the rock.

The tin alloy blade reflected the gloomy London skylight, the hilt was wrapped with a band of cheap brown artificial leather, and a barcode label with "Tower of London" and "£9.99" was taped to the butt end.

A middle-aged man in a Burberry trench coat squeezed to the front row, his ID badge still hanging around his neck: HSBC London headquarters, senior client manager.

"Who put this thing here? Performance art?" He scoffed and reached for the sword hilt.

The sound of bone cracking is very crisp.

His right metacarpal bones broke cleanly from the third to the fifth, his wrist twisted outward at a visible angle, and he was thrown three meters away by a force, his back slamming into the cast iron railing of the walkway with a dull thud as metal and bone deformed simultaneously.

His screams echoed far across the Thames.

The crowd stepped back five paces.

But no one left.

The souvenir sword, priced at nine pounds 99, was firmly embedded in the black granite, its barcode label fluttering gently in the river breeze.