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

Twenty-three seconds.

The values ​​on the EEG monitor jumped over 400 microvolts, and the waveforms all became jagged.

Zhou Dazhuang's legs were trembling. This was not out of fear, but because his cerebral cortex had lost fine control over his muscles after enduring far excessive mental stress.

He knelt down, but his hands didn't loosen.

The tiger tally burned his palm until it was smoking, and the smell of burnt meat filled the air.

The test site is located 47 kilometers away.

The eye sockets of a thousand bronze crossbowmen simultaneously glowed with a dark red light.

Their movements were so synchronized it was unsettling; a thousand hands simultaneously reached behind them to unload the heavy bronze triple-bow crossbows.

The gears inside the crossbow began to mesh at high speed, the winch rotated, and the crossbow string was pulled inch by inch to its full length.

When the string was stretched to its limit, it emitted a sharp screech, and the ear-piercing frequency of the grinding and friction between metals caused the rubble on the underground palace walls to fall down in a rustling sound.

The inlaid gold runes on the crossbow arm began to flow.

When the monitor in the control room switched to that screen, Chen Jianguo saw the complete picture.

He immediately gave up trying to understand the scene before him within two seconds.

A thousand bronze crossbowmen lie face up, their crossbow bolts aimed at the rocks above them.

"Shoot it into the sky?" someone blurted out.

"Shoot stones?"

Nineteen seconds.

The military doctor from the medical team rushed in and grabbed Academician Qi's sleeve.

"His heart rate is 210! If the connection isn't cut off soon, he'll be gone!"

Academician Qi's hand touched the handle of the industrial-grade knife switch.

The cast iron handle was cold.

This was a hardware redundancy that he personally requested to be installed after Zhou Dazhuang's first nosebleed incident. As long as it is pulled down, the copper wire between the Tiger Talisman and the EEG bridge port will be physically cut off.

Zhou Dazhuang's connection will be interrupted.

The work will stop once a thousand bronze terracotta figures are completed.

Then the 15 Mach tungsten rod will smash the mountain and bury them all inside.

Fifteen seconds.

Academician Qi is 63 years old.

He has spent his entire life working with materials, dealing with metals and alloys for forty years. He knows the yield point, fracture limit, and fatigue life of every material.

But no formula in the mechanics of materials can help him with this decision.

He glanced at Zhou Dazhuang, who was kneeling on the ground covered in blood, on the surveillance screen, and then at the thirteen-second countdown on the radar screen.

He removed his hand from the switch.

His fingers were trembling, and he tried to press them down with his other hand, but that hand couldn't stop the trembling.

Eleven seconds.

Deep within the underground palace, Zhou Dazhuang roared out a single word from the depths of his consciousness.

That word is neither Mandarin nor Sichuan dialect.

It is a memory instilled in the subconscious, the syllable used by Qin generals when issuing the charge order on the battlefield in the ancient Guanzhong dialect.

"break."

A thousand giant bronze arrows were released from their bows simultaneously.

The sound of the crossbow string snapping blended into a muffled thunderclap.

The moment the giant arrow pierced the rock strata, all the ancient runes engraved on the arrow shaft lit up.

High-frequency resonance spreads outward from the arrow tip, and invisible ripples spread layer by layer through the rock.

The rocks began to make way.

The rocks did not explode or shatter, but were pushed to both sides by a force.

An invisible force split the 420-meter-thick granite wall in the middle, and the rubble neatly retreated to both sides along the walls of the passage, leaving a vertical vacuum passage with a diameter of about 15 meters, leading directly from the underground palace to the surface.

Academician Qi stared at the earthquake waveform diagram.

His professional training allowed him to understand the tactic within three seconds.

"He's clearing the way." Academician Qi's voice was so hoarse it was almost inaudible.

"The mountain couldn't stop the tungsten rod; a direct confrontation would only shatter the rock layers and cause a chain reaction of collapses. He opened a passage, brought the tungsten rod in, and dissipated its kinetic energy in a controlled space..."

"Isn't this suicide?" Chen Jianguo asked.

"This is the only way to survive."

Eight seconds.

The space-based tungsten rod plunged down into the vacuum channel.

Without air friction, the speed does not decrease but increases.

A ten-ton, six-meter-long incandescent metal rod plummeted straight down at a speed exceeding five kilometers per second.

The rubble on the inner wall of the passage was blown away by the air pressure wave, and the underground palace at the bottom was illuminated as bright as day within two seconds.

One thousand bronze terracotta warriors discarded their empty crossbows.

A thousand hands simultaneously drew bronze halberds from their backs.

The halberd's tail is inserted into a pre-set stone groove in the ground, with the blade pointing diagonally upwards at a 45-degree angle.

A thousand long spears formed a dense, impenetrable metal jungle within a circular area with a radius of thirty meters.

The gold-inlaid patterns flow with a crimson-gold light, which spreads, connects, and converges along the body of the halberd, weaving a complete net of light among the thousand long halberds.

The tungsten rod came crashing down.

There was no explosion upon contact with Göring.

The crimson gold light reached its limit.

The ten-ton tungsten alloy rod was cut in the instant it touched the first row of blades.

The tungsten alloy rod was not melted or broken, but rather dissected at the molecular level.

The conceptual-level armor-piercing effect, combined with the thousands of long spears, formed a three-dimensional cutting network, breaking the tungsten rod into tens of thousands of fragments within 0.3 seconds.

The kinetic energy of the fragments is captured by the light net, conducted downwards along the body of the gob, and guided into the base through the stone grooves.

The base connects to deeper rock veins, and energy is infused into the depths of the earth's crust.

The main peak of the Qinling Mountains trembled.

The Xi'an Seismic Observatory recorded a magnitude 3.1 earthquake that lasted less than two seconds.

And then that was it.

The lights in the control room flickered twice, and a little water leaked from a pipe in one of the corners.

Apart from that, everything is intact.

When the surveillance footage switched back to the underground palace, Academician Qi saw the price to pay.

Of the thousand bronze halberds, more than seven hundred had been burned into twisted and deformed scrap copper.

The gold-inlaid patterns on the halberd had all disappeared, and the remaining metal showed a dull, oxidized color.

The bronze figurines' arm joints were emitting black smoke, and most of their gear sets were jammed, leaving them lying crookedly in the underground palace.

Of the less than two hundred that remained standing, their movements had become sluggish and stiff, with dark red kinetic fluid seeping from their joints.

Zhou Dazhuang was completely unconscious.

He lay prone on the floor of the control room, the tiger tally slipping from his grasp and falling to the side.

There was a clear burn mark on the palm of that hand, and the heart rate monitor showed 32 beats per minute, and it was still dropping.

The military doctor rushed over, pinched his philtrum, and injected him with adrenaline.

Academician Qi slumped into the chair; his legs could no longer support him.

Someone handed him water, and when he took it, his hand trembled so much that he spilled most of the water.

Chen Jianguo turned to the communications station.

"What about Cairo?"

The correspondent shook his head.

"Unable to connect, all frequencies are noise."

No one answered.

However, in the satellite thermal image in the lower right corner of the large screen, a white-incandescent band of light is falling towards the North African continent with an almost vertical trajectory.

The restoration room of the Cairo National Museum.

The dome canvas rustled in the wind.

Hassan's pencil stopped on the notebook, the tip poking a hole in the paper.

The scales have shifted.

The left tray sank on its own when there were no items inside.

Seven jet-black weights appeared out of thin air, each more than three times the size of the heaviest one used during Mustafa Saeed's last trial.

Two beams of golden light shot from the compound eyes of the scarab statue, piercing through the canvas, the sandbags, and the broken limestone dome, straight into the night sky.

Hassan walked to the only window crack in the restoration hall that wasn't blocked by sandbags and looked up.

A shooting star.

It was moving so fast that it was difficult to see with the naked eye. Its incandescent contrail drew an arc in the night sky, ending directly in front of the building beneath its feet.

The 72-year-old man held onto the windowsill with trembling hands.

Parkinson's disease causes his fingertips to twitch constantly, but his eyesight remains steady.

"Here we go again," he said in a low voice in Arabic, his tone almost like haggling at a market.

The scarab elytra on the Libra base slowly unfold to their maximum angle.

Golden light and shooting stars faced each other across the night sky.