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

On the same night.

In the port of Cusco, González squats on the cracked concrete pavement, facing a golden cornfield restored to its original state.

The golden tassels swayed gently in the moonlight, growing at the same pace as yesterday, as if nothing had happened.

Sofia ran over to ask about the losses, and Gonzalez brushed the gold dust off his hair and said, "The corn is still there, the port is still there, and the people are still here."

Qinling underground base, medical intensive care unit.

Academician Qi sat on the folding chair next to Zhou Dazhuang's bed. The chair legs were uneven and creaked when he sat on it. Zhou Dazhuang's heart rate had stabilized at 48 beats per minute, low but steady. The tiger-shaped brand on his palm was scabbing over. Academician Qi did not return to the laboratory. He sat there all night with a glass of water that had been spilled most of the way.

Hassan is still looking at inscriptions in the restoration hall of the Cairo National Museum.

The soldier at the door brought him a cup of black tea. Without looking up, he reached out and took it, placing it on the corner of the table. He continued drawing crooked pictographs in his notebook with his pencil.

Ruins on the south bank of the Thames in London.

Arthur Griffin leaned back against the black granite block, his longsword resting on his knees. A little girl, about seven or eight years old, peeked out from behind the rubble and timidly approached, holding half a sandwich in her hands. Arthur glanced at her, took it, and took a bite. It was ham and cheese, cold, but still edible.

Safe house in the capital.

Furnessa stuffed the last piece of tiramisu into her mouth, her cheeks puffed out, and poked the empty plate with the tip of her fork, making a clinking sound.

Zhou Ruo sat across from her peeling an orange. After peeling half of it, she asked, "You said something flew up earlier, what was it?"

After chewing and swallowing, Funina tilted her head and thought for a moment.

"I don't know, but it's already gone back down. The world is a little quieter today." She drew a circle on the empty plate with her fork.

Zhou Ruo pushed the peeled orange over, and Funina glanced at it, then disdainfully used her fork to push it aside: "This water goddess said I only eat sweets. Isn't this orange sour?"

"This variety is not sour."

"You said the same thing last time."

After Funina finished chewing and swallowing, the water droplet mark between her eyebrows flickered slightly. She turned her head to look at the night sky in the southeast, a hint of disgust flashing in her eyes.

"What's wrong?" Zhou Ruo asked.

"It's nothing, it's just that the air here is too dry, and there seems to be something dirty in the deep ocean." Funina put down her fork, her tone leaving no room for argument. "Tomorrow I'm going to the beach to find a base where I can see the Pacific Ocean."

Outside the window, the Beijing night sky was so clear that you could see the three stars of Orion's Belt.

Something is flying back from that direction.

.........

Three days after the space-based weapon was destroyed.

A secret military port in the East China Sea.

It was a little past four in the morning, and the light in the master bedroom on the second floor of the safe house was not on.

But Funina's eyes were open.

Three hours of light sleep is enough for a deity.

She lay on her side on the bed, her heterochromatic pupils, one blue and one purple, gleaming faintly in the darkness. Her ahoge (cowlick) stuck out on the pillow, swaying gently in the breeze from the air conditioner.

Not right.

This feeling started yesterday evening; it's very mild, like the discomfort of fingernails rubbing against a blackboard.

It doesn't hurt, but it's annoying.

Funina kicked off the covers, sat up, and walked barefoot to the window on the wooden floor.

The East China Sea appears leaden gray in the darkest hour before dawn, with small waves and little wind.

But her perception pierced through these appearances, across the East China Sea continental shelf, across the Philippine Basin, and extended southeastward until it reached an area more than three thousand kilometers away from her.

The water droplet mark between his eyebrows was shining.

That direction leads to the Mariana Trench, the site where the wreckage of the Holy Grail crashed after its self-destruction.

The fluctuations are weak, non-aggressive, and lack any independent will, but they are there.

To put it bluntly, it's something that continues to mechanically pollute the surrounding environment even after being blasted apart. It's the same principle as pouring half a bucket of engine oil into a pool of clean water. The oil won't chase after you, but the water will become increasingly dirty.

Funina's lips twitched down slightly.

"Hate."

She pressed her forehead against the glass window and muttered two words softly.

There was a rustling sound coming from the next room.

Zhou Ruo gets up at 4:30 every day, which has become a habit.

Six minutes later, she pushed the door open and saw Funina standing barefoot by the window, not even wearing slippers.

"Why aren't you wearing shoes again? The floor is cold."

"This water god is not afraid of the cold."

Without turning around, Fu Ningna asked a question that Zhou Ruo was completely unprepared for.

"Have you humans detected anything strange in the depths of the Pacific Ocean?"

Zhou Ruo paused, holding the towel in her hand.

"What do you mean?"

"It means exactly what it says, the deep sea, the very deep kind."

Funina turned around, her heterochromatic eyes reflecting the hazy gray sea outside the window.

"There's something dirty over in the Mariana Islands."

Zhou Ruo opened her mouth but didn't ask what the "dirty stuff" was.

She spent almost a week with Funina, and the first lesson she learned was that if the water goddess says something exists, then it exists.

She walked to the bedside table, opened the secure terminal, entered the access code, and connected to the duty channel of the Ninth Bureau's intelligence center.

I got a reply three minutes later.

Zhou Ruo's expression changed.

"How so?"

Funina leaned against the window frame, her arms crossed over her chest.

"In the past 48 hours, the deep-sea buoy array near the Mariana Trench has reported anomalies, with seawater temperatures rising by 17 degrees Celsius in some areas, and... a large area of ​​deep purple discoloration has appeared."

Funina didn't say anything.

Purple.

The color of the abyss.

"Notify that guy surnamed Chen."

After speaking, Funina walked back to the bedside, sat down, and began to put on her socks, her movements unhurried and deliberate.

"Tell him to bring the data over; this Water God wants to see the raw data."

……

Chen Jianguo arrived at 4:52 a.m.

He hadn't changed into a suit; he was wearing a dark blue windbreaker, and his trousers were damp with dew.

He was holding an aluminum alloy briefcase containing satellite thermal images that had just been retrieved from the remote sensing center four hours earlier.

The living room on the first floor of the safe house was temporarily cleared out and used as a meeting room.

Fu Ningna sat on the sofa with a plate of egg tarts that Zhou Ruo had just heated up in front of her. She picked one up, took a bite, her cheeks puffed out, and stared at the satellite photos that Chen Jianguo had spread out on the coffee table.

The photo's colors have been enhanced, but even so, it still gives me the creeps.

An unusual, deep purple body of water, about three kilometers in diameter, lies directly above the Mariana Trench.

The color of the seawater in the central area could no longer be explained by any normal marine phenomenon; it was an almost fluorescent purplish-black, as if someone had dumped hundreds of tons of industrial dye into the Pacific Ocean.

"The seawater in the central area is boiling, with a surface temperature of 43 degrees Celsius, while the normal value is 2 to 4 degrees Celsius."

Chen Jianguo flipped to the second photo.

"Where's the detector?"

"I'm chewing on an egg tart," Funina asked.

"Three deep-sea unmanned submersibles were sent down, but all of them lost contact when they were 6,000 meters below the surface."

Chen Jianguo handed over a sheet of printed data.

"The final data sent back contained a piece of garbled text. The technical team spent twelve hours deciphering it, and the conclusion was..."

He paused.

"It matches the data characteristics of the abyss in the original mirror world by 91%."

Funina put the egg tart down.

She wiped the oil off her fingers with a tissue, moving very slowly, so slowly that Zhou Ruo noticed something was wrong.

Funina only slows down her movements when she is thinking seriously.

"Your people probably already guessed it, but let me put it more clearly."

Funina crumpled the tissue into a ball and threw it into the trash can.

"When the Holy Grail self-destructed, the energy released by that omnipotent wish-granting machine did erase the higher-dimensional will of the original sin body, but the underlying destructive code was not completely cleaned up."

Chen Jianguo frowned.

"you mean?"

"You can think of it as a major operation. The tumor is removed, but the cancer cells are not completely eliminated. The fragments left on the wound do not think, do not plan, and do not act purposefully like the original sin body."

Funina drew a circle on the table with a fork.

"But they have instincts: to pollute, spread, and erode. Given enough time, the physical laws of that sea area will be slowly rewritten, first the temperature and density of the seawater, then the refractive index of light, and finally even the structure of the water molecules themselves will be affected."