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

On the same day, the straight-line distance from the Qinling Mountains was 7,400 kilometers.

The restoration room of the Cairo National Museum.

Hassan squatted in front of the scale base, his magnifying glass almost touching the copper surface.

Parkinson's causes his hand to tremble every few seconds, but the 72-year-old has learned to make precise observations in the intervals between the tremors.

This is a tacit understanding he reached after eleven years of living with his illness.

There is an inscription on the base, engraved in a groove at the base of the scarab's left wing, covered by two thousand years of verdigris.

He cleaned it out bit by bit with cotton swabs dipped in acetic acid three days ago. The writing was clear, but the characters did not belong to any known ancient Egyptian writing system.

It is neither hieroglyphic, nor monastic, nor secular.

Hassan stared at that text for a long time, then opened his notebook and turned to the page from the day before yesterday.

There was a picture on that page.

He didn't create the animation.

Three days ago, the moment Libra deployed its force field to rebound the tungsten rod, Parkinson disappeared for a full four seconds.

For those four seconds, his hand was completely out of his control.

When he looked down, the pencil had already left a mark on the paper.

Two snakes are intertwined in the shape of a balance scale.

The snake's heads face left and right, and its body forms a diamond-shaped knot at the point where they meet in the middle.

Hassan went through all the available references and indexes.

Ptolemaic period, New Kingdom period, and even predynastic period.

No.

This symbol cannot be found in any known ancient Egyptian iconography.

He closed the notebook and locked it in the safe next to the desk.

The key hung around my neck, close to my chest.

Some things are not yet ready to be made public.

……

Meanwhile, at a naval port in eastern China.

The sea breeze brushed against my face, carrying a hint of early autumn chill.

The destroyers Yan'an and Zunyi are docked inside the breakwater, while containers are being hoisted from the deck of the deep-sea rescue ship Tanyuan.

The formation codenamed Jingyuan had its original assembly timeframe compressed by a full eleven hours.

Chen Jianguo stood beside the cement pier at the dock, the cursor on the electronic tablet hovering over the last few lines of the logistics list.

Four hundred kilograms of egg tarts.

Three hundred kilograms of tiramisu.

Two hundred kilograms of macarons.

In addition, there is a French-style mobile bakery truck converted from a heavy truck chassis, accompanied by a Michelin two-star pastry chef who has signed a top-secret agreement.

My gaze slid to the bottom of the notes section, where the italicized text stood out: Cream puffs are made to order, frozen ones are not allowed.

The pen tip traced a smooth signature path on the screen.

The captain of the Tanyuan, dressed in his training uniform, ran down the gangway, his military boots clanging as they stepped on the metal plate.

The old sailor looked distressed and handed over an equipment manual.

The Jiaolong III manned submersible operates at a depth of 11,000 meters. It has very little redundant space inside the cabin and a capacity of three people, including two operators, leaving one space.

"We hadn't considered the possibility that Ms. Funina would bring an entourage."

The captain wiped the salty water droplets from his forehead and pointed towards the safe house in the distance.

"Deep-sea operations are not sightseeing; you can't fit four people in that metal lump."

Chen Jianguo looked up at the window on the second floor where the light was on.

Rewind an hour, and the matter had already been reported via secure communications.

Zhou Ruo relayed the Water God's words verbatim.

The foreign deity was using a silver fork to work on a freshly baked cream puff without even looking up.

"Those submersibles are for you humans. I, the Water God, will go down myself. Zhou Ruo can stay on the ship and wait for me to return."

No diving equipment is required.

The body was submerged to a depth of 11,000 meters in water pressure.

Chen Jianguo looked away, slapped the equipment manual back onto the captain's chest, and directly bypassed the topic.

"Check out the latest data summary."

The electronic screen switched to the live feed of the Ninth Bureau's intelligence center.

Satellite thermal imaging of the unusual waters of the Mariana Trench reveals a nauseating deep purple hue.

In the past 24 hours, the radiation radius has expanded from 3 kilometers to 4.7 kilometers, an increase of more than 56 percent.

This isn't just dissolved ink; it's a scalded, poisonous pool.

The central water temperature is 49 degrees Celsius, exceeding the survival limit for marine life.

Further out, the temperature diffusion model was torn to shreds.

Every 700 meters of water depth, the data recorded by the probe undergoes a non-linear jump, with the temperature difference increasing by 15 degrees Celsius within one or two meters without any gradual change.

The conventional laws of thermodynamics are kicked into the trash here.

Chen Jianguo turned to the second page of the acoustic monitoring graphs.

A chart with an extremely biased frequency axis.

The deep-sea acoustic shaft captured a vibration at an extremely low frequency.

At 0.07 Hz, with a complete cycle of 14 seconds, the amplitude is so weak that it is difficult to perceive with the naked eye, yet it is surprisingly stable.

The instrument's calibration error does not exceed one part per million.

Such a low-frequency and perfectly fitted thing does not exist in nature; it has a deliberate, artificial feel to it.

The sound source was located directly at the bottom of the 10,800-meter-deep trench, right under the noise band of the abyss debris.

The analyst added a questionable handwritten note at the end of the report: The signal's stability is unlike any known natural phenomenon and is closer to the characteristics of an artificial signal source, but humans have never deployed any devices at that depth.

That was a report that was delivered earlier.

At that moment, Funina slowed down her chewing of the cream puff.

She stared at the smooth sine wave for a full seven seconds.

They didn't say yes, nor did they say no.

She held the fork handle with her other hand, dipped the tip into the cream residue on the plate, and drew a pattern on the back of the report paper.

A simple line drawing of a water droplet.

Zhou Ruo leaned closer to take a look at the water droplet pattern and couldn't help but ask her what it meant.

Funina didn't answer and simply pushed the report back.

After finishing the painting, she told Zhou Ruo to pack a few more changes of clothes into the suitcase, and even polished the seahorse brooch until it shone.

Most of the places we went to were incredibly dirty mud pits.

"This dive will take a little longer than I expected."

That was her exact quote.

Chen Jianguo was standing by the door when he smelled something unusual.

That wasn't just an excuse to complain about pollution; it was more like she had caught a whiff of something familiar in this endless mess, but she was too lazy to reveal the whole story to humans.

........

InterContinental Hotel Rome.

The underfloor heating in the room was set to 30 degrees Celsius.

Jiang Ming hovered his finger over the editing interface in the holographic system's backend, closed the acoustic data analysis window, and brought up the character builder.

He began editing the spirit origin template for the new Mirror One, keeping the core parameters completely consistent with the old version.

Mirror One.

In the deadlock that preceded this, from the macroscopic to the microscopic, the Raven God was crushed into fragments by the aftershocks of creation, fragments that even the system's containment criteria could not trigger.

Recreating a perfectly identical mirror image from scratch resulted in a staggeringly long bill.

Inheriting combat experience and redundant memories, stitching together the remaining memory anchors of the global public, the rewriting of every line of underlying logic code is accompanied by a crazy loss of emotional value.

Fortunately, our current reserves are sufficient to support this illusory miracle of creation.

The deep-sea anomalies and the chain of panic triggered by the three divine artifacts are continuously flowing into the system's reservoir.

The cursor is blinking.

He typed in a few patch variables into the resume panel.

"At the moment of dimensional collapse, it was swept up by spatial turbulence and fell into the real ocean. Its spirit origin was severely damaged, and it entered a forced hibernation at extremely low power. It sank with the ocean current to the Mariana Trench anomaly point."

Survival requires a gear that meshes properly.

The remnants of the abyss can poison this oppressive sea, and a dying savior emerges from a deep-sea rift; the public will naturally fill in the blanks with their own imaginations.

The new script is transcribed into a data imprint in the background.