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

At this moment, in the medical isolation room at the lowest level, 700 meters underground, the pungent smell of disinfectant swirled in the air-conditioned circulation.

Zhou Dazhuang kicked off the thin blanket covering his ankles with his bare heels, braced himself on the edge of the bed with his hands, and used the pull of his waist and abdomen to sit up straight.

The rough right palm, which should have been lying in bandages, now showed large areas of peeling off the black scabs that were initially burned by that metal object.

Beneath that layer of dead skin was a dark red new flesh tissue enveloped in a vibrant life force.

He tried bending and contracting his five knuckles toward his palm.

The cracking sound of his finger bones squeezing and folding against each other was a whole level clearer and more distinct than when he practiced hand-to-hand combat in the company.

This goes beyond simple hearing; he can even capture the angle variation of every joint flexion and extension, as well as the tensile load generated when tendons slide on the bone surface, through feedback from nerve endings.

The old academician said that the thing was using him as a system interface to rework him, and this warning turned into a real, intuitive response.

Zhou Dazhuang opened the tin drawer by the bedside, its surface peeling paint, and pulled out a new steel-core one-yuan coin from the bottom of a stack of unfinished painkillers.

He flipped the coin to the side with the national emblem and firmly gripped the smooth, blunt metal edges with the pad of his right thumb and the first knuckle of his index finger.

I didn't see him grit his teeth and exert force; the veins on his forearm bulged slightly for half a second.

When the fingertip was withdrawn, two indented fingerprints, each about 0.3 millimeters deep, were clearly squeezed inward onto the originally hard and flat stamped metal disc.

This is not the grip strength that a mortal body should exhibit.

Zhou Dazhuang stared at the slightly reflective round pits for a full ten seconds, then shoved this piece of evidence, which he considered shameful, back into the deepest crevice of the drawer, ensuring that no third person would ever see it again.

.........

In the desolate Arctic region of Siberia, gale-force winds whipped up ice shards, creating a piercing howl as they scraped against the pale blue barrier.

Nineteen-year-old Andrei, wrapped in a blood-stained woolen blanket, curled up on his side on the folding bed, his eyes wide open.

He gripped the bottom of the military-grade thermometer in his left hand. To see the liquid column markings clearly in the dim tent light, he could only squint his bloodshot eyes to discern the tiny red lines.

Every hour, he would touch the pen, tear off a piece of tobacco-scented wrapper, flip it over, and write a number on the back.

This was a death order from the captain, delivered to him.

Thirty-seven hours later, thirty-seven slightly messy data points remained on the paper.

The latest number I've written down is a fluctuating 21.3 degrees Celsius.

The previous row of ink marks above it reads 20.7, and going back further, that time period stopped at 21.0.

The fluctuations in the readings were merely within a degree Celsius, but the absolutely cold, constant-temperature mask had clearly been completely torn off.

Sergei, wearing only a thin black down jacket lining, crouched on the edge of this boundary zone covering an area of ​​about one hundred square kilometers.

With his long, rough fingernail, he dug at the gap between the ice layer, which was harder than granite, and the completely thawed, soft black soil beneath his feet.

A sweet and earthy smell, a mixture of fermenting humus from the ground and the kind of smell that only wafts out when old farmers plow and clear land in early spring, rushed straight into the depths of his nostrils.

The idea that such a smell could be generated in the extremely hard permafrost at -68 degrees Celsius is as absurd as trying to light a fire at the bottom of the ocean.

He pretended not to hear anything and didn't even think about sending a telegram to Moscow to submit a report.

This is not only because the high-power shortwave antenna disintegrates into a mass of noise upon contact with this invisible wall.

More importantly, Sergei understood perfectly well that the physical barrier created by this sphere of light was using the most hardcore methods to gradually sever the last umbilical cord connecting them, the survivors, to the outside military command chain.

The clock hands are turned back to the thirty-seventh leg of the voyage where the Explorer cut through the waves.

That was the second mandatory warning broadcast issued by Funina from this fixed position.

"The intensity of the distortion in that deformed water mass ahead has increased by about fifteen percent in the past two hours." Funina switched the positions of her crossed legs and pointed her toes at the thick glass of the front window.

"And it no longer resembles a dough left to ferment in a cellar."

"It was pulled into an ugly ribbonfish shape by the extremely cold ocean currents in a certain ring of the bottom."

She used a few short words to outline the approximate scope and extended dimensions of the core of the pollution.

Zhou Ruo, who was standing nearby taking notes, hurriedly removed the cap from his ballpoint pen, lay down on the surface of the waterproof nautical chart used for combat, and used the pen tip to draw an elliptical red circle about forty kilometers long and with a maximum horizontal width of twelve kilometers.

The captain, clutching the copy of the blueprint that had come out of the fax machine, immediately called a brief meeting with the duty officers.

With a bead of sweat on his brow, the soprano, carrying two sheets of printed paper with wavy patterns tucked under his arm, burst through the door of the conference room.

"On the tangent of the latitude and longitude indicated by the Water God, our two ultra-sensitive deep-sea receivers have finally caught the mouse by the tail."

The sonographer spread the printed paper flat under the lamp, pointing with his index finger at a series of waves that were almost flat and straight.

"A very strange second harmonic superposition signal is embedded in the basic acoustic spectrum reflected back from the seabed rock layer."

"Its power is so low that if it relies solely on the machine's own filtering system algorithm, it will be treated as noise from the bottom current hitting the reef."

The naval officers around the conference table fell into a deathly silence.

"If she hadn't drawn that circle on the paper beforehand." Sheng Na rubbed his dry Adam's apple.

"This tiny needle, if it fell into the radar sea of ​​our ship, we wouldn't even glance at it."

......

Inside this suite at the InterContinental Hotel in Rome, the huge curved floor-to-ceiling windows offer a view of bustling traffic.

Jiang Ming nestled into the expensive light-colored leather swivel chair, while seven high-priority windows on the holographic projection screen scrolled through global current events like flowing water.

These windows reflect the deep-sea coordinates of the Tanyuan convoy, the wheels of the Qinling convoy speeding through the night, the images of wreckage receding along the banks of the Thames in London due to the force field diffusion, the continuous infrared security of the Cairo restoration room, the distribution of the glaring living heat source in Siberia, and even the plummeting digital curve of the New York financial terminal.

And then there's the New World Pioneers Forum, lurking deep within the dark web, with its towering posts built from a few viral photos.

The main interface floated above the keyboard, and the progress bar for the Raven God's revival code was lifelessly stuck at 37%.

But on the other side of the energy storage pool, with the continuous bombardment and dissemination of the images of space tearing apart satellites, the fragments of emotional value stripped away by panic and shock from all over the world jumped by a mere 23 million in just one day and night.

This brought his total trump card count to a staggering 4.67 billion, without any exaggeration.

Jiang Ming opened the long technical maintenance log of the Crow God's rebuilt base.

A row of emotionless "safe period" instructions popped up on the screen, indicating that the project had entered the so-called physical locking phase. All that remained was to patiently wait for the pre-set anchor point plot to be triggered.

He naturally understood the true nature of this anchor point.

Funinna must personally experience the water pressure at a depth of 10,000 meters and place her palm on the contaminated surface left behind by Mirror One in the explosion to complete the last missing piece of the puzzle on the stage of fate.

This isn't something you can bypass by simply typing a few lines of keyboard; you just have to wait.

He simply clicked the "X" to close the progress bar and casually dragged out the "Artifact Creation" blueprint workbench in the system background, which had not yet been filled with content.

Tonight, he will define the central theme of the new generation of conceptual armaments to be deployed into this frenzied world.

The first line of the draft box did not depict any devastating tactical destruction concepts; it only contained four characters with calligraphic strokes.

Dispel the darkness.