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

On the other side, deep within the Cairo National Museum, in a special restoration compartment.

Seventy-two-year-old Hassan pushed his heavy anti-pregnancy glasses up to the very top of his nose, his thin shoulders almost touching the heavy workbench.

He turned the knob of the military-grade high-powered electron microscope in front of him to its limit, and the optical projection of the eyepiece smashed straight into the bottom of the wound in the missing groove of the twenty-third deity on the base of the Libra.

On that cut, reflective surface, the thin scratches that were initially thought to be metal scrapes, when magnified four hundred times, tore apart all the lies and pretenses of the ancient craftsmen's skills.

The cross-section of the cut reveals a chillingly perfect hexagonal geometric array pattern.

This is an arrangement that only appears when a microscopic lattice is cut under extremely high pressure, not a rough surface that can be chiseled out with a bronze chisel.

He pressed the pages firmly onto the hardcover notebook spread out beside him with his left hand, whose knuckles protrude.

The nib of the fountain pen in his right hand, due to Parkinson's disease, left winding ink marks on the horizontal lines, but he still forcibly maintained the accuracy of the structure of each character.

"The crystal arrangement and orientation of the wound section showed an astonishing consistency."

"I am almost certain that this damage was caused by some kind of ultra-high-energy directed beam, or by a conceptual force that cannot be explained by physics at all."

He struggled to put down his pen and inhaled deeply the slightly murky oxygen into his aging lungs.

He shifted his gaze from the notebook to the main body of the Libra scale placed inside a bulletproof glass case.

The scales that bear witness to the laws of judgment are unusually quiet tonight.

But his keen archaeological sense immediately detected the extremely subtle changes in the state of the scarab beetle on the base.

For the first three days, the basic frequency of the red warning light emitted from its compound eyes remained at approximately twelve times per minute.

But now, the gaps between the beams of light washing over the retina have been shortened to an imperceptible degree, reaching a full thirteen beats per beat, increasing the overall intensity of the beats by about eight percent.

The old man capped the pen and added the final modifier to the blank space at the bottom of the page.

"Its heart is beating faster."

He carefully carried the notebook over the counter and locked it in a steel safe with a triple combination lock under the cabinet.

.........

The formation has been sailing for 43 hours.

Most of the lights in the observation room on the top floor of the Tanyuan were out of service, leaving only a single cold white emergency light to barely maintain visibility.

Funina sat up from the sofa cushions, the wool blanket rubbing against the floor and piling up, her bare feet slowly stepping onto the cold metal deck.

She didn't call herself Zhou Ruo.

Barefoot, I walked to the porthole, my ten toes pressing against the gaps in the rivets. The blue teardrop mark between my brows cast a fluorescent circle in the dark cabin, reflected on the inner wall of the tempered glass, like a quiet, open eye.

five minutes.

She stood in that position for five minutes, her shoulder blades slightly tilted forward, her entire weight pressed against the cold, hard window.

Over the past eight hours, she sent two brief updates to the bridge through Zhou Ruo: one was a follow-up correction to the warning about the increasing intensity of the contaminant distortion at the thirty-seventh hour of sailing, and the other was a confirmation at the fortieth hour that the spread rate had not accelerated further.

But just over ten minutes ago, the blue mark suddenly jumped to a new brightness threshold, pulling her out of her light sleep.

The sound of hurried footsteps came from the corridor outside the cabin door. Zhou Ruo turned the lock and rushed in, carrying an encrypted tablet and a voice recorder in her arms.

"Lord Water God, the watchman said that the brightness of your mark jumped two levels in the surveillance footage three minutes ago."

Zhou Ruo's voice was very low, but it was hoarse because she hadn't had time to compose herself after being woken up repeatedly.

Funina did not turn around.

"It's within range."

Zhou Ruo stopped, placed the tablet on the back of the chair, and took out the black-covered notebook, turning to a blank page.

"That pool of dirty water ahead?"

Funina finally turned her head, the highlight in her heterochromatic pupils being cut in half by the starlight outside the porthole.

Calling it dirty water is an understatement.

She pressed her forehead against the glass, and a small patch of mist appeared on the tip of her nose.

"About 1,200 kilometers ahead, there's a sea area where the temperature is three to four degrees Celsius higher than the surrounding area. This isn't unreasonable, but the source of the heat is wrong."

Zhou Ruo's pen tip hovered above the paper.

"Not a subsea geothermal vent?"

"no."

Funina raised her index finger and drew a small circle on the glass surface with the pad of her finger.

"The energy transfer from hydrothermal vents is directional; it travels upwards from cracks in the earth's crust, and I can trace the pathways."

After she finished drawing the circle, she placed her finger at the center and didn't move it.

"But the heat in this body of water is released by the water molecules themselves. The hydrogen and oxygen are still in their original positions, the structure hasn't changed, but some kind of tacit understanding between them has been disrupted."

Zhou Ruo's pen finally touched the paper, but the speed couldn't keep up with what she was repeating.

"You mean the intermolecular forces were disrupted, thus disrupting the tacit understanding?"

Funina's lips twitched, the curve of which was hard to define as either mockery or helplessness.

"Your human physics textbooks would probably translate it like this."

She pulled her hand away from the glass, turned her whole body to face Zhou Ruo, leaned against the window frame, and crossed her arms in front of her chest.

"I'll give you a more accurate version; send it back verbatim."

Zhou Ruo opened the encrypted tablet, switched to real-time encrypted voice-to-text mode, and pointed the microphone at Funina.

"This is neither chemical pollution nor radiation pollution."

Fu Ningna spoke slowly and deliberately, almost twice as slowly as usual.

"It's the rules that are polluting."

When those two words came out of her lips, the untouched cup of cold cocoa on the anti-slip mat in the observation room trembled slightly.

"Water is still water, the hydrogen and oxygen atoms haven't changed, but the physical laws they obey have been slightly distorted."

She paused for two seconds, then pinched a small piece of air between her right thumb and forefinger.

"It's like a piece of music where a few notes are out of tune. They might be off by a fraction of a note, and your ear might not be able to hear it, but my water can sense where the off-key part is."

Zhou Ruo finished writing down the last word and looked up.

Will this off-key singing spread?

"It's already spreading."

Funina loosened her fingers and crossed her arms over her chest again.

"Moreover, there were more than one place where the tune went off-key on the way to that thing."

She nodded with her chin toward the direction outside the porthole.

"You remember those seven points I marked before, right? The seventh point is the final destination, and there are at least three puddles of this filthy water in between, each one more disgusting than the last. What I'm touching now is just the edge of the outermost puddle."