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

On the open deck at the bow of the Tanyuan, the sea breeze, carrying a fine mist, rushed towards us.

Furnessa stood beside the mooring post, the hem of her white dress bent into an arc by the wind. In her left hand, she held half of the egg tart that Louis Bernard had brought her ten minutes earlier. She had precisely gnawed away the creamy core, leaving only the crust between her fingers.

His heterochromatic eyes were fixed on the endless horizon ahead.

Zhou Ruo stopped three steps behind her, with a safety rope tied around her waist that she insisted on wearing, and her other hand gripping a black underwater communication buoy.

Fu Ningna's gaze shifted from the sea to the orange safety rope around Zhou Ruo's waist, lingering for a second before she slightly pursed her lips.

"Adding legs to a snake is superfluous."

Zhou Ruo didn't say anything, but instead tightened her grip on the buckle even more.

Fulina didn't pursue the matter further. She popped the tart shell into her mouth, chewed it, swallowed it, and looked ahead again.

"Sixty kilometers to go."

The sea breeze made her voice sound fragmented, and Zhou Ruo took half a step forward before she could hear the second half of her sentence.

"The boundary of this polluted water is larger than I previously estimated, possibly exceeding fifty kilometers in length, and it has been slowly expanding outwards."

Zhou Ruo tightened the safety rope buckle.

"Should we notify the captain to adjust the course and go around them?"

Funina finally turned her face away, the wind blowing her hair across her forehead so that it covered half of her eyes, and a blinding light shone through the blue mark in her hair.

"There's no way around it."

"Three puddles of dirty water are blocking the road. Going around them is pointless; it's better to just go straight through."

She turned her gaze forward again.

"However, you can untie that rope now. The chance of falling into the sea next to me, the water god, is zero."

Zhou Ruo had no solution.

Funina didn't say anything more.

The two stood on the deck, one in front of the other, facing the salty night wind and looking at the unbelievably calm sea ahead.

Sixty kilometers away, the seawater was beating in a way that human instruments couldn't detect, and this six-thousand-ton steel behemoth was inching closer to that out-of-tune melody at a speed of twelve knots.

........

London, halfway around the world.

The force field of the sword in the stone has enveloped Greater London for seven days.

Just past noon, two Royal Air Force CH-47 Chinook heavy helicopters took off from Gatwick temporary airbase on the periphery of the force field, each carrying a standard military supply drop box under its belly.

The box contained thirty-six BOWMAN tactical radio repeaters, part of the Department of Defense's emergency communications program, which aimed to rebuild a minimum command link within the force field.

The helicopter hovered 400 meters above the force field, and the supply crates opened their parachutes.

Two military green square steel boxes, trailing orange and white striped deceleration parachutes, slowly descended through the low-hanging leaden gray clouds.

The moment the force field boundary was touched occurred at 1:14 PM.

There was no fire, no explosion, and not even a noticeable physical impact. In the details pieced together from eyewitness accounts, the invisible dividing line simply allowed the supply crates to pass through without any obstruction, as if nothing had happened.

When the box landed on a cleared area in Southwark, two soldiers from the paratrooper engineering platoon immediately pried open the lid.

When the first BOWMAN repeater was pulled out, the casing was intact, the coating color was normal, and the weight and feel were unchanged. The soldier pressed the power button.

There is no startup sound.

The screen is like a dead mirror.

The squad leader unscrewed the back cover, peeled off the sealing layer, and then froze on the spot.

All the semiconductor components on the motherboard disappeared.

To be precise, it didn't disappear.

Chips, capacitors, transistors—all components made from silicon wafers through doping, photolithography, and packaging processes are still in their proper pad positions, but the intricate internal crystal lattice structure no longer exists.

The chip package contained a handful of fine, grayish-white powder.

Pure silicon powder.

The Stone Sword reverses the modern semiconductor manufacturing process from the molecular level back—not by destroying, but by "reducing." It precisely reverses the silicon crystals that humans have processed through dozens of steps back to their most primitive elemental state.

The copper traces were untouched, the plastic casing was untouched, and even the tin-lead alloy on the solder joints was intact. Only the silicon remained.

Only those microstructures that carried more than half a century of human information civilization were gently and thoroughly erased by an unseen hand.

Thirty-six repeaters were all affected.

But in the same batch of supplies, everything that didn't require semiconductors to operate was intact. Twenty-four white candles were neatly stacked in shockproof foam, their wicks completely untouched.

Thirty handwritten medical care guidelines, with clear pencil marks. Two sets of blacksmith's manual blowers, the cast iron parts showing no signs of rust. A box of paper maps, the maps as clean as new.

The message was relayed back to Gatwick within forty minutes.

The Ministry of National Defense's assessment report contained only one conclusion.

"The force field of the sword in the stone doesn't destroy technology; it filters the levels of civilization. Only creations from the pre-Industrial Revolution era are allowed to exist."

An abandoned bus stop less than 200 meters from the obsidian base in the ruins area on the south bank of the Thames.

Arthur Griffin leaned against a crumbling wall next to his base, surrounded by about twenty South District residents. The seven-day siege had faded the initial fear from their faces, replaced by a complex expression that was somewhere between numbness and anticipation.

A retired teacher in his sixties squatted on the cement floor of the platform, holding a piece of white chalk in his hand, drawing a rough but information-rich map.

"This is the warehouse of that supermarket on Cornwall Road. I took some people in to take inventory yesterday. There are still about four thousand cans of food and three hundred liters of bottled water." The chalk made a harsh scraping sound on the concrete. "This is the underground passage at Exit B of Waterloo Metro Station. The temperature is consistently around fifteen degrees Celsius, enough to house two hundred people."

Arthur sat cross-legged and listened for a full half hour without interrupting.

He was wearing an old navy blue trench coat that he'd apparently found in some discarded clothing donation box. His stubble was thicker than it had been three days ago, but the look in his eyes was completely different from when he drew his sword a week ago. The homeless man's violence was now suppressed by something more composed.

The retired teacher finished drawing the last mark and looked up at him.

"Mr. Griffin, the food supply in the central area will only last for two weeks at most. The situation is even worse for the people across the street in Lambeth; they can't even get a stove to boil water."

Arthur finally spoke. His voice wasn't loud, but everyone on the platform fell silent.

"The gas cylinders and dry food from the central warehouse will be allocated to a seven-day supply, with priority given to women, the elderly, and children. They will then be moved to the subway station, where the temperature is most stable."

He said this with both hands on his knees, without touching the sword embedded in the black granite behind him.

No need to touch it.

Around the base, twelve translucent phantoms of the Knights of the Round Table, each three meters tall, patrolled slowly at even intervals. The outlines of their armor gleamed faintly in the pale London light, the tips of their lances were exactly a foot off the ground, and each step they took was perfectly synchronized, like a perpetually spinning pendulum.

After arranging the day's supplies, the crowd gradually dispersed.

Just as Arthur was about to close his eyes to rest, a figure squeezed up from behind the scattered departing crowd.

A young woman, around twenty-five or twenty-six years old, with short hair and a scabbed abrasion on her face.

Clutching a stack of neatly cut white paper and two pencils in his left hand, all the electronic devices in the force field had long since broken down, leaving only these for recording information.

She stopped in front of Arthur and took a deep breath.