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

"Mr. Griffin, this is Isabella Long, a reporter from the BBC London bureau."

The pencil was adjusted to the correct grip for recording.

"Downing Street broadcast a message over the high-altitude radio an hour ago, calling you a terrorist..."

Arthur interrupted her.

"Downing Street can come here and talk to me in person."

He turned sideways and pulled out a thick, forty-page handwritten document from the bottom of the crumbling wall. The dense black pen handwriting on the white paper was so neat that it looked like a trained legal document, which he had copied by hand every night by candlelight for several days.

He didn't write it himself.

Every day at midnight, the sword in the stone would burn a new batch of data onto the granite fragments on the ground around the base: names, dates, HSBC's offshore account codes, the registration dates and actual controllers of each shell company in the money laundering path, accurate to the penny.

These burn marks will gradually fade after dawn, and Arthur must finish copying them all before they fade.

The sword in the stone is speaking to itself.

It tells a lie that has lasted for sixteen years.

He handed the stack of documents to Isabella Long.

"Read this first."

The female reporter reached out to take it.

The moment her fingertips touched the edge of the paper, her hand visibly trembled.

The forty pages contained summaries of original trial records from twenty old cases, HSBC offshore account transaction codes accurate to single digits, money laundering details of several layers of shell companies smuggling money back into the London real estate circle, and forcibly suppressed judgment rejection documents.

She recognized some of the names, and some were known throughout Britain.

"After reading it," Arthur withdrew his hand, leaned back against the crumbling wall, and closed his eyes.

"You decide for yourself who the terrorists are."

Isabella Long lowered her head and turned to the first page.

The sword in the stone on the base behind him hummed silently in the gloomy light, the dark arc of light at the hilt intensified by half a breath, and then fell silent.

The twelve phantom knights continued their patrol, their pace unchanged.

........

At the InterContinental Hotel in Rome, 4,000 nautical miles away, an automatic summary pops up on the main interface of the holographic system.

Jiang Ming pulled his feet off the coffee table and leaned closer to the row of fluctuating numbers.

In the past 48 hours, content related to Watanabe's Space Dragon photo has reached a total of 2.3 billion people worldwide.

The emotional value increased by a net 17 million.

However, the growth curve has shown a clear inflection point, with the slope changing from steep to gentle.

He reached out and typed a line of text on the terminal.

"The drama about the deep sea needs to start airing as soon as possible, otherwise this wave of emotional hype will have peaked."

The handwriting disappeared into the underlying cache of the holographic interface. He switched to another window, which was a file image pieced together from fragmented images taken by three ravens from different angles around the Pentagon.

Patterson signed the fleet transfer order.

A Virginia-class attack submarine has departed from its base in Guam and is heading towards the western Pacific Ocean.

Jiang Ming used two fingers to draw a dotted line on the nautical chart, overlaying the submarine's estimated route with the trajectory of the exploration formation.

The intersection point is located at the outer edge of the second contaminated area.

He marked the intersection with a red diamond without writing any annotations.

My right index finger hovered above the diamond-shaped mark for two seconds without falling.

Furnessa was the most crucial move in his script, but Paterson threw a piece onto the board that he didn't fully control.

The Virginia-class attack submarines are not under his jurisdiction. Patterson's decision-making logic can be deduced but not remotely controlled. At what point will the captain of that submarine make what kind of reaction?

Tracking, approaching, provoking, or resorting to force—

Each possibility will force Funina into a different stress state, and her stress state will directly affect her judgment after diving.

An unrelated variable is now entering his carefully crafted narrative at an underwater speed of twenty knots.

Jiang Ming withdrew his hand and closed all the windows.

Only one thing remained on the holographic desktop.

The progress bar for the Raven God's reshaping is being updated.

The figure of thirty-seven percent trembled faintly, like a flame trapped in a glass bottle.

"I gave her directions."

Jiang Ming stared at the number, his voice so low that only he could hear it.

"But she chose her own path."

His gaze shifted from the progress bar, taking one last look at the lingering coordinates of the red diamond mark.

She walked the path herself.

But someone had planted nails in the road.

The progress bar's dot jumped again, remaining at thirty-seven.

.........

The formation has been sailing for 48 hours.

The bow of the Tanyuan cut through a long ridge of waves, and the gray silhouettes of Type 055 destroyers on either side were faintly visible in the thin mist.

On the main control panel of the sonar room, the indicator lights of the six monitoring instruments have been shining a dull green for the past two days.

The soprano picked up the enamel mug and took a sip of the cooled, strong tea. A tea stalk got stuck between his teeth, and he reached up to pick it out.

The moment my middle fingernail touched my molar, all six green lights turned red.

He slammed the enamel mug back onto the table, spilling tea all over half the screen.

"Temperature sensor alarm: Seawater temperature in the outer shell contact layer jumped from 1.9 degrees to 3.7 degrees."

Before the duty officer could even finish speaking, the second set of data caught up.

"4.2 degrees."

"4.9 degrees."

"5.6 degrees."

Sheng Nachang braced his hands on the steel panel of the control console, staring at the red temperature curve that was rising at an almost vertical angle, the hairs on the back of his head standing on end.

He pulled over the damp notebook and used his pen to write a line of stained words on the paper.

"6.4 degrees Celsius, 15 minutes after entering the marked area, the temperature rise was 4.5 degrees Celsius, the transition zone width was less than one nautical mile, and there was no gradient layer."

The pen tip paused above the period for two seconds.

He added another sentence.

"This is not a natural heat flow phenomenon."

The internal phone rang almost as soon as he finished writing, and he grabbed the receiver with a long, sharp voice.

The voice coming from the other end of the microphone was Zhou Ruo's. He spoke slowly and clearly, as if he were reciting a military order.

"In the Sonic Chamber, the Water God asked me to pass on a message."

The soprano held the microphone without saying a word.

"I, the Water God, already gave this notice two hours ago."

Zhou Ruo copied the sentence verbatim, even replicating the rising arc of the last syllable perfectly.

The soprano's knuckles cracked as he gripped the microphone, then slowly placed it back on its base and glanced at the pale-faced duty officer beside him.

Add a new entry to the record.

He rubbed the tea stains off the notebook with his thumb.

"The Water God issued a warning first, and this office confirms a delay of two hours and seven minutes."

Within three minutes, the bridge watch officer issued a command to reduce the formation's speed from twelve knots to eight knots.

The three warships, moving at a steady speed in formation, slowly cut into the unusually hot waters.

At the lowest point of the open deck at the stern, a pair of black court shoes were draped on a mooring bollard, their bows swaying slightly in the sea breeze.

Fu Ningna stood barefoot on the edge of the cold steel plate, her ten toes gripping the raised ridges of the anti-slip pattern. The hem of her white dress was pressed into an arc that rolled backward at the bend of her legs by the salty, damp air.

A spray of water rushed over the side of the ship, breaking into fine droplets that splashed onto the back of her feet.

She closed her eyes.

The light from the blue teardrop mark between her brows switched to a continuous state the moment she closed her eyes, the halo penetrating the shadows of her eyelids and casting two symmetrical pale blue bands of light on either side of her nose.

Zhou Ruo stood two steps behind her, the metal buckle of the orange safety rope around her waist jingling softly in the sea breeze.

Her gaze fell on Funina's bare toes, and her pupils contracted.

The water droplets that splashed onto the back of my feet did not slide down my skin.

At the bottom of each water droplet hangs an extremely thin blue ray, thinner than a human hair, extending downwards along the spherical surface of the droplet, passing through the gaps in the steel plate, and piercing into the unseen seawater below the deck.

Like luminous, fine tendrils, they silently pierced the texture of the ocean.

Zhou Ruo held her breath, her right hand reaching for the black notebook in her breast pocket, and she unzipped it as quietly as possible.

Eleven minutes.

The sea breeze changed direction three times, the water on the deck was dried and then wetted by new waves, but Funina remained in the same position, without moving.

The blue light broke off cleanly at the end of the eleventh minute, and water droplets slid off the insteps, splattering onto the steel plate and shattering into ordinary saltwater.

Fu Ningna opened her eyes, turned around and walked into the cabin, glancing at the safety rope around Zhou Ruo's waist as she passed by.

"Still tied up."

Zhou Ruo didn't respond to that, but followed her and pushed open the cabin door.

The lounge was very warm. Funina slipped her feet into the fluffy slippers under the sofa, reached for the half-eaten egg tart on the coffee table, and took a bite.

Zhou Ruo sat down opposite her, opened the encrypted tablet, switched to voice-to-text mode, and pointed the microphone at Funina.

"Lord Water God, may I speak it aloud now?"