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

After finishing the pastry in her mouth, Funina wiped a crumb from the corner of her lips with her thumb.

"The first spot is dirty, but the foundation isn't rotten."

Zhou Ruo's fingertips hovered above the tablet.

"The abyssal remnants that leaked from the shattered Holy Grail have been at the bottom of the sea for about two weeks. The residual poison of chaos seeps out from the point of impact. This is the outermost layer of the symptoms, the mildest one."

Funina picked up the hot cocoa on the coffee table and took a sip; as usual, the liquid in the cup swirled spontaneously.

"The Brownian motion rate of water molecules is increased by about 15 percent without discrimination, so your thermometer will jump."

"But the positions of hydrogen and oxygen remain unchanged, the bond angles remain unchanged, the covalent relationship remains unchanged, and the molecular structure is intact."

She put the cup back and tapped the inside of it with her index finger.

"Translated into your human terms, it's still water, just that the hands and feet are a bit restless, shaking a couple more times than normal."

Zhou Ruofei quickly finished writing this down and then looked up to ask a question.

"You previously told me that the essence of this kind of thing is rule pollution, which will rewrite the laws of physics. Now you say that the structure is intact. Aren't these two statements contradictory?"

Funina glanced at her sideways, the kind of look of someone in a high position scrutinizing a stupid problem almost overflowing from her pupils.

"I told you, each of the three puddles of dirty water is more disgusting than the last. You can't have such a bad memory."

Zhou Ruo paused for a moment while holding the pen.

"Rules contamination is the essence of this kind of dirty stuff; it's aimed at the laws of physics."

Funina put her other foot on the sofa as well, and her slipper fell to the floor with a thud.

"But this first blot is just the surface seepage; it hasn't seeped into the bones yet."

She picked up the last piece of the egg tart, broke it in half, threw one half into her mouth, and threw the other half back onto the plate.

"Those two groups in the back are the ones who actually broke the rules."

After typing the last word on the tablet, Zhou Ruo added the timestamp and priority, and then pressed the send button with her thumb.

The encrypted terminal in the captain's cabin received the report forty seconds later.

The captain printed out the document and read it twice. His grip on the paper loosened slightly, and then he picked up the internal phone.

"Regarding the Water God, I'd like to confirm two things."

Zhou Ruo's voice came through the microphone.

"Speaking."

"First, does this level of pollution pose a direct threat to the ship's structure or the personnel?"

There was a few seconds of silence on the other end of the microphone, followed by a low exchange, before Zhou Ruo spoke again.

"The Water God's exact words: This poses no threat to your iron shell. This level of pollution is like a handful of dirty salt sprinkled into the water; I, the Water God, can clean it up with a single wash. But not now."

The captain's brow relaxed by a centimeter.

"How long will the purification process take? Should we start now?"

Zhou Ruo paused again, and when she spoke again, her speech was a beat slower than before.

"The Water God said: Let me inspect all three places first. It will be more efficient to start cleaning from the dirtiest place."

The captain put the microphone back on its base, wrote a line in the remarks column of the nautical log, and closed the hard cover.

The formation continued to cross the first pollution zone at a speed of eight knots.

On the Pacific Ocean, the fleet has completely penetrated the first pollution zone.

The sea temperature dropped to 1.8 degrees Celsius within six minutes of crossing the opposite boundary, recovering so quickly it was as if someone had drawn an invisible line on the water's surface.

The captain convened a brief meeting in the command room when the soprano entered, carrying two printed reports.

"All instruments on the ship functioned normally during the crossing, with no malfunctions."

The chorus leader slammed the first report on the table, then pulled out the second one.

"But there is a hidden danger."

He drew a thick red line on the waveform graph.

"When traversing the pollution zone, all the hydrophones in the towed array received a uniform white noise floor, and the signal-to-noise ratio dropped by six decibels."

The captain turned around to look at him.

How significant will the impact be?

"If we were to search for submarine targets in this environment..."

Sonic tapped twice above the red line with his long index finger.

"Our effective detection range needs to be reduced by one-third."

The message was relayed to Funina by Zhou Ruo fifteen minutes later.

Fu Ningna was putting her third macaron into her mouth, chewing without stopping.

"We don't need your iron ears."

She flicked the powdered sugar off her fingers, her heterochromatic eyes peering through the porthole at the dark sea.

"At this distance, my senses have already covered the waters for thousands of kilometers around."

The macaron shell crumbled between the teeth.

"Don't even mention submarines, even a fish that flips over can't escape."

Zhou Ruo wrote down the sentence word for word, hesitated for a moment, and then sent the last sentence back to the bridge exactly as it was.

After hearing the retelling, the soprano screwed on his pen and said nothing more.

Halfway around the world, in the uninhabited far north of Siberia.

Andrei propped himself up halfway on the cot, the dark red scar tissue below his ribs itching slightly from the movement.

He pulled out the cigarette pack paper from under his pillow; the edges were already soft from his sweaty hands.

The paper was densely packed with forty-nine numbers, the handwriting was messy but the values ​​were clear, and next to the earliest reading was a time marked with two circles, one hour apart, without missing a single one.

Sergei lifted the canvas curtain of the tent and came in, leaving two dark marks on the ground from the mud on his boots.

"Shift change."

Andrei held out the cigarette box paper.

"Forty-nine, the last group is from ten minutes ago, I've written it down at the bottom for you."

Sergei took the paper, but instead of looking at the numbers immediately, he glanced at Andrei's face.

The nineteen-year-old had dark circles under his eyes, and bloodshot veins covered the whites of his eyes, but the corners of his mouth were slightly upturned, as if he had been holding back for a day and a half and was finally able to relax after delivering his task.

Go to sleep.

Andrei rolled over and pulled the woolen blanket over his head.

Sergei crouched down in the corner of the tent, rummaged through the bottom of the iron box containing the magazines, pulled out a large food wrapper, and unfolded it.

The paper already contained thirty-seven data points that he had previously recorded, written in two columns with a brief time stamp next to them.

He copied Andrei's forty-nine numbers one by one into the blank space of the wrapping paper.

Eighty-six data points.

The time span is approximately forty-nine hours.

Sergei used his fingers as a ruler, his thumb pressed on the paper as the origin, and his index finger drew a rough trend line along the fluctuations of the data points.

Without graph paper or drawing tools, they relied entirely on visual estimation and intuition.

The pattern of fluctuations is not clear.

The vast majority of readings oscillate between 20.5 and 21.3, like a lazy snake, with a small amplitude that is easily mistaken for measurement error.

But his index finger stopped after tracing the third wave of undulations.

He pressed his fingernail against the first obvious trough, 20.4 degrees, and counted fourteen data points backward. His fingertip landed exactly on the second trough, 20.3 degrees.

Count fourteen more on the list.

The third trough.

20.5 degrees.

The numerical values ​​are not completely consistent, and there are also one or two data point deviations in position, but the repetition of the number fourteen is difficult to explain as a coincidence.

Fourteen data points, each spaced one hour apart, mean that the temperature inside the barrier experiences a identifiable "trough" approximately every fourteen hours.

Sergei held the pencil stub in his mouth and stared at the waveform for a full two minutes with squinted eyes.

From the other end of the tent came the sound of Andrei turning over, the blanket rubbing against the cot, followed by a mumbled mutter.