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

Cairo, halfway around the world.

At 2:40 a.m., the fluorescent lights in the National Museum's restoration hall hummed.

Hassan flipped the balance scales upside down and placed them on the rubber pad on the control panel.

The bottom surface has a flat area about five centimeters long and three centimeters wide, which was completely covered by a layer of wax three days ago.

After three days of chemical dewaxing and forty-seven replacements of the acid-soaked cotton balls, the flat surface was finally completely exposed.

He pressed the objective lens of the military-grade electron microscope to less than three centimeters from the bottom, placed his right eye against the eyepiece, and held the edge of the base steady with his left hand.

Under 400x magnification, three lines of extremely fine engravings emerge from the dark yellow metal base.

Hassan's breathing rhythm changed.

He had memorized the inscriptions of the forty-two gods on the side; they were standard medieval script, with regular strokes and verifiable grammar.

However, among the three lines of inscription on the bottom, there are at least fourteen symbols that he had never seen before in his decades-long archaeological career.

He turned to a new page in his notebook and picked up his pen with his right hand.

Parkinson's trembling caused the pen tip to draw fine, jagged lines on the paper. He took a deep breath and pressed his right wrist down with the heel of his left hand to forcibly stabilize the lines.

The first unknown symbol was copied.

the second.

The third.

The pen tip veered sharply two millimeters off course in the middle of the fourth symbol, and a crooked line of ink cut across the carefully drawn outline.

Hassan closed his eyes and counted his heartbeats.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.

I opened my eyes, started writing again, and the fourth symbol formed a complete shape on the paper.

This process has been repeated more than a hundred times in the past three days.

The medicine bottle on the corner of the table contained levodopa and antihypertensive tablets, which the on-duty caregiver had delivered four hours earlier; the seal on the bottle was still intact.

Hassan didn't touch the pills.

The side effects of taking L-DOPA are the first to appear: my hands shake even more, and it's difficult to even hold a pen. When it comes to copying work that requires precision down to a fraction of a millimeter, that stuff is no different from poison.

As for antihypertensive pills, the reasons for his high blood pressure and the scope of what the medication can address are not on the same level.

After he finished copying all fourteen unknown symbols, he used a magnifying glass to compare their frequency of occurrence one by one.

The one I saw most frequently was that old acquaintance.

⊙。

A perfect circle surrounds a dot; he had already recorded this symbol in the side inscription three days ago.

The second highest frequency is a downward-facing triangle with two parallel horizontal lines embedded inside.

The third is three parallel wavy lines.

He wrote marginal notes in trembling handwriting in the blank spaces of his notebook.

"⊙The sun, a source of light."

▽Water, deep within.

≋Flow, time.

This is purely speculation, without any basis.

The pen paused for three seconds on the last period.

He lifted his gaze from the notebook and shifted it to the main body of the scales inside the bulletproof glass enclosure.

The red glow of the scarab's compound eyes flickered steadily at a frequency of thirteen times per minute, exactly as he had recorded yesterday.

Hassan extended his right hand, his index finger slowly probing towards a certain spot in the third line of inscription on the bottom.

He recognized that symbol.

The two snakes were intertwined, and the point where their bodies met formed a diamond-shaped knot, almost exactly the same as the drawing he had made in a state of loss of control three days ago.

The moment the fingertip touched the metal surface, the scarab's compound eyes lit up.

The flashing frequency jumped from thirteen to eighteen times, and the intensity of the red light nearly doubled. All the cold light tubes in the entire restoration hall flashed simultaneously under that light pressure.

Lasts for seven seconds.

Hassan felt a warmth at his fingertips, not the static heat of metal, but a vibrant, pulsating heat.

Seven seconds later, the light faded, and the frequency returned to thirteen.

The restoration hall returned to its previous deathly silence.

Hassan withdrew his hand, his two fingers trembling slightly under the light, the heat seeming to seep into his bones and lingering for a while.

He looked down and added a sentence at the very bottom of the notebook.

"It responded to me."

The pen cap clicked as it was tightened, and he carried the notebook toward the steel safe with a triple combination lock at the bottom of the cabinet.

The sound of footsteps in the corridor outside the repair hall sounded three times and then stopped.

The security guard asked a question through the tightly closed black wooden door.

"Professor Hassan, would you like to take a break?"

"unnecessary."

The old man slammed the safe shut with the latch locked, the crisp metallic clang echoing twice in the empty restoration room.

"Make me another pot of coffee, strong."

.........

After 55 hours of sailing, the formation was about 120 kilometers from the outer edge of the second pollution zone.

The sonar room operator pressed his face close to the anti-glare screen, repeatedly rubbing his fingers up and down on the scroll wheel, trying to confirm the long-term waveform record of the passive sonar that had just been highlighted in red by the system.

When the sound waves reflected from the seawater in front are completely locked at the frequency, the gap between the crests and troughs exhibits a uniform stretching that is extremely contrary to fluid dynamics.

The wavelength has shifted systematically, which means that the propagation speed of the sound wave in that area of ​​water has been forcibly increased by about one percent.

The sound engineer tore the thermal printing paper that had just been dispensed from the machine, held it in his hand, and shook it twice.

The curve on the paper is completely different from the first pollution zone. The rate of change coefficient here is not a smooth straight line at all, but rather shows an extremely harsh step-like increase as the depth of the cut increases.

He took the paper and pushed open the door to the captain's cabin.

Ten minutes later, a manila envelope marked "Top Secret" was delivered to the break room on a tray by an orderly.

Funina nestled deep within the velvet sofa, not even lifting her eyelids, holding a cup of double-sweetened black tea in her left hand.

The tea in the cup was slowly swirling counterclockwise without any external interference.

Zhou Ruo opened the envelope, took out the waveform diagram filled with professional coordinate systems, and the paper made a slight rubbing sound on her fingertips.

Funina didn't need to look at the lines drawn by humans at all. She only glanced at the swirling tea in the cup and gently tapped the warm porcelain wall twice with her fingertips.

"Tell your captain that the second contaminated water incident is no longer simply about tampering with the heat."

Zhou Ruo immediately turned on the recording module of the encrypted tablet and pointed the microphone at the sofa.

"The light went astray in there."

Funina placed the teacup back on the glass coffee table, the bottom of the cup hitting the surface with a dull thud, and the vortex inside instantly stopped.

"The residual poison of the abyss is so concentrated in that area that it can distort the parameters of electromagnetic propagation. What are the sound waves emitted by your worthless scrap metal? They can even reshape the refractive index of visible light underwater."

She shifted her position, crossed her legs, and looked past Zhou Ruo's shoulder at the dark sea outside the porthole.

"Once your iron shells are inside, you will see with your own eyes what things should never be on the seabed."