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

At the same moment, inside the pale blue constant-temperature barrier of the far north ice sheet of Siberia.

The temperature recording operation had progressed to its sixty-seventh hour. Andrei rubbed his dry eyelids and reported the sixty-seventh data point to Sergei, who was sitting opposite him on the cot.

The three large wrapping papers on Sergei's knees had been pieced together with transparent tape to form a long, rectangular data roll, covered with dense Russian numbers and folds.

He held the pencil stub and repeatedly traced the slope of the descending curve on the waveform chart that dipped to the bottom every fourteen hours.

A completely new and eerie feature emerged from the outline of his fingertips.

The paths leading down to the valley floor as temperatures drop are not static; some slopes are as steep as cliffs, while others are as gentle as hills. This alternation between steep and gentle slopes presents an extremely rigid and strict discipline.

Sergei drew twelve Russian abbreviations representing gentle and steep slopes on the paper, and counted them twice by pointing to each one with his fingernail.

Not a single one was misaligned.

Steep, gentle, steep, gentle.

The texture of this arrangement reminded him of a strong military communications smell, like an old-fashioned telegraph machine buried under frozen soil, typing out words in Morse code with fixed intervals of long and short tones.

Sergei tucked the pencil behind his ear, stood up, walked to the tent flap, lifted it a crack about three fingers wide, and squinted at the ever-present gray-blue dome above him.

He walked back to the cot and sat down, writing six Russian words in the blank space at the very bottom of the wrapping paper.

"It speaks for itself through its temperature."

Across from him, Andrei was rolling up the hem of his hospital gown, fiddling with a military manual ultrasonic flaw detector he had found in an airdrop supply crate.

He forcibly modified this crude instrument, originally used to detect cracks in the chassis of armored vehicles, into an abdominal scanner.

Sergei turned his head to look at the skin below Andrei's left ribcage.

The fatal bullet wound had completely closed, and dark red granulation tissue had filled the previously bloody hole completely. Even the medical sutures used for stitching three days ago had dried up and fallen off on their own without causing any purulent infection.

Andrei looked at the black and white cross-sections on the ultrasound screen and wiped the coupling gel off his stomach with a towel.

"The tear in my liver has healed by about 80 percent. I'm even brave enough to do 20 standard push-ups right now."

Sergei's eye muscles twitched twice, his soldierly alertness fully activated by these words.

Even in the best-equipped military hospitals in Moscow, with the best antibiotics and cell nutrition solutions, a military rifle wound that penetrates directly into the internal organs would require at least three to four weeks in the intensive care unit before one could barely get out of bed.

And now, they've been trapped in this blue dome for less than ten days.

Sergei hastily added a sentence in the corner of the notebook.

"This cover is definitely not just for keeping us warm."

Our gaze cuts across half the globe to the underground bunker of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

Acting Defense Secretary Paterson leaned back in his large leather chair, holding a glass of bourbon whiskey with only half an ice cube in his hand.

The adjutant handed him an urgent, classified briefing from the Guam naval base onto his desk.

Patterson used the finger holding the wine glass to open the folder, his gaze sweeping over the coordinate parameters at the end.

The Virginia-class attack submarine USS Colorado has been out of port for 43 hours and is currently lying in wait in the deep waters of the Philippine Sea, about 900 nautical miles west of Guam. It is expected to enter the forward route of the Chinese exploration fleet in 40 hours.

The mission briefing the submarine received consisted of only six cold, hard words.

Track, monitor, without revealing your identity.

Patterson grabbed a pen from the table, wrote the operation code in the upper right corner of the briefing, and added a line of restrictions below it.

"No one may drive a submarine into the vicinity of 30 nautical miles from Chinese warships unless China initiates a hostile act."

He closed the folder, tossed it back into his adjutant's arms, and took a small sip of his whiskey.

"I don't need to fight a war, I just need to know what that woman saw underwater."

On the Pacific Ocean, the propellers of the Exploration Abyss finally cut through the purple seawater at the edge of the second pollution zone, and it was once again bathed in the normal deep blue of the ocean.

The moment Fu Ningna removed the water film, she turned around and walked back to the lounge, slumped into the velvet sofa, and gulped down three glasses of soda water filled with ice.

Zhou Ruo stood to the side holding a metal tray, her gaze sweeping over Fu Ningna's left hand, which was holding a cup.

The bluish veins that were usually well hidden on the back of his fair hand were now visibly bulging, and the pulse rate of the carotid artery was at least 20 percent faster than the usual baseline.

The protective barrier of the Pure Land, which forcibly rewrote the rules with a radius of 150 meters, ultimately caused a certain degree of substantial wear and tear on this body.

Fu Ningna noticed Zhou Ruo's gaze, her brows furrowing in displeasure. She slammed the empty third glass onto the glass coffee table, making a crisp sound.

"Don't look at me like I'm a patient. I'm not a patient."

But when Zhou Ruo handed her a warm white towel, she didn't push it away. Instead, she took the towel and wiped her forehead haphazardly a couple of times.

Fu Ningna crumpled the towel into a ball and threw it on the corner of the table, saying something that stunned Zhou Ruo.

"The third place will be a different story."

Zhou Ruo immediately took out a voice recorder, pressed the red record button with her thumb, and pressed for its meaning.

Funina did not answer the question immediately. She turned her gaze to the empty glass and stared at the still ice water in it for a while.

"In the first two places, the water is still water, it's just been stirred up."

She kept her voice low at the end, with a rare sense of solemnity.

"But from the third noise, I felt the water itself splitting apart. It wasn't being stirred up, it was being broken down."

In the penthouse suite of the InterContinental Hotel in Rome, a huge floor-to-ceiling window offers a magnificent night view of the ancient city.

Jiang Ming leaned against the edge of the holographic projection table, while the backend of the dark web monitoring interface was automatically decoding a fragment of a weak intercepted signal.

This wasn't some kind of hacking technique that breached the firewall; rather, it was a raven he had deployed three weeks ago near the Pacific Fleet's communications relay node that used its black bird eyes to read the leaked shortwave frequency.

The syllable sequence was transformed into glaring plain text on the screen.

The USS Colorado's submarine mission number and departure time are clearly displayed.

Jiang Ming stretched out two fingers and pulled them across the virtual nautical chart. The submarine's predicted position and the Tanyuan's course overlapped in the center of the screen, and a bright red countdown timer popped up below.

The time window for the most recent contact point falls between thirty-six and forty hours later.

He picked up the ice water on the table and took a sip, showing absolutely no intention of revealing this information to anyone.

Funina's control over the seawater far surpasses that of human scrap metal; she doesn't need to warn anyone, and any intruder in the water will naturally not escape her notice.

Jiang Ming closed the nautical chart window and brought up the concept blueprint draft panel created by the artifact.

Below the words "Dispel the darkness," he slowly wrote the second line of text with his finger.

"To make the efficiency of all energy conversion processes within the range infinitely close to 100%."

His fingertip hovered in mid-air. He tilted his head and pondered for a few seconds before adding a question mark at the end of the sentence.

The lower limit of this concept is ridiculously high; once it is actually visualized in one's mind, the required emotional level is absolutely astronomical.

He minimized the draft interface and pushed it into the underlying cache, deciding to put it aside for the time being.

The climax of events on the deep-sea and underground lines is brewing a new emotional storm. He has enough patience to wait for the harvest season to arrive before making a final decision.