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

After passing through the second pollution zone, the Tanyuan fleet reduced its speed to idle, and the three massive steel behemoths anchored in the dark depths of the Pacific Ocean.

The numbers on the flight timetable quietly crossed the sixty-sixth hour mark.

Funina tossed the half-eaten tiramisu back into the silver tray Zhou Ruo was holding, and walked towards the outermost open deck at the stern, her heels treading on the non-slip steel plate.

Zhou Ruo quickly picked up the tray and followed the petite figure.

A slightly sticky sea breeze ruffled Funina's white and blue hair. She stopped at the edge of the railing, her gaze passing over the churning white tail and back in the direction she had come from.

Zhou Ruo placed the tray on the mooring bollard, took another step forward, and stood three steps behind Funina. She still remembered the action plan that had been decided in the lounge a few hours earlier.

"Lord Water God, aren't we supposed to wait until we've inspected all three pollution zones before starting the cleanup from the dirtiest core source?"

Funina did not turn around.

She slowly raised her hands, clad in white silk gloves, above her shoulders, palms fully turned outwards, facing the sea hundreds of kilometers away, stained by the remnants of the abyss.

"The plan has been changed. The smell coming from the third location is far more disgusting than I, the Water God, had anticipated."

She raised her chin slightly, and the small tuft of hair sticking up on her forehead stood stubbornly upright in the sea breeze.

"Paying attention to the dust floating around in these two places will only slow down our progress. Besides, we'll have to deal with these trivial matters later, which would really be beneath my elegant demeanor in battle. Let's clear the way back first."

The moment the last word fell, the blue teardrop mark between her brows burst forth like a searchlight forcibly injected with an excess of energy, emitting an intensely dark blue that stung the eyes.

The penetrating power of that light defied the basic optical principle of attenuation; even with the midday sun overhead, it could not obscure the dazzling halo of that mark.

Zhou Ruo felt the surrounding air become extremely stuffy in a fraction of a second, as if hundreds of tons of water vapor molecules floating in the atmosphere were being forcibly stripped of their control by this blue light and rapidly gathering towards the distant sea.

The massive hull of the Tanyuan, weighing thousands of tons, suddenly emitted a dense, teeth-grinding tremor.

This wasn't a collision with some reef; rather, the entire seawater thirty meters below the ship's hull was resonating violently at an abnormally high frequency.

The red warning indicator lights inside the bridge were flashing continuously.

The line graphs representing water pressure readings on the depth gauge's LCD screen twitched into completely unrecognizable gibberish within seconds, only managing to return to a smooth trend after a dozen or so breaths.

A long, urgent report, accompanied by heavy breathing, came from the speaker of the internal communicator.

"A large-scale release of internal stress in seawater has been detected within a range of 300 to 1300 kilometers behind us!"

The static from the walkie-talkie mingled with the rustling sound of pages being flipped through rapidly.

"The seawater in both the first and second pollution zones underwent some kind of structural reorganization within the same second!"

Zhou Ruo gripped the white towel and mineral water bottle tightly in her hands, her knuckles showing clear blue veins from the excessive force, and her heart was pounding violently at an extremely high rate of 110 beats per minute.

She looked at the slender figure in front of her, whose arms were outstretched.

A full fourteen minutes.

Funina's body remained motionless, like a sculpture fixed to the floor, and even her breathing, which was normally characterized by the rise and fall of her shoulders, was forcibly suppressed to less than four times per minute.

During those long fourteen minutes, Zhou Ruoneng could feel the humidity in the air fluctuating wildly.

Each time the light from the mark between Funina's eyebrows rose and fell slightly, the concentration of water vapor in the surrounding area would rise and fall sharply, as if an invisible hand was repeatedly drawing water vapor from the entire atmosphere and continuously concentrating it towards the two pollution zones in the distance.

A suffocating sense of oppression hung over the deck.

This is not merely the oppressive force of the deep sea, but the instinctive fear of carbon-based life forms when confronting a power that rewrites the rules of the world.

As the fourteen-minute countdown came to an end, Funina slowly lowered her arms, which had been raised in mid-air.

Her movements were so slow that they were completely unlike her usual casual and carefree style.

As her arm returned to the side of the suit jacket hem, Zhou Ruo keenly caught a fleeting tremor at the fingertips of the pristine white glove.

Funina did not turn around.

She stood quietly with her back to Zhou Ruo in the night wind for almost a minute, her gaze fixed on the white waves churned up by the propeller at the bottom of the stern.

Zhou Ruo didn't dare to breathe loudly, but just gripped the towel in her hand even tighter.

The sound of her heels clicking on the deck rang out as she turned and walked back toward the lounge.

In that fleeting moment as they brushed past each other, Zhou Ruo caught a glimpse of the details on the other person's face.

The once dazzling blue water droplet mark had now dimmed to an even fainter degree than usual, like an old table lamp whose knob had been forcibly turned down.

The walkie-talkie hanging on his waist came through again, followed by a long, stammering voice confirming the data.

The long-term monitoring radar transmitted back the final detection results: the abnormal sea temperature phenomena in the first pollution zone had completely disappeared, and the sea surface and deep water temperatures had all fallen back to the normal safe range of two to four degrees Celsius.

The distorted optical phenomena resembling deep-sea aurora in the second pollution zone have also completely returned to zero, and the refractive index parameters of all water bodies have returned to the positive value framework defined by physics.

On his nautical log duty page, the sungman wrote a line with a pen dripping with sweat.

"She washed the water clean 1,300 kilometers away."

Pushing open the heavy bulletproof door of the lounge, Funina didn't go for the dessert first, but instead slumped heavily into the soft velvet sofa.

He casually placed his hands on his knees and closed his eyes.

Zhou Ruo stood at the door without moving.

The only sound in the room was the faint whirring of the air conditioner vents.

The silence lasted for a full ten seconds.

Funina opened her eyes, leaned forward, reached out her right hand and picked up a cream puff that Louis had just made from the plate on the coffee table, then took a big bite out of it.

"What I just washed off was just some dust floating on the surface of the water."

As she chewed on the crispy outer layer, she broke the silence with a slightly muffled voice, her tone less casual than usual.

After swallowing the sweet cream, Funina's eyelids drooped slightly, and the usual playfulness disappeared from her heterochromatic pupils.

"Thirteen hundred kilometers of dust, this water god has used up a lot of the strength he has accumulated over this period of time today."

She tossed the remaining half of the cream puff back onto the plate, pulled a handkerchief from beside the sofa armrest, and carefully wiped the cream stains from the corner of her mouth.

"The filth that leaked from the seabed fissures in the abyss has spread everywhere with the ocean currents over the past two weeks, turning into a surface pollution that looks like dust."

Zhou Ruo then walked into the lounge, sat down in the opposite seat, held the encrypted tablet in front of her chest, and her fingers flew across the virtual keyboard, entering each word into the file.

"Whether it's a sudden rise in temperature or light taking a wrong turn in the water, it's all just dust."

Funina folded the handkerchief twice and placed it back on the armrest, her tone filled with undisguised contempt and disgust.

"Dust is easy to sweep away, but what's the use if the roots are still there?"

She shifted to a more comfortable position, leaning back against the sofa. The faint water droplet mark refracted a soft glow under the overhead light.

"But the third place is completely different. The pollution there is no longer just dust floating in the air; it's the root of the problem."

Funina swallowed the cream puff, wiped her mouth with a handkerchief, and her tone became serious. She spoke very slowly, emphasizing each word.

"That root, rotten to the core, grew directly up from nearly 10,000 meters deep in the seabed and took root in the underlying rules of this ocean that belong to water."

She raised her eyes and looked directly at Zhou Ruo's face, which was filled with tension.

"On the boat, I can only sweep up the dust, not cut the roots. To cut the roots, I have to go down and touch the place where it grew with my own hands."

The air around us seemed to grow even heavier.

She spoke her last sentence very slowly.

"If I don't pull the roots out, the dust I sweep up today will grow back in three days."

After typing the last word, Zhou Ruo hovered her finger above the tablet screen, hesitating for a moment.

Looking at Funina's slightly pale profile, she finally asked the question that had been on her mind ever since Funina woke up in Yokosuka.

"Then... can't Lord Uther and the others help you?"