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

It was 2:10 a.m.

The supercomputing center in the Qinling underground core area was filled with the roar of server rack fans running at high load.

Academician Qi was holding a chipped enamel mug, with a few thoroughly soaked brown leaf stems floating on the surface of the strong tea.

The passive oscillating wave source radar data packets from the second night happened to pass through the dedicated fiber optic cable and enter the central server cluster.

The doctoral student raised his hand to straighten his black-rimmed glasses, which had slipped down to the middle of his nose, and quickly rubbed his fingertips on the touchpad.

Two negatives from different time periods were digitally overlaid and reconstructed in a three-dimensional coordinate system.

The dark patch marked "Cavity C" on the screen began to spread and take root deeper into the earth's strata.

It's like a bottomless abyss, its massive outline bitten out from below the extreme line at a depth of 123 meters.

The doctoral student dragged the cursor to the bottom edge of the color block and tapped the Enter key with his fingertip.

"Teacher, today's data has revealed the bottom."

The doctoral student increased the elevation angle parameter of the perspective view, exposing the entire three-dimensional structure completely to the glaring incandescent light.

"The maximum visible depth of cavity C reaches 145 meters."

He swallowed a mouthful of slightly bitter saliva and drew three dark blue dotted lines radiating outwards from the bottom center of the screen with his finger.

"Furthermore, we found three long, radially distributed channels on the bottom cross-section."

Academician Qi took a big step forward, his body almost touching the resin shell of the anti-glare screen, his bloodshot eyes fixed on the three thin, dark blue lines.

He traced the path of the passageway on the glass surface with his rough fingers, and a few drops of water spilled from the teacup due to the movement of his arm.

The doctoral student grabbed a data summary sheet from the side and handed it over.

"These three passageways are approximately four meters wide and about three and a half meters high."

The doctoral student's voice sounded somewhat hoarse amidst the roar of the computer room.

"But the most troublesome thing is their wall reflection characteristics."

He typed out a complex set of frequency comparison waveforms on the keyboard and drew a circle at the peak with a red pen.

"These cross-sectional echoes have an extremely strong high-frequency filtering effect, and natural granite or quartz veins would never be able to reproduce this signal wavelength."

The doctoral student tilted his head to look at the old man's face, which was illuminated by the cold light, and uttered the final physics conclusion.

"That underground corridor must have been cast from some kind of synthetic material."

Academician Qi placed the teacup on the metal panel of the control console, making a dull thud.

This proves that the Qin Dynasty craftsmen more than two thousand years ago not only dug out a city underground, but also used unknown materials to construct a kind of network system buried deep in the earth's core.

The old man pulled over a folding iron chair and sat down, his two wrinkled legs crossed together.

"Immediately take the radar data from these two nights and 3D model it, and align it precisely with the coordinates of the miniature map in the No. 7 underground palace."

Upon hearing the instruction, the doctoral student looked troubled and ran his right hand through his somewhat messy hair at the back of his head.

"This work requires forced spatial registration of two sets of data from completely different sources with varying degrees of accuracy."

He created two independent mesh reference frames on the main computer.

"Radar data is derived by using the reinforced concrete buildings on the surface of modern Xianyang city as coordinate anchor points."

The doctoral student then brought another ancient Qin sand table model, obtained through laser scanning, into view.

"The map data uses the central column base of the Qin Xianyang Palace site, which is known to the archaeological community, as the absolute reference point."

Looking at the two tangled messes that were not even on the same level, he gave a relatively conservative project timeline.

"It will take six hours to run all the registration algorithms."

Academician Qi tucked his hands into the sleeves of his military overcoat and sank deep into the back of the chair.

"Then let's start calculating."

Without further ado, the doctoral student turned around and began typing a series of wake-up codes into the command-line interface.

He glanced back at his tutor, who showed no signs of sleepiness.

"The results should be out as early as tomorrow morning."

Academician Qi closed his eyes and stopped responding, using this refusal to communicate to declare his determination to hold the command center to the death that night.

The navigation log of the Exploration Flotilla crossed the sixty-eighth hour mark at dawn.

The Pacific sea breeze, carrying a strong, fishy smell, swept through the open corridors of the warship.

For a full twenty minutes, Fu Ningna stood in front of the huge bulletproof porthole in the lounge, her back to the cabin door, maintaining a posture of looking out at the sea.

The various exquisite French desserts that she usually carries around are completely gone today.

The freshly baked macarons on the round table hadn't even had their frosting touched.

Zhou Ruo, carrying a cup of warm black tea, stopped two steps away from Funina.

She noticed that the water goddess girl, who usually acted with a carefree and arrogant demeanor, was now trembling slightly with her hands hidden at the edge of her lace sleeves.

The trembling was completely irregular; it was neither the physiological tremor of facing a polar cold front nor the muscle spasms caused by severe physical exhaustion.

It was more like a deep-seated, instinctive reaction fighting against some unspeakable sense of oppression.

Zhou Ruo placed the teacup on the shelf by the windowsill, trying to break the heavy silence.

"Lord Water God, would you like to wear another coat?"

Funina didn't turn around, not even tilting her head, stubbornly staring at the surging black waves hundreds of kilometers away with her heterochromatic eyes.

Her voice pierced through the damping feedback of the glass insulation and landed in the room, carrying a chilling, hoarse quality.

"The third flavor has arrived."

Funina raised her right hand, which was hanging by her side, and pressed her fingertips against the thick, bulletproof tempered glass. Her fingers dragged a crooked water mark in the condensation droplets.

"It's completely different from the previous two places."

She turned to look at Zhou Ruo, and there was no trace of the liveliness she usually showed when asking for sweets on that delicate face.

For the first time ever, a pure and utter disgust overflowed from those eyes, as if they were looking at a pile of rotting, stinking dead flesh.

"The first two places were just dirty water."

Funina slowly pulled her fingers back from the glass, clenching them into a fist in her palm.

"The third place is stagnant water."

Zhou Ruo took out the black notebook and ballpoint pen from his pocket, but the pen tip hesitated to make the first stroke on the page.

She couldn't understand this conceptual division regarding the life and death of bodies of water.

As if seeing through her doubts, Funina turned around and leaned against the cold metal frame of the porthole, beginning to peel back the layers of the truth in extremely slow speech, as if carefully choosing every word that might evoke fear.

"Stagnant water is more than just dirty."

She raised her left hand and made a violent tearing motion in mid-air, the knuckles making a slight clicking sound from the force.

"If dirt seeps into the water, just put in a little effort to dust it off and wash it to make it clear again."

Funina's breathing became heavy, and the rise and fall of the silk fabric at her chest increased visibly.

"But the water molecules there are being forcibly broken apart by some external will from the abyss."

She stared intently at Zhou Ruo's biceps as she gripped the pen.

"The hydrogen and oxygen atoms, which were originally tightly bound together, were forcibly separated by that force."

The absurdity of the chemical knowledge contained in that sentence made Zhou Ruo's heart skip a beat, and the tip of her pen drew a long, meaningless line on the paper.

Ignoring the panic, Fulina continued to build upon the terrifying despair that utterly undermined common sense about physics.

"That's not all. After they were separated, they were even deprived of the desire to reunite by absolute malice."

She put her hands behind her back and gripped the alloy steel frame of the porthole tightly.

"Those things that originally nurtured life have now all become charged free particles."

The surface of the alloy steel frame defied the laws of thermodynamics, directly condensing a thick layer of frost, like white sweat, onto the part where her fingers were gripping it, and the cold air seeped out from her fingertips.

"They no longer abide by any of the ancient laws about water on this planet."

Funina raised her chin, and the light blue mark between her eyebrows shimmered with an intermittent halo.

"These are the roots of that rotten tree."

She used the tone of announcing a court's final verdict to completely shut down any possible escape routes.

"This kind of rotten root, which is rooted in the underlying logic, can never be swept away by standing on the deck and sweeping dust."

Zhou Ruo felt as if the anti-slip steel plate under her feet was losing its support. Within a few seconds, all the color drained from her face, turning even paler than the frosting on the outside of macarons.

She knew what she was about to hear—the words she had been secretly praying would never come true since the first day she boarded the ship.

Fu Ningna loosened her grip on the steel frame and straightened the wrinkles on her clothes.

"I have to dive down to that deep sea and uproot this damned thing with my own hands."