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

The air in the room seemed to have been sucked out of its oxygen. Zhou Ruo opened her mouth, but it felt as if a handful of rough, dry sand had been stuffed into her throat, and she couldn't utter a single syllable.

Our gaze travels across an arc of over 10,000 kilometers and falls into the blazing sun of Cairo, Egypt.

Hassan began his seventh day of intensive work in that special repair room enclosed by thick bulletproof glass.

The old man pushed the military-grade high-powered electron microscope to the very edge of the worktable and reached out to rub his eye sockets, which were covered with dark bags.

He pressed his left thumb hard against his trembling right wrist, trying to suppress the muscle spasms caused by Parkinson's disease.

The notebook contained three lines of unknown text that he had cleared from the bottom of the Anubis Scales over the past seven days.

He turned the page, which was fuzzy from his sweaty hands, and his gaze locked onto the sun-shaped symbol that appeared most frequently.

A perfect circle surrounds a dot.

Hassan moved the wheeled office chair and sat down in front of a heavy terminal computer that was directly connected to the International Database of Ancient Writing Systems.

He traced the image into the search box using a digital drawing board and selected the blind search mode that transcends cultural barriers in the advanced options.

He pressed the Enter key on the keyboard with his thin fingers.

The massive memory pool of the database, containing 37,000 entered symbols, began to perform calculations.

Progress bars and matching results kept popping up on the screen, and the case cooling fans were making a loud, strained noise.

Two minutes later, the search program returned twenty-three matches with highly similar features.

Hassan pushed up his reading glasses and squinted as he clicked on the image links one by one, each bearing an old excavation report number.

He dragged the first nineteen matches directly into the digital recycle bin within seconds.

Those are crude sun worship totems from different periods of Mayan civilization or Native American times. They have an essential technological barrier in terms of form compared to the intricate engravings on the bottom of the scales, and have no cross-study reference value.

He scrolled his mouse wheel down one notch, and the preview of the twentieth match entered the light-sensitive area of ​​his retina.

Hassan's breath caught in his throat for a split second.

He leaned forward, his nose almost hitting the outer glass of the LCD screen, and rapidly tapped to enlarge the black-and-white scan until it filled the entire display.

It was a fragment of a clay slab with a pitted surface and that had suffered severe physical damage.

The excavation report's summary section indicated the object's true identity in English.

Relics from the Sumerian civilization, dating back to 3000 BC.

This fragment, unearthed from the mud piles of the ancient city of Ur in Iraq, is older than the founding of the First Dynasty of Egypt.

This item is now locked in a temperature-controlled underground storage room at the University of Pennsylvania Museum on the other side of the world.

In the lower right corner of the remaining clay tablet, a circle with dots is clearly engraved, exactly the same as the bottom of the balance scale.

Whether it's the angle of the cut along the edge lines or the centered proportion of the dot within the circle, the two are almost like products printed from the same metal mold on different materials.

Hassan immediately grabbed the encrypted communicator keyboard and opened his private email client, which belonged to a leading figure in the international archaeological community.

Ignoring the potential rudeness caused by the time difference, he urgently sent an email with an expedited tag to the Institute of Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania.

The email explicitly requested all high-resolution scanned images of the back of the Sumerian clay tablet, as well as all original archaeological log reports from the time of its excavation.

The notification sound of clicking the send button rang crisply in the quiet restoration room.

.........

The Tanyuan amphibious formation has been pushed to its seventy-fourth hour.

We are about 200 kilometers away from the outer edge of the third pollution zone ahead.

Inside the sonar room, the piercing alarm of a Level 1 anomaly warning suddenly resounded throughout the entire cabin.

The sonar operator responsible for monitoring the high-frequency band suddenly ripped off his headset and covered his ears in pain with both hands.

The drag array detected an unusual frequency of howling that had never been recorded before.

The phony master immediately rushed to the control panel, his fingers flying across the control panel.

The waveform jumped wildly on the screen, with the frequency unusually stable between 430 Hz and 440 Hz.

The intensity of the sound decreased regularly with distance, but the clarity of the signal source was frighteningly high.

He retrieved all the voiceprint databases of active-duty marine life and man-made underwater vehicles in the Navy for blind matching. After the progress bar finished, the results were all empty.

The sound engineer did not give up and directly accessed the offline reference database of the intranet hydrophysical laboratory.

Three minutes later, an encrypted footnote was found by searching the code.

The above contains only two short lines of professional explanation.

When water molecules undergo large-scale synchronous bond breakage under extreme physical or chemical pressure, a macroscopic resonant signal that can be captured by a highly sensitive hydrophone will theoretically be generated in the vicinity of that frequency band.

The choreographer read the line twice, then grabbed a tactical pen and wrote a line heavily on the thick duty logbook.

"This frequency falls within the theoretical resonance prediction range for the large-scale synchronous breaking of OH bonds in water molecules, and the water in that area is being violently torn apart."

The top deck of the open-air area.

Funina was not in the sonar chamber, nor could she see the pulsating electronic waveforms.

She simply stood quietly in front of the railing.

Today, she wasn't holding any desserts, and even her chin, which she usually habitually tilted up slightly, was lowered.

Zhou Ruo stood to the side and behind, holding a black notebook, just about to report the abnormal communication coming from the sonar room.

"There's no need to look at the data you get from sweeping up that junk."

Funina suddenly interrupted her.

Without turning around, Funina raised her right hand and gently fanned herself twice in the salty sea breeze.

"I can smell it."

Zhou Ruo paused for a moment, her gaze sweeping across the boundless deep blue sea. Apart from the exhaust fumes from the burning diesel and the smell of seaweed, she noticed nothing unusual.

"Lord Water God, what do you smell?"

Zhou Ruo pressed the tip of her pen onto the page.

Funina turned around, her heterochromatic eyes filled with intense disgust.

"The smell of a corpse in the water."

Zhou Ruo's hand trembled slightly as she held the pen, and the ink left a crooked line half a centimeter long on the paper.

"It smells like fermentation, all ozone and free ions. That's a temporary reaction that only happens after lightning strikes the sea, but right now, that reaction is constantly emanating outwards 200 kilometers ahead."

Funina crossed her white-gloved hands over her chest and spoke very slowly.

"The water is dying."