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

The pollution zone extends 20 kilometers from its outer edge.

The lookout post on the Type 055 destroyer Yan'an was the first to detect the anomaly.

When the lookout lowered the binoculars from his eye socket, his lips moved twice but no sound came out. He then raised the binoculars back and looked at the eyes a second time.

He pressed the button on the walkie-talkie on his chest, his voice extremely low.

"A large area of ​​anomaly has appeared on the sea surface 15 degrees to starboard from the bridge."

The voice of the watch officer on the bridge came through the walkie-talkie.

"What type of anomaly?"

The lookout remained silent for two seconds.

"The seawater looks dry."

The watchman did not respond; only the faint background noise of the electrical current could be heard through the walkie-talkie.

Three seconds later, the watchman's voice reappeared.

"Repeat it."

The lookout adjusted the focus of his binoculars by half a circle, making the image in the lens clearer.

The sea surface in large areas was still flowing, and the rhythm of the waves was no different from that of normal sea areas, but the liquid surface had lost the viscous reflectivity that normal seawater should have.

When the beam of the searchlight at the top of the mast of the Tanyuan swept across the water, the surface of the water took on a texture similar to frosted glass. The light falling on it did not form a bright mirror reflection, but was evenly dispersed into a layer of hazy diffuse reflection.

It's as if someone removed the surface tension of seawater from the underlying code.

The lookout lowered his binoculars, his Adam's apple bobbing.

"The sea surface is still liquid, but it looks dry, without any shimmer, like frosted glass."

There was a one-second pause.

"The water molecules don't seem to stick together very much anymore."

Enter the outer edge for ten kilometers.

All six green lights in the sonic chamber turned red within three seconds.

The sonar chief wore headphones, placed his hands on the edge of the control panel, leaned forward, and his earlobes turned red from the pressure of the headphones.

He wasn't hearing white noise.

The sound coming in through the hydrophone was a crackling sound with an extremely high density. Each sound was very short, but there were so many that it was impossible to distinguish individual sounds. When they were stacked together, they formed a wall of sound with almost no gaps, as if someone was pouring thousands of gravel onto a metal plate at the same time, and this pouring action would never stop.

Sonic slowly took off his headphones, turned the volume down three notches, and then put them back on.

He listened for a full two minutes.

"The water here is both dying and coming back to life."

His voice was very soft, as if he were explaining to himself.

"When hydrogen bonds break, water molecules are broken into plasma fragments. Then, under the influence of the surrounding normal water body, the fragments recombine into water molecules, and then are broken apart again, in a continuous cycle, which is why it keeps making a sound."

His deputy, sitting to his right, looked up.

What about the signal-to-noise ratio?

The soprano glanced at the numerical reading on the screen, then turned his head away.

"Unavailable".

He reached out and tapped twice on the keyboard, bringing up an additional information box.

"in addition."

His finger touched a signal icon that had disappeared in the lower right corner of the screen.

"The deep-sea reconnaissance glider released by the US submarine earlier has lost signal."

The deputy frowned.

"When?"

"The last faint reflection appeared about four kilometers ahead of the pollution zone, and there were no more echoes after that."

The sonar enlarged the signal marker, and the timestamp was clearly displayed next to it.

"It has been completely melted by the plasma state of seawater."

The deputy stared at the blank signal slot without saying a word.

Stern deck.

Funina began releasing a water film shield.

But her movements were completely different from the previous two times she had traveled through time.

The first two times, the blue light spread outward from her palm, like a layer of silk blown open by the wind, lightly covering the hull and the sea.

This time, she put her hands at her sides and gripped the steel deck plate tightly with all ten bare toes.

Blue light emanated from the tips of all ten of her toes simultaneously.

It's not upwards, not outwards, but downwards.

The light penetrated the anti-slip coating on the deck, the steel plate, the longitudinal reinforcing ribs beneath the steel plate, and continued downwards through the keel structure at the bottom of the ship. It then emerged from the outermost plate at the bottom of the keel and directly entered the churning seawater below the hull.

The moment it connected, the hull of the Tanyuan emitted a muffled, low-frequency vibration, as if the entire ship had been gently lifted from below by a giant hand.

The blue light radiated outwards at an extremely fast speed in the water, no longer a thin three-centimeter film of water, but a dense water wall as thick as fifteen centimeters, as if bending an entire translucent blue ice wall into a hemisphere, extending outwards from the bottom of the ship, and completely enveloping the three warships below the waterline.

However, the coverage radius of the hemisphere was significantly smaller than the previous two times.

The previous 150-meter protection zone has been reduced to approximately 80 meters.

The intercoms in the captain's cabin were pressed almost simultaneously by the helmsmen of all three ships.

"Yan'an reports: distance to the preceding ship has decreased to 62 meters. Requesting instructions."

"Zunyi reports: tail distance is less than 55 meters, steering margin has reached its limit."

The three warships were forced to close the distance between them to almost touching end to end. From the air, they looked like three pieces of iron blocks tightly joined together, with gaps so narrow that an adult could reach the side planks with outstretched arms.

The helmsmen's voices, lowered to report the distance, rose and fell over the walkie-talkies.

Zhou Ruo stood inside the cabin door, watching Fu Ningna's back.

Her back was ramrod straight, and the outline of her shoulder blades was faintly visible through the fabric of her white, tight-fitting dress. The muscle lines on both shoulders appeared unnaturally taut under the blue light, as if someone had twisted a hundred steel wires into her skeleton.

Zhou Ruo lowered her head and wrote a line in the notebook.

"The thickness of the shield has increased from three centimeters to fifteen centimeters, while the radius has shrunk from one hundred and fifty meters to eighty meters. She is using a stronger anchoring force to counteract the disintegration of plasma water molecules, at the cost of a significant reduction in the protective range."

The formation drove into the core of the pollution zone.

The seawater outside the protective shield completely lost its "water" form.

Looking out through the bulletproof glass of the hatch, Zhou Ruo could no longer find a single drop of water that she recognized.

Instead, a semi-transparent, high-temperature plasma flow, its color between orange-red and white, resembled someone dumping an entire steel mill's furnace into the Pacific Ocean. The scalding fluid surged and swirled on the outer wall of the shield, reaching temperatures of several thousand degrees.

The inner wall of the shield is subjected to the thermal radiation and particle impact of the plasma. Tiny evaporation bubbles constantly emerge from the 15-centimeter-thick water wall surface. Each bubble exists for less than a fraction of a second before being pushed back into liquid by an invisible force, as if an invisible hand is repeatedly pressing down one water molecule after another that tries to escape on the surface of the water wall.

The ship's cooling system automatically switched to maximum power, and the hum of the fans emanated from the engine room below the deck, making my feet go numb.

However, the purpose of turning the cooling system to its maximum is not to cool down any equipment.

The chief engineer reported a single sentence over the ship's communication channel at an extremely fast pace.

"Radiant heat is penetrating inward through the multiple layers of the protective shield, and the cooling system is operating at full power to counteract it."

Funina's consumption is rising rapidly.

Zhou Ruo saw that her complexion was paler than during the previous two purifications. It wasn't the kind of pale white from blood loss, but rather as if all the blood had been drained from under her skin, leaving only a thin, translucent layer of porcelain glaze.

Her hands hung at her sides, her ten fingers spasming involuntarily, the bending of her knuckles varying in degree, as if an electric current was jumping back and forth between her fingertips and palms.

The muscles around her knees were taut like two iron bars, and the lines of her calves below the hem of her skirt trembled slightly from the continuous exertion.

Zhou Ruo unconsciously clenched her fist in her pocket.

She didn't dare to go up.

The door was pushed open a crack from behind.