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

Louis Bernard carried a stainless steel tray up from the lower deck, on which freshly baked cream puffs were neatly arranged, their sweet aroma carried on the sea breeze.

The Frenchman walked to the deck table and was about to put down the tray when his gaze fell across the tabletop onto Funina's back, five steps away.

His movements paused for a second.

He then gently placed the tray on the table, said nothing, and turned to retreat back to the hold along the same route he had come from.

As the footsteps faded around the corner of the staircase, Louis's right hand clenched and unclenched on the corridor handrail.

He didn't know what was happening outside, he didn't know what the blue light under the short girl's feet was, and he didn't know what the surging orange-red fluid outside the shield meant.

But he could see the way a person was risking their life for something.

The crossing lasted for twenty-seven minutes.

The moment the stern ship of the formation, Zunyi, sailed out of the trailing edge of the third pollution zone, Funinga withdrew the blue light.

The blue began to fade from her toes, pulling away along the deck steel plates, through the keel, through the outer hull, peeling back layer by layer from the seawater, like a tree of light uprooted and withering upside down.

The moment the last wisp of blue light retreated back into the mark between her brows, her body swayed.

It wasn't a large movement, only a few centimeters, but it was enough to shift her center of gravity to an angle that her right foot couldn't bear on its own.

Her right hand reached back, and her five cold fingers gripped the horizontal bar of the railing behind her.

Zhou Ruo rushed forward.

When her hand touched Funina's fingers, it felt like holding an iron rod that had been frozen in a freezer all night, so cold that the muscles in her palm reflexively wanted to pull back.

But the veins on the back of Funina's hand were throbbing rapidly; the bluish veins looked like several thin snakes struggling desperately, pulsating at a visible frequency beneath her pale skin.

Fu Ningna did not push Zhou Ruo away.

But she did not accept help.

She used her own strength to shift her weight back to the center of her feet and regain her balance.

Then she loosened her grip on the railing, reached for the tray Louis had left on the deck table, picked up a cream puff, and popped it into her mouth.

It made a crunching sound as it was chewed.

Cream squeezed out from the crack in the puff pastry shell and smeared on the corner of her mouth, which she casually wiped away with the pad of her thumb.

Zhou Ruosong released her hand, took a half step back, bent down and took out the notebook from her pocket, her hands still trembling.

Funina finished chewing the cream puff in her mouth and swallowed it.

When she spoke, her voice was half a tone lower than usual, as if a layer of elasticity had been removed from her vocal cords.

"I can't clean the third spot properly yet."

Zhou Ruo's pen stopped on the paper.

Fulina picked up the second cream puff, but instead of immediately putting it in her mouth, she held it between her fingers, looking at the caramel-colored crust on top of the puff.

"The roots are deeper and harder than I expected."

She brought the cream puff to her mouth, took a bite, chewed it twice, and swallowed much slower than usual.

"I might not be back anytime soon after I go down there."

Zhou Ruo's pen tip drew an uncontrollable ink mark on the paper.

She looked up at Funina's profile.

Funina didn't look at her; her gaze was fixed on the white wake churning at the stern of the ship. The blue water droplet mark between her brows had faded to the point of being almost invisible, with only a faint glow remaining beneath her skin.

Zhou Ruo opened her mouth as if to say something, but in the end she just closed the notebook and stuffed it back into her breast pocket.

She walked to the table and pushed the tray toward Funina.

Six thousand four hundred kilometers away.

Cairo.

Hassan Ali Mohammed sat at a worktable in the restoration hall, where the temporary rainproof roof had been reinforced. A new email notification appeared on the screen of his laptop.

The sender is the Near East Archaeological Documentation Room at the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

His trembling right hand swiped twice on the touchpad and opened the email.

The attachment includes a 37-page archaeological report in PDF format, as well as eight high-resolution scans.

A complete image of both sides of a Sumerian clay tablet.

Hassan took a metal-framed magnifying glass from the drawer, pressed his left hand against his right wrist to suppress the tremors of Parkinson's disease, and brought the magnifying glass to a distance of less than five centimeters in front of the screen.

He looked at the image on the back of the clay tablet for the first time.

Then I watched it a second time.

On the third time, he put the magnifying glass down, closed his eyes and sat for ten seconds, then picked up the magnifying glass again and looked at it a third time.

The symbolic arrangement on the back of the clay tablet consists of seven independent symbols arranged in a semi-circle.

The first three symbols are standard Sumerian cuneiform, and the archaeological report has already provided a translation.

"In deep water."

The last four symbols do not belong to any known Sumerian writing system.

But two of the symbols made Hassan hold his breath for a full three seconds.

One is a downward-pointing triangle with two parallel horizontal lines embedded inside.

The other is a sun symbol with a circle surrounding a dot.

The shape of the unknown symbol is highly consistent with the inscription on the bottom of the Libra base.

Hassan dragged the window of the mud tablet scan to the left side of the screen, then opened his phone's photo album, found the photo of the base of the Libra statue that he had taken three days ago, and displayed the two images side by side in front of him.

He took out a compass from his toolbox, aligned the two ends with the outer edges of the two sets of symbols, and compared their geometric proportions one by one.

The thickness ratio of the double horizontal lines embedded in the downward triangle should be within two percent.

The angular deviation of the sun symbol with a perfect circle surrounding the dot does not exceed three percent.

Hassan put down the compass, pressed his right hand down with his left, and wrote a line in his notebook.

The tremors from Parkinson's disease made the handwriting crooked, but every letter was still legible.

"A shared symbol system across civilizations."

He paused for two seconds, then added another line below.

"There exists an undiscovered layer of common knowledge among the oldest known human civilizations."

The pen tip hovered on the paper for a moment.

He flipped back to the scanned image on the back of the clay tablet and stared at the arrangement of the seven symbols for a long time.

The first three are known.

"In deep water."

The last four are unknown, but their arrangement logic presents a clear subject-verb-object structure, forming a semantic continuity with the first three words.

Hassan opened the archaeological report and found the remaining text translation on the front of the same clay tablet.

The two words appeared repeatedly, one positive and one negative.

"ruling."

"just."

He closed the report, re-examined the arrangement of the seven symbols on the back, and tried to write a semi-speculative translation in his notebook with a pencil.

"In the deep waters... the Arbiter..."

The third position was a symbol whose meaning he couldn't be determined at all, so he left a space.

"……just."

He put two question marks next to "The Arbiter".

This word was not directly translated from the last four unknown symbols, but rather inferred from the context of the remaining text on the front.