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

Hassan closed the notebook and locked it, along with the printout of the puff pastry scan, into a triple-locked steel safe.

He did not mention these discoveries to any of his colleagues at the museum.

He stood up, walked out of the restoration hall, and went to the restroom at the end of the corridor.

As he passed through the middle of the corridor, he caught a very small movement out of the corner of his eye.

The two armed guards on duty stood against the wall; the older one was in a normal posture, looking straight ahead.

The younger man quickly flipped his phone screen over as he passed by, pressing the screen against the outside of his thigh.

The movements were very small.

very natural.

But Hassan's peripheral vision had seen far too many people trying to hide something from him over the past fifty years, from the gestures of students flipping their papers while cheating to the actions of antiquities smugglers pulling their passports toward their thighs on customs inspection platforms; the commonalities in angle and speed were etched into his visual memory.

He didn't say anything.

I went into the restroom, washed my hands, and dried my fingers with a rough paper towel.

Back in the restoration room, he sat back on the low stool and began writing a passage in tiny print, starting from the last page of his notebook.

Parkinson's disease made his handwriting even more illegible, but he deliberately used this to his advantage, writing each letter extremely compactly, making it almost impossible to read without a magnifying glass.

"A young guard in Squad A. He had a callus on his right ring finger, but it was positioned high up, and he often gripped a pistol rather than a rifle. His physique did not resemble that of a regular Egyptian soldier."

He paused, and the tip of his pen made two tiny dots of ink on the paper.

"Note: This person has been on duty within a few meters of Libra for an extended period, yet has not been subject to trial. They may have only been given an observation mission, rather than a plundering order."

The pen tip hovered again.

Libras distinguish between 'looking' and 'taking'.

He added a three-letter abbreviation at the end of the last line, followed by a question mark.

"CIA?"

Then he added the last sentence in smaller font below that line.

"If the nature of its mission changes, Libra may immediately settle accounts."

He closed the notebook and stuffed it into the inside pocket of his shirt.

The trembling in my right hand intensified for a moment when I finished writing the last word, then returned to its normal frequency.

He picked up the cooled strong coffee on the table and took a sip.

He gently swirled the cup in his hand, causing the bubbles on the surface of the coffee to break into fine concentric circles.

Siberia.

Inside the constant-temperature barrier.

Sergei laid five long strips of paper, made of food packaging paper, on the ground and weighed down the four corners with four stones.

The packaging paper was densely covered with ninety-two handwritten data points, each marked with a corresponding time number, from the first hour to the ninety-second hour.

Temperature data recording has entered its ninety-second hour.

The data collection frequency is fixed at once per hour.

Sergei squatted at the beginning of the paper roll, holding a pencil sharpened to half in his right hand, while his left index finger slowly moved along the line connecting the data points.

The waveform chart shows a smooth, sinusoidal curve for the first forty hours, but from the forty-first hour onwards, the curve's shape becomes more complex.

Irregular secondary undulations appeared between the crests and troughs, like several small ripples superimposed on a large wave.

He didn't have a calculator.

The communications course at the Moscow Military Academy teaches basic spectrum analysis methods, but that course assumes that students have a terminal device that can at least perform Fourier transforms.

He only had half a pencil and five sheets of wrapping paper at hand.

Sergei held the pencil horizontally, using the flat side of the pencil shaft as a ruler, and drew a rough time baseline along the edge of the rolled paper.

Then he began to try to decompose the waveform with his naked eye and mental calculations.

The first step is to find the base frequency.

He marked all the identifiable main troughs and counted the spacing.

The intervals between the three main troughs are fourteen data points and fourteen data points, respectively.

Data is collected once per hour, and fourteen data points equal fourteen hours.

The fundamental frequency period is approximately fourteen hours.

He wrote the division equation in the blank space at the corner of the paper, the pencil tip scratching the rough surface of the wrapping paper with a soft, scratching sound.

One divided by fourteen and multiplied by three thousand six hundred.

It is approximately equal to 0.00002 Hertz.

He drew a horizontal line under the number.

Then he stopped.

The pencil tip hovered above the paper, not falling.

He remembered something.

Three days ago, he happened to hear a news broadcast from the BBC World Service on his shortwave radio, which was powered by a hand-cranked generator.

The announcer mentioned a frequency.

0.07 Hz.

Someone on the dark web claimed to have detected a persistent, extremely low-frequency signal in the deep Pacific Ocean, with a frequency of 0.07 Hz and a source depth of over 10,000 meters.

Sergei's pencil tip fell back onto the paper.

He wrote 0.07 Hz below 0.00002 Hz.

Then he did a division.

0.07 divided by 0.00002.

That equals three thousand five hundred.

He wrote the answer to the right of the two numbers and circled it with a box.

Three thousand five hundred.

Integer.

Precise integer multiples of frequency.

The fundamental frequency of the ignition temperature pulse is a precise integer division of the frequency of the deep-sea signal in the Pacific Ocean.

Sergei stared at the numbers in the box for half a minute without moving.

Andrei peeked out from the other side of the tent.

"What's wrong?"

Sergei did not answer.

He picked up the five wrapping papers from the ground, folded them one by one along the creases, and stuffed them into the zippered compartment of his inner breast pocket.

Then he stood up and walked out of the tent.

The black soil at the heart of the fortress exuded a sweet, earthy smell that only comes with early spring plowing. The nineteen-year-old frozen soil had completely thawed at a constant temperature of twenty-one degrees Celsius, and their repeated trampling had created a shallow, circular path on the surface.

He stood in the middle of the path, the red orb on his chest slowly rotating, the light seeping through the three layers of clothing, casting a dark red halo on his chest.

He lowered his head and looked at the ball of light.

"You're not just trying to keep warm."

His voice was very low, so low that only he and the spinning ball of light in his chest could hear it.

"You are communicating."

The overhead dome refracts outside light, creating a false twilight effect. The sky is not the real sky, the sun is not the real sun; everything is an optical illusion inside a hundred-square-kilometer constant-temperature enclosure.

Sergei raised his head and looked at the fake sky.

It paused for two seconds.

The problem is...

His Adam's apple bobbed.

"Who's listening?"