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

Eighty-eighth hour of formation sailing.

Three warships sailed in a triangular formation into a calm, deep blue expanse of water. The surface of the sea was as smooth as a dark silk ribbon stretched to the horizon, with hardly any white foam in sight.

The electronic nautical chart on the bridge slowly refreshed the coordinate axes on the main screen, and the numbers in the lower right corner showed that it was less than eighty nautical miles directly above the central axis of the Mariana Trench.

After crossing the third contaminated zone, Funin slept for nearly six hours straight.

Zhou Ruo stood guard at the door of the lounge, glancing inside through the observation window every half hour to make sure the small man curled up on the sofa was still breathing.

In six hours, Funina woke up four times.

Every time I wake up, it's the same routine: open my eyes, reach out, grab something sweet from the coffee table, put it in my mouth, chew it, swallow it, close my eyes, and go back to sleep.

In total, she ate eleven cream puffs, eight macarons, two whole boxes of tiramisu, and a plate of egg tarts over four meals.

Zhou Ruo flipped through the logistics list and looked at the total amount of desserts that Louis Bernard had noted before his departure. She did a simple division and came to a conclusion that made her teeth ache.

In those six hours, Funina devoured nearly a third of the ship's entire dessert supply.

In the makeshift galley in the lower deck, Louis Bernard had been working continuously for nine hours.

The sweet aroma of butter wafted up from the ventilation ducts, mingling with the distinctive diesel smell of the warship and the salty odor of the sea, creating an extremely absurd combination of scents.

When Louis took the last batch of cream puffs out of the oven, his arms were already trembling, not from nervousness, but simply because he had reached his physical limit.

He placed the tray on the worktable, turned around and leaned against the two bags of flour stacked in the corner. His head hit the brown paper bag, and his eyelids closed faster than he could keep his mind at ease. Within three seconds, his breathing became long and even.

A bodyguard in camouflage stood at the kitchen doorway, looked at him for two seconds, didn't wake him, but simply reached out and took the tray from the counter to the upper floor.

When Funina woke up, it was 3:17 PM, the time for formation.

She sat up from the sofa, dangled her feet on the ground and swung them around a couple of times, her toes still two centimeters away from the deck.

The brightness of the blue teardrop mark between her eyebrows had returned to a level that was visible to the naked eye. Although it was far from its peak before crossing the pollution zone, it was at least no longer the dimness that made Zhou Ruo feel uneasy.

Funina raised her hand to rub the corner of her eye and glanced at the empty dessert plate on the coffee table.

"That's it?"

Zhou Ruo walked over from the door and placed the newly delivered batch of cream puffs on the table.

"Mr. Louis finished the last batch, and he's now asleep against a flour sack."

Funina picked up a cream puff, took a bite, chewed it a couple of times, and her brows relaxed slightly.

"This batch of cream whipped up a little better than before."

She swallowed it and took a second bite.

Tell him not to wake up yet, let him sleep a little longer.

Zhou Ruo was stunned for a moment.

Funina didn't look at her; her gaze was fixed on the deep blue sea outside the round porthole on the bulkhead. She held a half-eaten cream puff in her hand and spoke casually, as if she were talking about the weather.

"We won't need him anymore."

Zhou Ruo opened her mouth, then swallowed back the question that was on the tip of her tongue, and wrote down the time and the original sentence in the notebook.

At 3:42 p.m., Funina did something she had never done before since boarding the ship.

She pushed open the door to the lounge and walked along the narrow corridor toward the bridge.

The sailors along the way automatically pressed themselves against the wall and made way for her the moment they saw her. Two new recruits bumped their backs directly into the pipeline valves, and the dull thud echoed twice in the corridor.

Ignoring everyone, Funin walked barefoot through three watertight doors and stepped onto the bridge threshold.

The six officers on duty stood up from their seats almost simultaneously, their chair wheels making short, creaking noises as they rolled on the non-slip floor.

Funina's gaze did not linger on any one person, but instead swept directly onto the electronic nautical chart on the main screen and the depth gauge data displayed vertically on the right.

The nautical chart shows the original diving coordinates for Operation Clean Abyss, with the red diamond icon positioned directly above the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.

Funina stared at the red diamond for three seconds.

Then she walked to the nautical chart, raised her right index finger, and placed the fingertip about four hundred kilometers south of the Challenger Deep's marked location.

"Go down from here."

The captain stood two steps behind her, his hands behind his back, his right knuckles unconsciously bending alternately.

He took five seconds to choose his words.

"Lord Water God, this location is not included in the original plan for the Cleansing Abyss operation."

His voice remained steady, befitting a soldier, and he enunciated each word clearly.

"The original plan targeted the core area of ​​the abyssal debris directly above the trench, where satellite thermal imaging and data from deep-sea buoy arrays all pointed to."

Funina didn't remove her index finger from the nautical chart; she turned her head and glanced at the captain.

The angle of that glance was small; the chin was slightly raised, and the corner of the eye swept across the captain's face from the side.

"Your design was based on those blurry spots captured by satellite."

She tapped the dot on the nautical chart with her index finger.

"My judgment is based on what the water tells me."

He pulled his fingers back and let them hang down at his sides.

Which one do you choose?

The captain's lips moved slightly, and the force with which his upper and lower teeth closed was faintly visible through the contours of his masseter muscles.

He did not speak again.

Funina turned back to look at the nautical chart, and lightly traced an arc on the coordinate point with her fingernail.

The communications officer had already sat back down in front of the terminal in the second it took her to draw the arc, her hands on the encrypted keyboard, and encoded the final dive coordinates specified by Funina into a ciphertext packet, which was then uploaded to the East Coast base command center via satellite link.

Six thousand four hundred kilometers away, the encrypted terminal at the East Coast base command center popped up with this coordinate change request four seconds later.

Chen Jianguo stood in front of the main screen, holding a red pen in his hand, the cap of which was nowhere to be found.

His first action upon seeing the new coordinates was not to approve them, but to reach out and pull up three sets of overlaid data on the auxiliary screen next to him.

The first set is the last of seven points that Funina marked on the high-resolution underwater topographic map before boarding the ship.

The second set is the location coordinates of the 0.07 Hz extremely low frequency signal source captured by the Ninth Bureau's intelligence system at a depth of 10,800 meters.

The third set consists of coordinates corresponding to the accompanying garbled text that Jiang Ming accidentally captured while systematically analyzing the underlying logic of the Holy Grail remnants.

The three sets of data belong to three completely independent sources, with a collection period of more than two weeks, and there is no overlap in data flow between them.

Chen Jianguo pointed the red pen tip at the screen and drew a third circle in the overlapping area of ​​the three coordinate points.

The three rings fit together almost perfectly, with a maximum deviation of no more than twelve kilometers.

He wrote six characters next to the circle.

"The convergence of the three lines indicates an anomaly."

Then he picked up the encrypted microphone and said four words into the formation communication channel.

"Let her make the decision."

The coordinate change approval was sent back to the bridge of the Tanyuan at 4:01 PM.

After reading the message, the captain folded the note and put it in his uniform pocket, then gave the helmsman the new course instruction.

The three warships simultaneously turned their rudders, correcting their course by eleven degrees from the original southwest-southwest direction, and sailed at full speed toward the new coordinates.

Based on the current speed, it is estimated that we will arrive in five to six hours.