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

When Zhou Ruo returned, she was carrying a tin lunchbox with four cream puffs inside, which had already softened a bit.

Funina took it, bit off half of one, her cheeks puffed out, her eyes never leaving the sea beneath her feet.

She did not return to her cabin that night.

Zhou Ruo came to relieve her at 2 a.m. and found her still sitting on that steel bench, with her feet on the bench and her chin resting on her knees. The blue mark between her eyebrows was flashing on and off with an extremely faint light, at a frequency of exactly once every fourteen seconds.

She synchronized her breathing with that signal.

The next afternoon, the fleet arrived at the diving coordinates.

The three warships completed their final steering corrections in turn, their propellers slowed down and stopped, and the massive steel hulls glided slowly for the last few hundred meters due to inertia before coming to a complete stop.

The moment Funina stood up from the steel stool and stepped barefoot onto the deck, the vibrations from the soles of her feet were completely different from those of the past ninety-odd hours.

The deck itself remained completely unmoved.

The tremor came from directly below.

At a depth of 10,800 meters, the pulse that beats every fourteen seconds has now changed from a whisper to a knock.

Her toes curled up briefly, then relaxed.

The sea was unusually calm.

The waves were less than half a meter high, the wind speed was close to zero, and the entire body of water was spread out under the afternoon sun, with hardly any white waves to be seen.

Three warships are anchored in a triangular formation directly above the new coordinates, three nautical miles apart, with their propellers already stopped.

Inside the sonar room, the waveform curve on the low-frequency monitoring instrument jumped with an extremely regular rhythm.

A peak occurs every fourteen seconds.

The soprano braced his hands on the edge of the control panel, the sweat on his back plastering his inner lining to his skin.

He pressed the communication button.

"Report to the bridge: The intensity of the 0.07 Hz pulse signal has increased by two orders of magnitude compared to the previous signal. The peak interval is stable at 14 seconds with no attenuation or drift. The source is located 10,800 meters directly below the bridge."

The bridge watch officer's reply consisted of only two words.

"receive."

The speaker hung up the call, picked up a pen to mark values ​​in the notebook, his wrist trembling slightly.

He'd been staring at this curve for almost forty hours, and each peak was so steady it was unsettling.

But standing directly above the signal source, the amplitude of the wave crest was a hundred times greater than that on the road, causing the baseline to sway.

Just as he was rubbing the goosebumps on his arms, a warning box for passive sonication popped up on the screen next to him.

He turned his head, and his expression changed.

"Report to the bridge, emergency alert number two."

He increased his speaking speed.

"Bearing 085, target acquired by passive sonar, characteristics match the noise of a nuclear-powered submarine's dual-circuit cooling pump, distance 73 kilometers, depth 320 meters, speed approximately 5 knots, still approaching."

The intercom on the other end of the bridge was silent for four seconds.

The captain's voice came over, his words uttered very clearly.

"Are you sure it's that iron pipe?"

The soundbar quickly retrieved the comparison database.

"The voiceprint characteristics overlapped with those intercepted 310 kilometers away by more than 97%, indicating that it was the same target."

"It went from 310 to 73 in two hours."

The captain took a breath on the other end of the walkie-talkie.

"It's fast-applying."

Stern deck.

Funina stood barefoot beside the lowest mooring bollard, her long hair fluttering in the sea breeze before falling back down, her toes resting on the steel plate soaked by seawater.

Her eyes were closed.

Zhou Ruo stood three steps behind her, clutching a notebook and a voice recorder, without saying a word.

Fu Ningna closed her eyes and smiled slightly.

"That iron pipe is coming up again."

Zhou Ruo was stunned for a moment.

Which submarine are you referring to?

Funina didn't open her eyes, but nodded her chin slightly to the right.

"Over 70 kilometers, over 300 meters deep, five knots speed, very quiet, but it has 63 drainage holes on its hull."

Her tone was incredibly casual.

"The water flow rate is different for each hole. There is a difference of 0.3 liters per second between hole number seventeen and hole number thirty-four. It should be because the sealing strip is aging."

Zhou Ruo's pen stopped on the paper, unable to write a single word.

She could count the individual flow differences of the sixty-three drain holes from the deck seventy-three kilometers away.

Funina opened her eyes.

She glanced down at the thin layer of seawater that had spilled onto the edge of the deck, the smile on her lips still lingering.

Then she squatted down and put the tips of her right toes into the seawater, which was less than a centimeter deep.

Zhou Ruo saw blue light shooting out from the tips of her toes.

The light spreads outward along the surface of the sea, so fast that the naked eye can only catch a fleeting blue line.

In less than three seconds, the blue light had disappeared into the distance.

Almost simultaneously, a second beam of blue light shot out from Fu Ningna's left foot, in the exact opposite direction, heading straight for the Yan'an 055 destroyer five nautical miles to its starboard side.

Two beams of light, two directions, setting off simultaneously.

Fu Ningna stood up, patted the water stains off her skirt, turned around and walked back to the cabin door, took a macaron from Zhou Ruo and put it in her mouth.

Zhou Ruo's voice was slightly hoarse and strained.

What did you just do?

Funina chewed twice and swallowed.

"I wrote a letter to the Yan'an ship."

Inside the Yan'an bugle call room.

The sonar operator on duty was performing a routine scan of the passive array data when his fingertip stopped swiping across the touchscreen for a moment.

"Sir."

His voice rose half a tone.

"The passive sonar array received a set of low-frequency water flow pulses, which were extremely regular and did not belong to any known type of natural acoustic signal."

Sonic took three steps to stand behind him, bending down to stare at the waveforms on the screen.

The pulses are arranged compactly with precise intervals, and the time difference between each group is exactly the same.

"This is organized information coding."

The soprano straightened up, turned his head and shouted in the direction of the communications cabin.

"Communications officer, come here to decode."

The communications officer ran over twice as fast as usual, and after receiving the data, he operated on the terminal for less than thirty seconds.

A string of numbers popped up on the screen.

Longitude, latitude, depth.

Azimuth 085, distance 73 kilometers, depth 320 meters.

The communications officer's finger paused on the last line of data.

The message ends with a teardrop-shaped pulse pattern that repeats three times.

The entire formation has long been recognized by convention.

Water God's Special Communication Signature.

"Captain, the Water God has sent the coordinates."

The communications officer's voice was steady, but the knuckles of his hand gripping the microphone were sticking out.

"The coordinates point to bearing 085, 73 kilometers, and depth 320 meters, which completely coincides with the location of the unidentified submarine target detected by our ship's passive sonar."

The captain of the Yan'an stood in front of the chart table in the combat command room and made a decision in just three seconds after listening to the report.

He picked up the encrypted microphone and called the squadron commander.

"Reporting to the fleet commander, the Yan'an has received underwater coded information from the Water God, containing the precise coordinates of an American submarine. Requesting authorization to execute sonar roll call and international channel warning."

The squadron commander's reply came in just five seconds.

"Authorize, execute immediately."