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

The first image was a photo of an ID card, and the face in the photo was exactly the same as the young guard outside the door. The header of the ID card was printed with the standard format for CIA field agents.

The second screen shows a location coordinate system, with latitude and longitude numbers slowly scrolling across the holographic screen. The corresponding place name is marked as the underground parking lot of the headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The third screen shows three text clips from mobile phone communication records, with white text floating in mid-air. The content involves the regular transmission of Libra's real-time movement trajectory to its holder.

Hassan stared at the words for four seconds.

His Adam's apple bobbed once.

Libra, without any human intervention or external instructions, automatically locked onto a target and initiated the trial process.

It woke up.

It has developed the will to take the initiative in judgment.

Hassan stood up from the stool.

His right hand was shaking, as Parkinson's always does, but his steps toward the door were steady, each step landing precisely on the seams of the floor tiles.

He walked to the door, grabbed the handle with his right hand, and opened the door.

The young guard was leaning against the corridor wall, holding a mobile phone in his right hand, the encrypted communication application on the screen still lit up, his thumb hovering above the keyboard.

He tensed up the moment the door opened, and stuffed his phone into his pocket with his left hand.

But it was too late.

The red beam of light from Libra lingered on his face for a full four seconds.

Four seconds later, the red light disappeared.

The holographic image froze on the CIA's negative photo, and the face in the photo was exactly the same as the panicked young man in front of him.

Hassan looked at him.

The 72-year-old man stood in the doorway, a fluorescent light casting a dim yellow glow on his head. His Parkinson's tremors caused his right hand to swing slightly at his side, but his gaze swept from the young man's forehead to his chin without shifting even a millimeter.

"You have thirty seconds to tell me your real name and your employer."

He lowered his voice, the last syllable of each word lingering slightly in the echo of the empty corridor.

He raised his left hand and pointed his thumb toward the restoration hall behind him.

"Otherwise, I wouldn't be the one telling you."

The young man's expression went through three phases within three seconds.

The first second was one of astonishment; his mouth opened but no sound came out.

The second second was spent trying to control his expression; his facial muscles tightened, his jaw clenched, and he tried to appear calm.

In the third second, his gaze passed over Hassan's shoulder and fell upon the holographic image floating above the scales in the restoration hall.

His own face, his own CIA ID card, his own communication records.

Everything is exposed to the air.

He broke down.

"My name is Brian Koch."

He raised both hands, and the phone slipped out of his pocket, landing face down on the floor tile. A sliver of blue light from the encrypted application leaked out from the gap in the phone case.

He is a mid-level field agent at the CIA Middle East station, with excellent infiltration training results and ranking in the top 15% of his cohort in psychological stress tests.

However, none of his training programs covered this scenario.

Hassan didn't need to worry about the rest of the interrogation.

Egyptian military intelligence officers arrived within twenty minutes, and two soldiers in civilian clothes took Koh away from the corridor. The handcuffs were made of titanium alloy, and the locks made a crisp sound when they went down.

Hassan stood in the corridor watching the three figures disappear around the corner.

He turned and went back into the restoration room, closing the door behind him.

Libra has returned to normal.

The scarab's eyes lit up again, flashing evenly, at a frequency of fourteen times per minute.

The holographic image dissipated, and the air above the left tray was clear and transparent, no different from fifteen minutes ago.

Hassan walked to the workbench, sat down, and picked up a pen with his right hand.

Parkinson let the pen tip draw an irregular dot of ink on the paper. He pressed down on his right wrist with his left hand and waited until the trembling was reduced to a controllable range before he began to write.

He wrote very slowly.

The first line, showing the Libra icon flashing 14 times per minute, is not a standby signal.

The pen tip paused on the paper for two seconds before falling again.

The second line immediately following is the patrol signal.

He looked up at Libra; the scarab's compound eyes were still blinking steadily, with each blink occurring at the exact same interval.

It continuously scans everyone in the surrounding environment.

Once a target with sufficient guilt weight is detected, a trial will be automatically initiated.

Hassan's pen fell again.

Libra's judgment threshold is decreasing.

It has chosen to become increasingly proactive.

He capped his pen and looked at the last line he had written.

The question is, to what extent will it ultimately take initiative?

He closed the notebook, locked it in the triple combination lock steel plate safe, tightened the combination, and tapped the top of the safe with his right hand.

The restoration room fell silent again.

Libra sat in the center of the worktable, the compound eyes of the scarab beetle flashing at a frequency of fourteen times per minute.

One light, one shadow; one light, one shadow.

Hassan sat on a low stool watching it, his right hand trembling on his knee, while his left hand picked up the long-cold cup of strong coffee from the corner of the table and took a sip.

.........

The scales of Cairo have chosen their object of judgment.

Eight thousand kilometers away, something else is also being chosen.

Qinling underground base, early morning.

At the entrance to the No. 7 underground palace stood two fully armed security personnel. The incandescent light tubes in the corridor cast long shadows of them, which stretched to the front of the bronze threshold of the underground palace, blending with the dark green rust on the threshold.

Zhou Dazhuang stood alone among them.

He didn't have a wheelchair, so he walked there on his own two feet.

The tiger brand on his right palm had completely blended into his skin texture, with dark red lines embedded deep into the skin along the direction of the palm lines, gleaming with a very thin metallic sheen under the corridor lights.

Four EEG monitoring patches were attached to both sides of his forehead, with wires extending from the patches and converging into a miniature recorder clipped to his belt.

On his left wrist was a white heart rate monitoring bracelet, with an LED indicator flashing green every second.

Academician Qi stood in front of the monitoring terminal at the end of the corridor and said a sentence into the microphone.

"Let him in."

Security personnel cleared the way.

Zhou Dazhuang stepped over the bronze threshold, his military boots making a dull thud as they landed on the stone slabs that had been poured two thousand years ago.

Behind him, the security personnel did not follow in. The two men stepped back outside the threshold, standing on either side of him, facing the corridor.

Waiting at the entrance to the underground palace.

The underground palace was extremely quiet, with a thin layer of metallic oxidized smell floating in the air, a mixture of coldness and antiquity.

The incandescent bulbs have been replaced with low-power warm-colored lighting, with light spilling out from the recessed light troughs in the ceiling, enveloping the entire space in a layer of dark yellow light and shadow.

A miniature map was placed on a bronze casting platform in the center of the underground palace. Zhou Dazhuang walked to the front of the platform and stood there.

Under the warm light, the surface of the map has a deep bronze color, and the dense dark patterns appear to be crisscrossed and of varying depths from this angle.

He crouched down, his right palm less than fifteen centimeters from the surface of the map.

The heat spreads outward from the center of the brand.

The heat started from the palm, traveled along the wrist bone to the forearm, and then seeped into the elbow joint. The speed was not fast, but the direction was clear.

Along with the heat came a non-physical attraction, a pulling force that seemed to be pulling his palm upwards from the map, increasing with each centimeter closer.

The largest star on the map is lit up.