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

At this time, the Pacific Ocean is 3,500 meters below the surface.

As Funinna sank steadily on the blue platform, she was surrounded by absolute darkness. The blue light emitted from the water droplet mark between her eyebrows could only illuminate a range of less than fifteen meters. Everything beyond fifteen meters was swallowed up by the pitch-black deep sea.

Her long, silvery-white hair floated upwards in the water, her expression was calm, and her bare toes rested gently on the edge of the platform.

The abyssal noise crossed a step between three thousand and three thousand five hundred meters.

The noise she had heard before was just a layer of static electricity in the background she perceived; she could completely ignore it by switching the redundant signals aside.

Starting at 3,500 meters, the density and intensity of the noise jumped dramatically within a short descent of a few hundred meters, transforming from background interference that could be filtered into an intrusion that required her to continuously devote her attention to suppressing.

Her senses were forced to redistribute resources: part of it was used to lock onto the pulse that beat every fourteen seconds beneath her feet, part to maintain basic control over the surrounding water, and part to block the chaotic information that kept pouring in.

The nature of the noise has also changed.

Above 3,000 meters, it interferes with her perception of the water's position and direction, blurring the data on distant ocean currents.

Below 3,500 meters, it began to move other things.

In a fleeting moment, a concept suddenly appeared in Funina's mind.

"Water is uncontrollable."

These five words, without passing through any sensory channels, without sound, without image, without temperature, were directly stuffed into the bottom layer of her cognitive structure, attempting to implant a new axiom at the foundation of her thinking.

Fryna's will crushed that concept the instant it touched the edge of her authority.

The crushing time is less than one-tenth of a second.

There was no back-and-forth, no struggle.

That false definition survived for less than a heartbeat before being erased from her sight.

She controls the water; this isn't just a belief, it's a fact.

Then a second concept was crammed in.

"The deep sea belongs to no authority."

Crush.

The third.

"Your perceptions are deceiving you."

Crush.

The three concepts were implanted and shattered in turn within two seconds, but Funina's expression remained unchanged from beginning to end, and the brightness of the blue light between her eyebrows did not fluctuate.

This is a conceptual battle of offense and defense.

The attacker has no consciousness or strategy; it is simply the destructive logic left behind after the collapse of the abyss that is being executed automatically.

Fryna doesn't need a strategy to deal with her.

She is the very definition of water.

The sound of the probe echoed in the room.

The soprano took off his right earphone and glanced at his deputy.

"Background noise below 3,000 meters has increased again."

The assistant moved over from another set of terminals, bent down to look at the waveform.

"How much did it increase?"

The speaker pointed to a continuously rising curve on the screen.

"The noise level has increased by nine decibels in the past forty minutes, and the spectrum distribution is too uniform. Natural geological activity cannot produce something like this."

The deputy stared at the curve for five seconds, then rubbed his chin with his fingers.

"What about the inner walls of the passage?"

"The rotation speed is still 7.2 revolutions per second, with no decrease."

The soprano hung the headphones back around his neck.

"But if the noise outside the passage is also increasing at the same time, the stress she is under below may be greater than we estimated."

The door to the soprano chamber was pushed open from the outside.

Zhou Ruo stood at the door, holding the hardcover notebook in her left hand and a ballpoint pen in her right.

"Has the buoy signal arrived yet?"

The speaker glanced at the timer in the upper right corner of the terminal.

"Fourteen minutes left."

Zhou Ruo walked in, stood to the side of the terminal, and looked at the waveform graph.

"Are these waveforms transmitted from below?"

"Yes, it starts to appear below the 3,000-meter isobath, and the deeper it goes, the stronger it becomes."

The sonar plays a recording of playback data, and the finger slides along the timeline.

"Look here, at 2,500 meters the noise is still within an acceptable range, but at 3,000 meters it starts to rise, in segments, not a smooth ascent."

Zhou Ruo looked at the stepped curve.

"She told me before she went down that the closer we got to the source, the louder the noise became."

The soprano nodded.

"Based on this rate of increase, noise levels below 4,000 meters could double again."

Zhou Ruo didn't reply. She flipped to the front page of her notebook, glanced at the previous records, closed it, and walked to the corner of the sonar room to sit down.

She waited.

Four thousand meters below the water surface.

Funina reduced her descent speed to 15 meters per minute.

The intensity of the abyssal noise reached a new level at this depth, and her perception radius was compressed from thousands of kilometers above the sea surface to about three hundred kilometers.

The temperature and salinity data of distant ocean currents are all drowned out by the noise; only the information about the nearby water bodies remains clear.

However, within this effective range of 300 kilometers, the clarity of the 0.07 Hz pulse is higher than ever before.

She can now discern the direction of the pulse.

Directly below, about 15 degrees south.

The distance is approximately 5,900 meters.

The signal, which comes every fourteen seconds, is located there, surrounded by layers of abyssal debris and conceptual noise. But each pulse that arrives tears a very short gap in the noise, allowing her to lock onto the location in a window of less than 0.1 seconds.

It's still calling.

Funina glanced down into the deeper darkness beneath her feet and reached for the buckle on the buoy at her waist.

She flicked a coded dial in a recess on the side of the buoy with her thumb.

Each segment of the roulette wheel corresponds to a preset code; initially, only the depth and state were set.

She rotated a few spaces and added a new set after the original sequence.

Then release your grip, and the buoy will disengage from the latch and begin to rise.

The sound of the probe echoed in the room.

The timer on the terminal is reset to zero.

A notification beep sounded.

The sonographer lowered his head to read the data that popped up on the screen.

"Buoy signal!"

The deputy jumped up from his chair and rushed to the terminal. Zhou Ruo also stood up from her folding chair and took three steps to walk behind the soprano.

Sonic's long fingers slid down along the data rows.

"Buoy number confirmed, timestamp normal, transmitting to 800-meter acoustic relay layer."

His gaze shifted to the next line.

"The final separation depth of the Water God is marked as 4,037 meters."

Zhou Ruo quickly jotted down the number in her notebook.

"How are you doing?"

"Status is normal."

The sonic boom paused for a moment, but the finger did not leave the screen.

"There's more to come."

Zhou Ruo looked up at him.

"What?"

Sonic's long fingertip landed on the last line of data on the screen.

"Noise interference level two."

The sono chamber was silent for three seconds.

The deputy spoke first.

"This data item was not in the previous signals."

Sheng Na Chang turned around and glanced at Zhou Ruo.

"In the previous buoy signals, there were only two items: depth and status. This time, there's an additional noise interference level, which she added herself."

Zhou Ruo stared at the "Level Two" mark on the screen.

"She changed the signal format underwater."

Sonic nodded.

"The buoy's coding wheel allows for the manual addition of additional codes, and she turned that wheel at a depth of four thousand meters."

Zhou Ruo's pen tip hovered above the notebook.

What does Level Two represent?

Sonic shook his head.

"Without a frame of reference, she didn't define any standards beforehand. I don't know what level one is or how serious level two is."

The deputy whispered a reply from the side.

"But she still ranks them."

Zhou Ruo looked at him.

The deputy rubbed his fingers together.

"If things are really bad, she won't be in the mood to turn the coding wheel."

Zhou Ruo did not answer, but lowered his head and wrote "Noise Interference Level Two" next to 4,037 meters, and then drew a second short line segment below the number.

The first line segment is marked with 2,015 meters.

The second line segment is marked with 4,037 meters, indicating noise interference level two.

She closed the notebook and tucked it into the inner pocket of her life vest.

She was proactively sharing more information with me.

This fact made Zhou Ruo loosen her grip on the pen, and the marks on her knuckles slowly faded.

She walked out of the sonar room, down the corridor through two watertight doors, and pushed open the hatch leading to the stern deck.

The wind picked up.

The blue channel at the stern, with a diameter of one meter, was still rotating quietly. The blue light reflected on the surrounding deep blue sea, drawing a faint halo. The seawater automatically receded at the edge of the channel, without splashing in a single drop.

Zhou Ruo stood three meters away from the entrance of the passage, the sea breeze blowing her hair against the side of her face.

She looked at the blue circle.

His eyes never left.

In the makeshift galley below deck, Louis Bernard's whisk was spinning rapidly against the stainless steel bowl, cream swirling and piling up, the air filled with the aroma of butter and vanilla.

He's still making cream puffs.

I've been doing it.

Zhou Ruo took out a notebook from her inner pocket, turned to the page with the line segments drawn, and pressed her thumb on the second line segment.

4,037 meters, noise interference level 2.

Halfway around the world, the Sword in the Stone force field in London has entered its twelfth day.