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

Funina stopped.

It is a cone-shaped bulge with a height of over 300 meters and a base diameter of about 250 meters. It sits on the ground of the trench and rises vertically upwards for 300 meters.

She approached from above the cocoon, at a depth of 9,500 meters, which roughly corresponds to the top of the cocoon, while the bottom of the cocoon is about 9,800 meters.

Funinna stood firm on the blue platform, the light from the water droplet mark between her brows illuminating a radius of fifteen meters. The light fell on the surface of that huge outline, but was mostly absorbed.

This is not a geological formation of any kind.

Her senses made a definite judgment the instant they touched the surface.

The surface is a jet-black crystalline substance with faint purple veins. Its texture has both the hardness of a mineral and the growth patterns of some kind of organic matter.

The pattern is highly similar to the purple crystals on the shells of those mutated isopods at 8,000 meters away, but the density is at least an order of magnitude higher.

Funina tried to extend her sensory tentacles to the surface of the cocoon.

She pulled back the moment they made contact.

"That thing is biting water."

Her voice echoed in the darkness, and no one else heard it.

The surface material of the crystal cocoon is proactive; it slowly but continuously decomposes all the water molecules it comes into contact with, stripping out the oxygen atoms to use as its own nutrients.

The corrosiveness of the abyssal residue reaches its peak in this core area.

But Funina also noticed a contradiction.

The cocoon is not uniformly black.

Somewhere in the lower middle part of the cocoon, at a depth of approximately 9,700 meters, an extremely faint light was penetrating outward through a black crystalline layer tens of meters thick.

The color of light is neither blue nor purple.

It is a reddish-gold color.

The 0.07 Hz pulse was emitted from the location of that reddish-gold light source.

"It's dirty outside."

Funina's gaze pierced through the fifteen-meter-wide blue light zone and landed on the faint reddish-gold shimmer.

"There's something else inside."

She made the final judgment.

"Two layers, the outside is eating the inside, and the inside is digesting the outside, they're stuck."

She did not immediately attempt to enter the cocoon.

She slowly circled the cocoon for about forty minutes, performing sensory scans in six directions to create a complete three-dimensional structural map of the cocoon.

The three-dimensional structural diagram can only exist in her own sensory memory and cannot be transmitted back to the sea surface.

at the same time.

The sound of the probe echoed in the room.

The soprano stared at the 0.07 Hz green waveform line on the screen, his fingertips flying across the notebook.

"The amplitude has changed significantly."

The deputy leaned over to look and saw that the green line had experienced six brief troughs of disturbance within forty minutes, each lasting about two seconds, as if something was repeatedly passing by the pulse source.

The phony chief wrote down his speculations in his notebook.

"The Water God may have arrived near the signal source."

Zhou Ruo stood in the corner of the sonar room, her back against the cold bulkhead.

Her gaze was fixed on the green line that kept jumping on the screen, the only remaining connection between her and Funina.

The most indirect connection.

She reached her right hand into the inside pocket of her vest, her fingertips pressing on the hard cover of the notebook, which had six lines drawn on it, with a small empty circle next to the last one.

There will be no seventh article.

But the green line is still jumping.

She's still down there.

.......

Cairo National Museum.

day.

The security personnel in the restoration hall have been replaced with a completely new batch, each of whom has undergone rigorous vetting by the Egyptian Military Intelligence Bureau. The security loopholes left after CIA spy Koch was taken away have been plugged one by one.

Hassan sat at his workbench, with a notebook and high-resolution printouts of Sumerian clay tablets spread out in front of him. More than twenty hours had passed since he last immersed himself in these symbols.

His right hand held a pen, and the tremors of his Parkinson's disease were suppressed to a manageable level within a two-meter radius of the scale. The pen tip was redrawing the details of the double snake symbol on the back of the clay tablet on the paper.

The scales emitted that deep hum.

The worktable surface trembled.

Hassan's pen stopped on the paper.

He looked up at the Libra scales in front of him.

This time, the scarab's two compound eyes did not shoot out red beams; instead, both eyes emitted a steady golden light, the light not directed at anyone.

Light penetrated the walls of the restoration room.

The golden light left a circular spot on the wall, which moved slowly, like an invisible finger pointing the way.

Hassan put down his pen and stood up.

He followed the light spot out of the restoration hall, through the corridor, and into the adjacent exhibition hall.

The golden light stopped on a pharaoh bust displayed in a bulletproof glass case.

Collection number E-3421, marked as the Eighteenth Dynasty, portrait of Thutmose III, circa 1479 BC.

The light from the Libra scale lingered on the statue's face for eleven seconds.

Then it disappeared.

But a slowly condensing holographic symbol appeared on the glass of the statue's display case.

The symbol of the Libra judgment is a hieroglyph that represents falsehood.

Hassan stood in front of the display case and bent down to look at the information card on the base of the statue.

This bust was excavated in Luxor by a British archaeological team in 1936 and transferred to Egypt in 1954, where it has been on display as one of the museum's most prized possessions ever since.

He straightened up, took out his phone, and dialed a number.

"Fahmy".

The museum's chief sculpture appraiser on the other end of the phone was clearly eating breakfast, his words muffled.

"Mr. Hassan? At this time..."

"Bring your portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometer to Hall 3, now."

"What happened?"

"E-3421, Bust of Thutmose III".

Hassan's voice was as flat as if he were reading a menu.

"Libra says it's fake."

There was a three-second silence on the other end of the phone.

Upon arrival, Fahmi conducted an emergency non-destructive test on the statue. He first used a portable spectrometer to scan the stone composition, and then took a small sample from a hidden area at the base of the statue for thermoluminescence dating.

The results came out two hours later.

Fahmi's face went from being skeptical in the exhibition hall to deathly pale.

"The last heating event occurred approximately 270 years ago."

His voice was trembling.

"Not three thousand four hundred years?"

Hassan stood to the side, his hands in the pockets of his white coat.

"no."

Fahmi swallowed hard.

"The spectrometer also detected residues of an artificial dye commonly used in 18th-century Europe, which did not exist in ancient Egypt."

He glanced back at the pharaoh's portrait in the display case.

"This is a modern forgery from around the 18th century."

Fahmi collapsed to the ground.

The news caused a stir within the museum, and the director convened an emergency closed-door meeting, deciding to temporarily block the information.

Hassan was invited to the meeting.

The curator rubbed his hands together, his forehead covered in sweat.

"Mr. Hassan, if this news gets out..."

"Truth does not accept confidentiality agreements."

Hassan's tone left no room for negotiation.

"Libra has made the ruling; how you handle it is your business."

He pointed in the direction of exhibition hall number three.

"But you can't erase that mark."

The deceptive symbol left by Libra on the display case glass could not be removed by any chemical or physical means. The museum tried alcohol, acetone, special glass cleaner, and even scraping with a blade, but the symbol remained unmoved.

Hassan returned to the restoration room and wrote down his notes in his notebook.

"Libra's second autonomous action. The two motivations are different: the first is to expose the threat posed by people, and the second is to expose the falsehood of things. What they have in common is zero tolerance for hypocrisy. Its scope of judgment is expanding from people to everything."

He turned back to the pages of the Sumerian clay tablets, his finger lingering on the speculative translation of "the arbiter in the deep waters."

If this description refers to Libra or the creator of Libra, then the scope of the judgment has never been limited to people from the beginning.

The scarab's compound eyes flickered evenly at a frequency of fourteen times per minute, the golden warmth not yet completely faded.

Hassan locked the laptop in the safe, but the medicine seal on the corner of the table remained unopened.