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

On the other side, 9,550 meters.

Funina hovered about fifty meters above the outer wall of the black crystal cocoon, her arm slowly stretching forward.

Her silver-white hair was lifted behind her by the water pressure, and the blue water droplet mark between her eyebrows bathed the surrounding fifteen meters in a clear light.

Her right hand was getting closer and closer.

Thirty centimeters.

The shield sensed it first.

The five-meter water barrier began to vibrate subtly from its edges. Unlike the mass-level impact of the isopods she had encountered before, it was a conceptual shoving, extremely restrained and precise, as if an invisible hand was repeatedly telling her: You do not belong here, order should not approach chaos.

Fu Ningna's eyelids didn't twitch.

She pulled the five-meter shield inward, down to two meters, tightened it, and then piled all the resources she had saved into her right palm, into a fist-sized area, so dense that she could feel the skin on her palm swell slightly.

Then she pressed it on.

And so, his palm touched the surface of the black crystal cocoon.

The physical reaction occurs within 0.1 seconds.

On the surface of the crystal cocoon at the contact point, the abyssal residue that was slowly decomposing water molecules and stripping oxygen atoms suddenly stopped, as if a machine that had been running for countless years had been directly unplugged. The hydrogen and oxygen bonds were forcibly locked back in place in that fist-sized area, and the water molecules stopped disintegrating and hung there blankly.

The conceptual impact occurred about half a second later than the physical impact, but its intensity was an entire order of magnitude higher.

The two rules, "Water should be decomposed" and "Water is water," are simultaneously in effect in the same area. Within a radius of no more than fifteen centimeters outward from the center of Funina's palm, reality is violently shaking in a high-frequency oscillation manner, like two magnets with the same poles being forcibly pressed together. The roaring sound is not in the sound wave frequency range, but in the consciousness frequency range, vibrating from her palm all the way to her chest.

The mark between his eyebrows suddenly changed color.

The blue disappeared, and deep indigo appeared.

For those three seconds, Funina said nothing and did nothing. She simply stood there, letting the mark glow and allowing her senses to follow the deep indigo light into the crystal cocoon.

She "saw" it.

The outer layer is abyssal debris, with a thickness ranging from forty to sixty meters. It is not uniform, being thinner at the top and as thick as a wall at the bottom near the trench rock layer.

Further in, in the three-meter-wide chaotic zone, abyssal remnants and crimson-gold energy gnawed at each other, neither able to devour the other, stuck together like two colors of paint forcibly mixed in a bowl, unable to blend or separate.

At the very inside, there is a cavity.

It is about 80 meters in diameter and is shaped like an irregular ellipsoid, with a reddish-gold light source suspended in the very center of the cavity.

three seconds.

The mark faded back to blue.

Fu Ningna withdrew her hand and looked down at her palm. There were slight white spots on the surface of her right palm, as if it had been branded by an extremely low temperature. She stared at it for three seconds, and the power automatically repaired itself, and the white spots shrank and disappeared from the edge to the center.

She steadied herself and said one sentence.

"A shell sixty meters thick, you have to peel it off layer by layer."

No one listened to the sea, and no one responded to the abyss; only her own voice was suppressed by the water and dissipated near her throat.

She doesn't care.

She went around to the other side of the cocoon and re-scanned the area she had just touched, which took her fifteen minutes.

The fist-sized contact point was not re-covered by the residue. The purification was permanent. The abyssal residue in that area remained inert, like a brand on the surface of solid ice—clear, stable, and without any sign of being repaired.

A certain judgment in Funina's mind was confirmed.

Her authority can irreversibly purify the remnants of the abyss; once cleared, they are cleared away without requiring continuous resource consumption or rebound.

But the speed of purification is a nightmare.

A single touch, the area of ​​a fist, sixty meters thick, covering tens of thousands of square meters.

She placed her right hand back on the surface, this time not just a light touch, but a full infusion.

She pressed the power of water into the contact surface from her palm with extremely high density, like pouring cement into a crack, squeezing it deeper and deeper little by little. The boundary of purification started to crawl outward from the size of a fist, the rim of a bowl, a washbasin, slowly, very slowly, until it expanded to a diameter of about thirty centimeters and then suddenly stopped.

The mark between the eyebrows began to flicker.

Sweat beaded on his forehead.

She could feel the sweat beads pushing out of her pores and then being pressed back into her skin by the surrounding water pressure. It felt strange, like someone was gently pressing her skin with their fingers and then releasing it, repeatedly in the same spot.

She didn't stop.

At the same time, the senses penetrated the purifying surface and probed deeper, encountering the edge of the crimson-gold pulse.

That weariness, that stubbornness that came every fourteen seconds, that voice that had been shouted for who knows how many years—the moment her senses touched it, her emotions underwent a subtle change that she could hardly describe accurately with any existing vocabulary.

The fatigue is still there, but beneath it lies something else—not hope, for hope is too bright; it's something more primal.

It means to recognize.

Like someone who has been shouting in the darkness for too long, suddenly hearing footsteps in the distance, unsure if the footsteps are coming towards them, but their body tenses up before their mind can react, and they tilt their ears in that direction.

Funina silently pondered a question.

"Who are you waiting for?"

The pulse did not respond semantically, and there was no miraculous response of human language in the trench. There was nothing but darkness, water pressure, and the boundary of the residue that was still being slowly purified forty meters away.

Then the next jump came.

It occurs every fourteen seconds, but this time it was 0.2 seconds earlier than the normal cycle.

Funina's fingers paused slightly on the surface of the cocoon, not out of fear or surprise, but because that 0.2-second delay made something move slightly in her throat. She couldn't quite put her finger on it, but she felt that in this darkness, some kind of ancient loneliness had lessened a tiny bit at the moment she touched it.

She regained her breathing and continued to infuse authority into the contact surface.

……

Six thousand four hundred kilometers away, the sound of the Tanyuan rocket echoed inside the room.

The last buoy completed its signal transmission forty minutes ago. The sonar can no longer receive any direct data from underwater. The passive sonar monitors the background noise, and there is an information vacuum below the sea surface.

He stared at the screen for a long time, not touching the coffee on his left even after it had gone from hot to cold.

The 0.07 Hz signal was still there, always there, every fourteen seconds, as regular as a clock that had been ticking for too long. The baseline had not shifted since they arrived at the docking coordinates, so stable that he was a little scared.

When something that is too stable starts to move, it means that something must have happened.

Then it moved.

He stared at the green line on the screen, the green line that he had never seen deviate from since entering this sea area, when at a certain moment, the baseline frequency shifted slightly upward.

It's not a big deal, but the measurements don't lie.

He leaned closer to the screen, tapped on the accuracy reading, and the number refreshed once.

He turned his head and said something to his deputy beside him, his voice a little lower than he had expected.

"Come and see this."

The deputy walked over and looked at him for three seconds.

"Has the baseline been raised?"

"One percent and four percent."

The two looked at each other, and the others in the sonic chamber also turned their bodies to their side.

This is the first time since the dive that the signal line has shown a change in baseline frequency.

It's not the amplitude, it's not the period, it's the baseline, it's the underlying rhythm of the signal source itself that has sped up.

The deputy's voice was low.

"What did the water god do?"

The sonic director did not answer immediately. His gaze remained fixed on the screen, watching the green line continue to jump at a new, slightly higher frequency, quiet and regular, yet completely different from twenty minutes ago.

He opened his mouth, speaking very slowly.

"That thing's heartbeat has gotten faster."