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

at the same time.

Inside the Siberian Wall, the false twilight light remained unchanged, but Sergei knew it was late at night.

He spread a long roll of paper made from six pieces of food packaging paper on the frozen ground, weighed down the four corners with four stones, knelt on the mud, and the pencil tip had been worn down to only two centimeters.

Andrei squatted beside him, occasionally instinctively protecting his abdomen, which had completely healed from its wounds, but the movements became smaller and smaller.

"How long did it take you to tidy up?"

Sergei didn't look up; he drew the last mark on the end of the paper roll with his pencil.

"Eleven hours."

"What did you find?"

Sergei held the pencil horizontally over the roll of paper, pointing to the first set of marks on the far left.

"Look at these troughs. Each trough represents a temperature drop, and the duration varies. I mark those lasting more than 20 minutes as long and those lasting less than 12 minutes as short."

Andrei leaned closer, squinting to examine the pencil marks.

"Alternating between long and short durations?"

"It's not a simple alternation."

Sergei's finger traced a large patch of dense markings in the middle of the roll of paper.

"Long and short sequences are combined to form a sequence, with a blank interval between them where the temperature is completely flat. The length of the blank interval is highly consistent, with an error of no more than three minutes."

He marked the three blank spaces with his pencil.

"These spaces are separators, like spaces in a sentence, which break the data stream into individual words."

Andrei's lips moved slightly, but he didn't make a sound.

Sergei turned the scroll over to the back, where he found a summary table that had taken him nearly five hours to complete. It consisted of twelve lines, each line containing a different number of long and short markers.

"There are a total of twelve non-repeating words, the shortest of which consists of two markers and the longest of which consists of five."

Are you sure this is a word?

Andrei's voice carried a hint of hesitation.

"Perhaps it's just a natural fluctuation in temperature?"

Sergei looked up at him, his gaze calm.

"Natural fluctuations are not accurate to integer frequency divisions."

He poked the tip of his pencil at the top line of numbers on the roll of paper, the key equation he had calculated three days earlier.

"The fundamental frequency of the 'spark' temperature pulse is 0.00002 Hz. Do you remember the BBC radio broadcast mentioning a 0.07 Hz signal more than 10,000 meters deep in the Pacific Ocean?"

Andrei nodded.

"0.07 divided by 0.00002".

Sergei wrote the number in the blank space of the paper roll, pressing the pencil hard so that the strokes were etched into the paper.

3500.

"Precise integer multiples, no remainders, no decimals, 3500 times."

He put down his pencil, placed his fingers on his chest, and could see the dark red halo slowly rotating even through three layers of clothing.

"In all known communication protocols, the carrier frequencies between base stations and terminals are integer multiples or integer divisions, because only in this way can the transmitting and receiving ends be accurately synchronized and signal drift be avoided."

Andrei's Adam's apple bobbed.

Are they chatting?

Sergei shook his head.

"It's not a chat."

He picked up two flattened tree branches and a base made of mud from the ground; it was the compass he had made himself yesterday.

"The 0.07 Hz signal is a broadcast, continuously transmitted in all directions, regardless of the direction or who is listening. It repeats every fourteen seconds, like a lighthouse."

He placed the compass on the ground and aimed the pencil tip at the direction of one of the tree branches.

"The fire source is different here. Its pulse is directional and has a directionality. Every time a temperature trough appears, I record the precise moment when the lowest value is reached, and then project the direction of the temperature gradient between two adjacent troughs onto the ground."

Andrei's eyes narrowed.

"You use temperature differences to determine direction?"

"The temperature inside the barrier is constant at 21 degrees Celsius, but when the trough appears, the temperature of the spark drops by 0.03 degrees Celsius in a specific direction. This deviation is extremely small, but after more than 90 sampling points are superimposed, the direction converges into a very narrow fan."

Sergei adjusted the direction of the branch, pointing it southeast by east.

"Across the entire Eurasian continent and the Pacific Ocean."

Andrei looked along the direction of the branches, but his view was blocked by the false twilight cast by the dome of the wall, and he could see nothing.

"What's over there?"

Sergei did not answer the question, but instead opened the scroll and pointed to a sequence in the middle that he had marked with double circles.

Three long markers, one short marker, and two long markers.

"This word was repeated forty-one times."

Andrei counted the double-circle markings on the scroll; they were arranged in three dense rows.

"Forty-one times, the same word?"

"The same word is not evenly spaced, with the shortest interval being only forty minutes and the longest exceeding six hours, but the waveform characteristics are perfectly consistent, and the frequency deviation does not exceed two parts per million."

Sergei lowered his voice by half a note.

"In any communication protocol, the information that is repeated most frequently can only be one of two things."

He held up one finger.

"Identification mark".

The second finger.

"Or call a signal."

Andrei remained crouched, his gaze rising from the scroll to the dark red halo of light seeping through Sergei's clothes on his chest.

The halo was rotating at an extremely slow speed, and the rhythm of the rotation perfectly matched the sequence of three long, one short, and two long on the paper roll.

"It's not talking to itself."

Sergei stuck the pencil into the soil and stood up, supporting himself on his knees with his hands.

"It's calling that thing that beats every fourteen seconds, and it's been calling it for who knows how long."

Andrei opened his mouth as if to ask something, but Sergei's hand suddenly froze in mid-air.

He stared down at the end of the paper roll; the latest set of data hadn't been processed yet, and the pencil marks were crooked, recording the temperature curve over the past two hours.

After forty-one repeated call sequences, there was a long gap of twenty-three minutes.

Then comes a completely new word.

Four long markers, two short markers, and one long marker.

This combination had not appeared in any data from the previous 140 hours.

It happened once.

Only once.

Sergei crouched down, pulled the paper roll to within ten centimeters of his eyes, and checked it three times.

"It changed its lines."

Andrei spoke up, his voice a little hoarse.

"What do you mean?"

Sergei did not answer immediately.

He traced each mark of the new sequence heavily with a pencil, so deeply that the strokes left dents in the paper.

"Over a period of 140 hours, it repeated the same phrase 41 times, then paused for 23 minutes, and then said something it had never said before."

He stood up and glanced back at the eternal, false twilight sky created by the Barrier Dome.

"What could make a voice that's been shouting for who knows how long suddenly change its tune?"

Andrei uttered a muffled syllable.

Sergei looked down at the red orb of light on his chest. The orb was spinning a little faster than it had three minutes ago, almost imperceptibly, but he noticed it.

"Someone answered the phone."

Cairo, 6,400 kilometers away.

The lights in the National Museum's restoration hall had been turned down to the lowest setting, with only the gooseneck lamp directly above Hassan's workbench still on, its light just covering Libra and his notebook.

I haven't slept for 37 hours.