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

The long, drawn-out sound came from the loudspeaker on the roof, carrying a sense of suppressed tension.

"The entire ship has been notified that the passive sonar detected a low-frequency vibration lasting approximately four seconds at a depth of 9,500 meters. The frequency is unrelated to the 0.07 Hz pulse and is preliminarily identified as an acoustic feature caused by the fragmentation of a solid structure."

The broadcast paused for two seconds here.

"It looks like something broke down underneath."

Zhou Ruo stopped on the stairs.

She turned and ran to the deck. When she pushed open the hatch, the night wind rushed into her face. The blue water at the entrance of the passage was still swirling, and the deep indigo halo was wider than before she left.

She crouched down and put her ear close to the edge of the passageway. The damp steam hit her cheeks, but there was no sound from inside.

But the light at the entrance to the passageway changed.

The blue background color remained unchanged, as did the deep indigo halo. The only difference was the appearance of a very fine, warm-toned bright line along the inner edge of the halo.

Red gold.

Zhou Ruo stared at the bright line for three seconds, then wrote down the seventh line of her notes in her notebook.

"At 03:29, a reddish-gold light appeared in the inner circle of the passage, about two millimeters wide. The duration is yet to be observed."

After she finished writing, she didn't close the notebook. The pen tip rested on the paper, waiting for the next change she could record.

Nine thousand five hundred meters underwater, on the surface of a black crystalline cocoon.

Funina pressed her right hand against the extremely thin layer of ash, her fingers remaining still. The blue light in her palm intertwined with the black patterns within the ash, the frequency increasing rapidly.

She is waiting for the pulse.

0.07 Hz, once every 14 seconds. Nine seconds have passed since the last pulse, and she has five seconds left.

In those five seconds, she reviewed the information she had gained after her palm touched the layer of ash.

The ash layer covered a much larger area than she had anticipated; it wasn't a small patch, but a complete thin film enveloping the transition zone between the outer shell of the abyssal debris and the inner layer of crimson-gold light source.

Its function is to isolate.

The abyssal residue erodes water molecules from the outside, while crimson-gold energy attempts to expand outward from the inside. The ash layer, sandwiched in between, prevents direct contact between the two, maintaining a fragile stalemate.

If she allows the crimson-gold energy to work from within while purifying the outer shell, this stalemate will be broken.

The fifth second has passed.

The pulse has arrived.

A crimson-gold light wave of 0.07 Hz surged from the depths of the crystal cocoon. After being attenuated by the ash layer, it was only about three percent of its original intensity. When it hit Funina's palm, it was significantly more powerful than the last time.

Her lips twitched slightly.

"You heard me."

No one responded, nor was a response necessary; the pulse itself was the response.

She transmitted the conceptual-level instructions through the purification channel to the ash layer below; the instructions contained only two words.

Push outwards.

The next fourteen seconds.

The crimson-gold light source responded.

It responded with the amplitude of light waves; when the second pulse reached Funina's palm, its intensity was three times that of the first.

The shockwave radiated outward from the inside of the crystal cocoon, impacting the ash layer and causing it to vibrate microscopically. The vibration spread in all directions along that extremely thin layer of conceptual ash, like ripples spreading after a stone is thrown into a lake.

When the ripples spread to the inner wall of the outer shell directly below the area that Funina had already purified, the stress in the weak points began to concentrate.

A pincer attack from both inside and outside.

Funina removed her right hand from the ash layer, stepped back half a meter, and extended the power of water from her palm to both hands. Her ten fingers spread open under the pressure of the deep sea, and the blue light at her fingertips pierced the edge of the purification area like ten probes, anchoring the stripped parts and preventing the abyssal residue from flowing back.

Crimson-gold pulses struck the outer shell repeatedly from the inside.

Once every fourteen seconds.

She counted.

The third time, stress lines appeared on the inner wall of the outer shell.

The seventh time, the stress lines expand into a network of cracks.

The twelfth time, the crack penetrated the thinnest part of the shell.

Twelve minutes.

A deep cracking sound came from inside the crystal cocoon, penetrating the more than 40-meter-deep abyss debris and the 9,500-meter-deep seawater, and reaching the passive sonar of the Exploration Abyss 500 kilometers away.

That's what the soprano meant when he said, "Something broke."

Funina looked at the changes in front of her.

Directly below the purified area, a piece of abyssal debris, about four square meters in size, developed its first penetrating crack under the pressure from both inside and outside. The crack extended from the inner wall to the outer surface, and the black crystal emitted a piercing squeezing sound in the crack. Eight seconds later, the entire crystal detached from the cocoon wall.

A black fragment the size of a wheel spun and sank deeper into the abyss. The abyssal remnants at the edge of the fragment lost their energy source to maintain their structure the moment they detached from the cocoon and began to disintegrate on their own. A dozen seconds later, they turned into harmless mineral particles and dissipated in the water.

At the crack, the crimson-gold light was directly exposed to the seawater.

Without the obstruction of the more than forty-meter-thick layer of abyssal debris, the light was so bright that Funina squinted for the first time in the absolute darkness of nine thousand five hundred meters.

The light shone on her face, giving her pale complexion a warm hue, and the mark between her brows flashed a deep indigo response under the golden light.

She leaned closer to the crack and looked inside.

The crack was about two meters in diameter, and its edges were still slowly crumbling. Her vision was cut into irregular spots of light by the broken debris and floating particles, but through those spots of light, she could see what was inside the crack.

It wasn't the sphere of light she had envisioned.

It is not an abstract energy body of any kind.

The being that was calling for help had a recognizable outline, a huge, blurry outline illuminated from within by a crimson-gold light.

It looks like a fish.

The arc of the caudal fin extends from the lower left corner of the slit's field of vision to the upper right corner, far exceeding the field of vision of the two-meter slit, making it impossible to estimate its overall size.

Scales, densely packed scales covered that arc, each scale's edge gleaming with a reddish-gold light, like copper plates glowing from within. Their arrangement was unlike any fish she knew, but closer to some extremely ancient, primitive form that had already taken shape before the evolutionary tree branched.

The 0.07 Hz pulse surged again. This time, there was no attenuation from the ash layer, nor the obstruction of the more than 40-meter outer shell. The full-intensity crimson-gold light wave rushed out from the crack.

Funinna's body trembled slightly in the light wave.

It was not a physical impact.

It's at the conceptual level.

An extremely ancient fragment of a concept pierced through the crack, crossed a distance of two meters, and entered her consciousness.

It is not language, not images, not sounds.

It is part of a name.

The first half.

Incomplete, unable to be pronounced, and even impossible to record using any known symbol system, its existence is more primitive than writing and more direct than sound waves, like a seal directly stamped on the surface of her consciousness.

She knew it was a name.

She knew that name was older than human civilization.

She didn't know the second half.

The mark between the eyebrows changed from blue to deep indigo and back to blue the instant the concept fragment entered, the whole process taking less than 0.4 seconds, like a lamp being blown out by the wind and then relit.

Funina hovered before the rift, staring at the enormous silhouette enveloped in crimson-gold light inside. Her five fingers slowly clenched into a fist, then slowly relaxed.

Her lips parted.

The sound didn't travel out; it was impossible for it to travel out under the water pressure of 9,500 meters. But she made two words with her mouth.

"Who are you……"

Inside the crack, a crimson-gold light flickered.

The 0.07 Hz pulse was offset by 0.2 seconds at that moment, arriving 0.2 seconds earlier than the standard period.

It's like an answer.

It also sounds like urging.

Hurry up, faster, peel my shell open.

Funina withdrew her gaze and turned to the black crystals that were still disintegrating at the edge of the crack.

She raised her right hand again, palm facing the still-unpeeled cocoon wall on the right side of the crack, and blue light spread from her fingertips.

There is no light, no sound, and no living person can see this scene at a depth of 9,500 meters in the ocean.

However, at the stern of the Tanyuan ship, 500 kilometers above the water, the bright red-gold line inside the blue channel has expanded from two millimeters to four millimeters.

Zhou Ruo squatted down beside the entrance to the passage, pressed the tip of her pen against the paper, and noted down the second change.

"At 03:41, the width of the crimson-gold ray has doubled to four millimeters and continues to expand."

She stared at the bright line and mentally calculated how many hours Funina had been underwater.

Then she closed her notebook, stood up, and walked toward the lower deck galley.

The cream puffs can't get cold.