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

Rome, 4:12 AM.

Jiang Ming stared at the progress bar on the holographic panel for a full thirty seconds.

62.8%.

The number jumped to 62.9%, with the interval being nearly two seconds shorter than the previous jump.

He had already calculated the curvature of the acceleration curve, and extrapolated it to the end time window, which was about six hours away.

Six hours.

He stood up from his chair and walked to the French windows. The Roman night sky was impossibly clear; the dome of the Pantheon gleamed a cold white in the moonlight, and the silhouettes of several old buildings in the distance formed a jagged line on the horizon.

It's such a waste to do nothing for six hours.

He turned and walked back to the control panel, brought up the concept weapon design interface on the holographic panel, and drew the first line in the void with his finger.

two pieces.

While the Raven God was reshaping, he was going to forge two new things.

The first concept blueprint had been running through his mind for almost a week. The framework was clear, the parameters were well-defined, and all that was missing was the emotional value to be added.

He typed a name in the title bar of the design interface.

The torch of Prometheus.

The cursor in the concept definition field blinked twice, and he began typing word by word.

Within its range, the efficiency of energy conversion in all forms approaches 100%.

He paused for five seconds in the core rules bar, his finger hovering above the cursor without falling.

Then he hit it.

It must be triggered by someone whose hands have scars from labor.

Work injuries, hard labor, and slave labor marks all count.

Not a scientist, not an engineer, not anyone wearing a white coat in a laboratory.

It's those people who rub their palms until they bleed.

He entered a number in the activation radius field: ten kilometers.

Enter the number 99.97% in the Efficiency Lock Value column.

Not 100%, because he doesn't intend to violate the underlying logic of the second law of thermodynamics; he only intends to corner the second law and make it unable to breathe.

The cursor indicating the amount of emotional input is waiting for him there.

He entered 150 million.

A confirmation dialog box pops up on the panel.

[Is it confirmed that 150,000,000 emotion points have been invested to forge the conceptual weapon "Prometheus's Torch"? This action is irreversible.]

Jiang Ming clicked "confirm".

The air in the room became scalding hot in that instant.

It's not a change in temperature, but a scorching heat at the conceptual level, as if someone had dragged the entire meaning of the word "fire" out of the dictionary and stuffed it into three-dimensional space.

The sentiment value balance on the holographic panel plummeted, the millions of digits flipping so fast the naked eye couldn't keep up.

The casting progress bar starts climbing from zero, and with each increment, the orange-red light in the room brightens by one unit.

ten minutes.

twenty minutes.

Forty minutes later, the progress bar reached 100%.

Above the control panel in front of Jiang Ming, a fireball the size of a fist suddenly appeared out of thin air.

Orange-red in color, without the shape of flames, it resembles a miniature star compressed to its extreme, with light patterns on its surface rotating at an extremely slow speed, illuminating every corner of the entire suite.

He reached out and held it.

Room temperature.

There was no burning sensation in my palm, only a gentle warmth seeping from my skin into my fingertips, like holding a cup of hot tea that was just about to be drunk.

But the conceptual weight carried by this gentle thing is enough to rewrite the energy conservation equations for all physicochemical reactions within a ten-kilometer radius.

He brought up a global map on the holographic panel, swiped his finger across the African continent, and stopped at the southern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Kolwezi, Katanga Province, center of the cobalt mining area.

Open-pit mine.

Deployment coordinates locked.

He held the fireball up to the window, where moonlight and orange-red light overlapped on the glass to form two halos of different color temperatures.

The fingers loosened.

The fireball passed through the glass without leaving a trace, as if it had passed through a non-existent layer of air.

It ascended into the Roman night sky, accelerating to a speed undetectable to the naked eye within three seconds, and entered a suborbital trajectory.

A countdown timer popped up on the holographic panel: seventeen minutes.

Jiang Ming turned around and sat back in his chair, picked up the glass of red wine on the table that had gone cold, and took a sip.

Instead of keeping an eye on the countdown, he turned to the design blueprints for the second artifact.

Seventeen minutes later.

Cobalt mining area, Katanga Province, Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of Congo.

At 6:03 a.m. local time, before the sun had fully risen, the horizon on the east side of the mine was cut into a thin, gray-blue strip.

The open-pit mine has a diameter of over 800 meters and a depth of 150 meters. When viewed from the air, it looks like a bowl that has been dug out of the earth.

The bottom of the bowl is already lit up.

It wasn't an electric light, but a carbide acetylene lamp above the miners' heads. Dozens of yellow flames flickered at the bottom of the pit, like a swarm of fireflies trapped in a mud pit.

The first group of child laborers walked down the dirt road along the side wall of the mine pit, shouting at the foreman.

Kabila Mutinga walked in the third row of the line. He was eleven years old and less than 1.4 meters tall. He wore an old T-shirt that was stained grayish-black by mineral dust, and his plastic slippers had a broken strap on the left side, which was tied with an electrical wire.

His hands hung down at his sides.

There is a three-centimeter-long old scar on the palm of my right hand. It was cut by ore fragments last year. It was not stitched up and healed on its own, leaving a raised white ridge of flesh.

The fingertips of his left hand were covered with fine cuts, old and new, the most recent one from yesterday evening when he was sorting ore and was cut by the sharp cobalt ore blade; it was still oozing blood.

The overseer yelled behind him and hit him on the back with a stick.

"Hurry up, today's order volume is 20% higher!"

Kabila quickened his pace, his footsteps making a soft crunching sound on the gravel road.

He didn't turn around. Turning around would mean getting a second beating.

When the group reached the edge of the mine, someone gave him a push.

He didn't know whether it was one of the children behind him who slipped or the foreman who had interfered again; before he could tell, he fell down the slope at the edge of the mine pit.

His right knee hit the ground first, followed by his right hand.

His palm rested on the ground, a mixture of mud and gravel, the three-centimeter-long old scar pressing against a patch of orange light illuminated by the morning sun.

The light spot was transmitted from a height of thirty meters.

He looked up and glanced at it.

A fist-sized, orange-red ball of light hovered above the mine, rotating silently without any support, its surface rippling with light as slowly as a snail crawling.

The sensation under my palm has changed.

It is not the roughness of mud and gravel.

It is warmth.

A clean warmth rising from the ground, unlike any temperature found in the mine.

Warmth flowed into his palm, climbed up his wrist and forearm, and when it reached his elbow, he wanted to pull his hand back but couldn't. It wasn't that he was immobilized, but that he didn't want to pull it back.

That warmth reminded him of something.

The warmth his mother gave him in winter when she was still alive.

The ball of light flashed briefly at a height of thirty meters, and then it began to descend.

No, it's not sinking.

It's melting.

Orange-red light peeled off the surface of the sphere layer by layer, turning into countless tiny points of light that fell to the ground. The densest stream of light flowed directly into Kabila's palm along that spot of light.

He looked at his right hand.

The white, fleshy ridges of the old scar shimmered in the orange light, like a lit fuse.

Then the fireball disappeared.

My palms returned to their normal texture; the soil was still soil, the gravel was still gravel, and the morning light was still gray-blue.

But the sound from the bottom of the mine changed.

The three diesel generators simultaneously emitted a deep, muffled roar, their speeds soaring from 800 rpm at idle to over 2,000 rpm within two seconds, and the exhaust fumes from the exhaust pipes changed from thick black to almost transparent thin mist.

The power generation indicator light jumped from yellow to green, and then from green to a bright white that was not marked on the dial at all.

The fan blades of the ventilation system went from a slow, sluggish rotation to their maximum design speed in an instant. The mine dust that had accumulated in the pipes for months was blown out of the pit in one go by the strong airflow. The concentration of toxic gases at the bottom of the mine dropped from four times the standard to below the safety threshold within thirty seconds.

When Kabila stood up, the overseer was kicking the generator with his back to him, cursing.

"Has this crappy machine taken the wrong medicine?"

No one noticed his hands.

No one noticed that when the first batch of miners started swinging their pickaxes, the effect of each strike was different from before.

An adult miner raised his pickaxe and chopped down into the vein.

The pickaxe blade was embedded four times deeper into the rock than usual.

He paused for a moment, then pulled out the pickaxe and chopped again.

Same depth.

The coworker next to him also stopped, looked down at the marks left by his pickaxe, and then looked up at him.

The two of them had the exact same expression: confusion, mixed with disbelief.

One pickaxe strike is equivalent to four previous strikes.

With the same workload, physical exertion was reduced by three-quarters.

The sounds in the mine gradually changed over the next twenty minutes. The sound of picks increased, but the panting and coughing decreased, and the foreman's cursing also decreased, because the progress was much faster than expected, and they could find no reason to beat people anymore.

Nobody knows what happened.

No one noticed that on a utility pole at the edge of the mine, a surveillance camera the size of a fingernail was faithfully recording everything.

In the corner of the picture, an eleven-year-old boy is using his right hand, whose palm is slightly glowing with an orange light, to toss pieces of ore into a basket behind him.

His hand no longer hurts.

Four hours later, the surveillance video appeared on three major forums on the dark web, with the same title.

"In the Congo mines, fire was started by a child."

The number of reposts exceeded 400,000 within the first hour, surpassing the speed at which Watanabe's photos of the space dragon spread on the first day.

In his suite in Rome, Jiang Ming looked at the emotion value collection counter jumping on the holographic panel and smiled slightly.

He pulled the concept blueprint for the second artifact in front of him and typed a second name in the title bar.

The first deck of the ark.

The progress bar for Raven God's remodeling has skipped 67%.