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

The first deck of the ark.

The cursor in the concept definition bar flashed three times, and Jiang Ming's finger hovered in mid-air for two seconds before falling.

Rewrite liquid water as a material with the strength of a solid building structure.

He added three constraints on the next line.

Preserve the water's temperature. Preserve the water's transparency. Preserve the water's chemical inertness.

It cannot be broken. It cannot be melted. It cannot be evaporated.

The structure is permanently stable.

He wrote the core rules section more slowly than the torch of Prometheus, each word as if it were being weighed.

It must be triggered by civilians whose land has been flooded more than three times in the past decade.

He is not an engineer, not a water conservancy expert, and not just anyone who draws blueprints in an office.

They are the people who stand barefoot in the water waiting for the water to recede.

Emotional value input: 150 million.

A confirmation dialog box popped up on the panel, and he clicked "confirm".

This time, the air in the room didn't get hot; it got cold.

It's not the kind of cold that a thermometer can read; it's a chill on a conceptual level, like someone taking the entire mass of the word "water" out of the dictionary and hanging it above your head.

The casting time was five minutes shorter than that of the fireball, thirty-five minutes.

When the progress bar finished, a palm-sized cube appeared above the control panel. It was dark blue, transparent, and at room temperature.

Jiang Ming picked it up and flipped it between his fingertips.

It felt like glass, but he was certain it wouldn't break even if dropped from the 30th floor, because the concept of "break" had been removed from its definition.

He brought up a map of Asia on the holographic panel, swiped his finger from the east side of the Indian subcontinent to the tail end of the Ganges Delta, and stopped at a coordinate line densely marked with slum icons.

Dhaka, Bangladesh, Chahar Delta, Bogra region.

The lowest point in the entire city.

He glanced out the window; the Roman sky had changed from night blue to grayish-purple, and a very thin bright line stretched to the east.

The fingers loosened.

The dark blue cube pierced through the glass, rose into the sky, and cut into the trajectory of the bullet.

Fifteen minutes later.

Dhaka, Bogra district.

Local time 2 p.m.

It has been raining for six hours.

It wasn't a light rain, but the kind of downpour that felt like buckets of water were being poured from the sky. Every drop of rain hitting the tin roof sounded like bullets being chambered, so dense and continuous that it made your eardrums tingle.

Shahida Begum squatted on the inside of the threshold of her tin-roofed house, holding a plastic basin in both hands, which was more than half full of muddy rainwater.

Her movements were mechanical and practiced. She held the edge of the basin with her left hand, scooped up the water flowing in from the corner with her right hand, and forcefully poured it into the basin. When the basin was full, she lifted it up and poured it outside the door, and then continued to scoop.

She's 63 years old, and she's done this set of movements for most of her life.

Her home has been flooded four times.

The first time was in 2011, when the water reached her waist. The second time was in 2017, when it reached her chest. The third time was in 2020, when she stood on the bed with water sloshing around her ankles. The fourth time was last year, when the entire tin-roofed house was washed away. The one she lives in now was rebuilt by her neighbors using the tin sheets from the previous house.

She stepped barefoot into the water, which was already above her ankles. Plastic bags and rotten vegetable leaves floated on the murky yellow surface.

I stepped on something hard.

It wasn't a stone. She was too familiar with the sharp edges of stones. This thing had sharp edges but wouldn't cut her feet; it was like a bar of soap placed at the bottom of the water.

She looked down, but the water was too murky to see anything.

She placed the basin on the threshold, bent down, and dipped her right hand into the water to feel it.

My fingertip touched the surface of that thing.

It was cool, the same temperature as the surrounding water, smooth, square, and just the right size to fit in the palm of your hand.

She didn't have time to pick it up.

Because she felt a sensation she had never experienced before from the soles of her feet.

The water is hardening.

It's not frozen. Frozen things are cold and can bite your bones. This isn't cold; the temperature is exactly the same as it was a second ago.

But the water under her feet stopped flowing.

The water stopped flowing.

It's not static, it's solidified, like someone poured a layer of transparent cement into water in a fraction of a second, pinning all the molecules to their original positions.

She looked down at the water around her ankles. The murky yellow color was still there, and the turbid matter was locked inside, motionless. But the water surface itself had become a flat, smooth, solid surface that she could step on and stand on.

She tentatively stepped on the ground with her left foot.

Hard.

It was as hard as the ground, no, much harder than her mud floor. Stepping on it didn't sink at all, nor did it have any springiness; it was like stepping on marble.

But it is transparent.

She could see about three centimeters below the solidified surface, a plastic bag frozen in the water, its shape as if pushed by the water flow, perfectly intact.

A faint blue light emanated from the center of the cube she hadn't had time to pick up, spreading in all directions.

The diffusion speed is not fast, about two meters per second, like a ripple being slowed down.

Wherever the blue light goes, the water solidifies.

The water inside the threshold has completely solidified.

The water on the steps outside the threshold has solidified.

The water that had reached above the calves in the alleyway below the steps had solidified.

At the end of the alley, the drainage ditch, which had turned into a yellow torrent, froze in a fraction of a second the moment the blue light touched the water's surface. The black silt and garbage were trapped inside the transparent, solid water.

Shahida stood at the door, still clutching the plastic basin in her hand.

The water in the basin has hardened.

She turned the basin over, but the water didn't spill out. The entire basin of water turned into a transparent hemisphere inverted in the basin-shaped space, and the water stains on the rim of the basin condensed into a thin ring of ice-blue ridges.

A woman's scream pierced the rain from the tin shack across the alley.

"The water's stopped moving! The water's stopped moving!"

Shahida's neighbor Fatima rushed out of her house, her bare feet stepping onto the hardened surface.

She stomped her foot.

The cured surface remained completely still and made no sound, as if I were stepping on a stone slab several meters thick.

The blue light is still spreading.

It travels outward along the drainage ditch, and every puddle, every culvert, and every drop of water seeping from the base of the wall that it passes through solidifies into a transparent solid at room temperature the moment it comes into contact with the blue light.

Six minutes.

The blue light's front edge crossed the boundary of the Bogra district, crossed a small river that had already overflowed its banks to the north, and spread southward into the low-lying area outside the south gate of Dhaka University.

The solidified area covered approximately one square kilometer within six minutes.

The heavy rain is still falling.

Raindrops fell from the sky and hit the transparent surface of the solidified area.

Each raindrop solidifies within a fraction of a second of contact with the hardened surface, retaining the shape of the splashing water as it hits the ground, and solidifies on the surface like a miniature glass sculpture.

New raindrops fall on top of old raindrops, layer upon layer, millimeter upon millimeter.

Ten minutes later, a transparent dam about thirty centimeters high spontaneously formed around the edge of the solidified area.

Outside the dike, torrential rain continued to pour down, and the floodwaters continued to rise.

Inside the dam, raindrops solidify upon landing, with no water accumulation or runoff; not a single drop of liquid water can exist in this area for more than 0.1 seconds.

The Dakabogra district was transformed into an island that wouldn't be submerged during the torrential rain.

Shahida stood at her doorstep, barefoot on the transparent, solid water.

She looked down at the clear, solid layer beneath her feet, which held the mud floor of her house, the broken bricks of the alleyway, and the plastic bag that had been pushed halfway.

Her shoulders twitched.

It's not cold.

The rain in Dhaka was mild, the air in June was hot, and the hardened surface underfoot felt like lukewarm water—neither too hot nor too cold.

Her shoulders were shaking for something else.

Because she had been submerged in water in this alley for half her life, this was the first time she had stepped onto a ground that would never disappear.

Four hours later, a commercial drone that took off from Chittagong flew over the Pogra district, its aerial camera pointing downwards for seventeen seconds.

In the scene, the city of Dhaka is divided into two completely different worlds.

To the north and west, muddy yellow floodwaters submerged half the street, motorcycles and oxcarts were submerged in the water, and people were squatting on the tin roofs.

To the south, a clear, transparent disc is embedded in the floodwaters. The inside of the disc is dry, and the lights of the tin shack are on. People are walking, and children are running on the solidified surface.

The edge of the disc is a transparent embankment thirty centimeters high. The floodwaters crash against the outside of the embankment, creating muddy yellow waves, but not a single drop can get in.

The aerial footage was uploaded to social media at 6 p.m. that day.

Within twelve hours, the number of reposts exceeded eight million.

All the previous records of the first day's dissemination of the "miracle device" incidents failed to stand firm under this aerial photograph.