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

Queens, New York.

John Nunez Cruz sat on the floor of his rented room, legs crossed, back against the wall, with a stack of papers spread out in front of him.

Two hundred pages.

He spent three days reading it from beginning to end. He could understand about 15 percent of it, which consisted entirely of numbers and names. The rest were legal terms, which he recognized in English, but when put together, they became another language.

The cover of the court summons featured Morgan Stanley's full name and a phrase he had never seen before: financial terrorism.

He wasn't quite sure what those four words meant, but he understood the amount of compensation claimed next to them.

$640 billion.

He flipped the summons back to the first page and stared at the number for about a minute.

Then he looked down at his right hand.

The coin was in his pocket, but he didn't take it out because he could feel its warmth seeping into his thigh through the fabric of his jeans.

It's a little hotter than yesterday.

Since that coin swallowed Morgan Stanley's repayment money, its color has changed from ordinary bronze to dark bronze, and the Parthenon relief patterns on its surface are sharper than before. You can even feel the fine lines engraved on the pillars when you touch it with your fingertips.

He placed it on his bedside table every day, and every morning when he woke up, there would always be a faint, warm, round mark left on the surface.

Someone knocked on the door.

John stood up, pushed the summons against the wall, walked over, and opened the door.

A young woman stood outside the door, her straight black hair tied in a ponytail. She wore a faded dark gray suit jacket, carried a bulging canvas briefcase in her left hand, and held a pen in her right.

"Mr. John Nunez Cruz?"

"it's me."

"Evelyn Chen, the lawyer assigned to you on the legal aid list, I called you three days ago."

John nodded and stepped aside to let her in.

Evelyn walked into the rented room and glanced around.

Twelve square meters, a cot, a plastic chair, a plastic table, on which sits a half-empty bottle of water and a bag of unfinished tortilla chips.

She saw the stack of two hundred pages of summonses on the floor, squatted down, picked it up, flipped through the cover, and her brow twitched.

"You saw it?"

"I watched it for three days."

John moved the only plastic chair to her.

"I can't understand most of it."

Evelyn didn't sit down. She placed her canvas bag on the plastic table, unzipped it, and pulled out a stack of documents thicker than the summons.

"I've reviewed it for you, three times from beginning to end, and I've annotated each and every cause of action."

She turned to the first page of the document and pointed her index finger at the first cause of action listed by Morgan Stanley's legal team.

"Unjust enrichment. Their logic is that you transferred $640 billion worth of funds from Morgan Stanley's digital asset system through unknown means, which constitutes illegal appropriation."

John stood to the side, his hands in his pockets, the fingertips of his right hand touching the edge of the coin.

"But I didn't transfer that money."

"I know."

Evelyn turned to page seven and pointed to a passage of bold text.

"Here is their list of key evidence, a total of fourteen items, eleven of which are screenshots of internal system logs showing that 30 million interbank transfers were completed in 0.1 seconds. Each transfer was initiated by Morgan Stanley's own clearing server and received by 30 million individual accounts worldwide."

She looked up at John.

"Did you hear me clearly? The initiator is their own server."

John frowned slightly.

"Then what grounds do they have to sue me?"

Evelyn closed the file, a slight, barely smiling curve to the corners of her mouth.

"Because the trigger timestamp of each transaction precisely coincides with the time you walk into the Lower Manhattan branch with your coins."

She put the documents back on the table, took a half step back, and leaned against the wall.

"John, I've made myself clear. Listen to me and then make your choice."

John looked at her without saying a word.

Evelyn held up one finger.

"In short, they have no chance of winning."

She paused for two seconds, then raised her second finger.

"Secondly, they don't need to win; they just want to drain you dry in the lawsuit."

John clutched the coins tightly in his pocket.

"What do you mean?"

"This means that this summons is not for winning a lawsuit."

Evelyn swept her ponytail behind her back, her voice not louder, but the spacing between each word increased slightly.

"Morgan Stanley's legal department has 140 full-time lawyers and an additional team of over 60 external consultants. They can file new motions, new subpoenas, and new document requests against you every week for the next three to five years. You have to respond to each one, and each one requires legal man-hours."

She pointed to herself.

"I am a legal aid lawyer, and my hourly wage is $23. The legal aid fund has a budget cap of $12,000 per case. Based on their workload, this budget should last about six weeks."

John's expression changed slightly.

"And what about six weeks later?"

"Six weeks later you will need to hire a lawyer at your own expense. Depending on the size of the opponent, the starting price for a law firm that can go head-to-head with them is $800 per hour, and the annual cost is conservatively estimated to be over two million."

Evelyn's tone was as flat as if she were reading a supermarket price list.

How much money do you have in your account?

John was silent for five seconds.

"Six hundred and seventeen yuan."

"Six hundred and seventeen dollars."

Evelyn repeated the number without adding any embellishment, but the weight of the number itself was enough.

"A federal judge signed a freezing order three days ago, and your account has been frozen. You can't get the $617 out of your account."

John looked down at the dark bronze coin in his pocket.

The coin was 0.5 degrees warmer than when he entered the rented room.

"Can it help me?"

He asked the question so softly that Evelyn had to lean forward to hear him.

"What is it?"

John hesitated for a second, then pulled his right hand out of his pocket, palm up.

The deep bronze coin lay quietly in his palm, the reliefs of the Parthenon gleaming with a gentle metallic sheen under the dim light of the rented room.

Evelyn stared at the coin for three seconds, then looked up at John.

"Is this the coin?"

John nodded.

Evelyn squinted in the dim light, but she didn't reach out to touch it.

I've seen your story in the news.

Her tone finally changed slightly; it wasn't sympathy, but a restrained scrutiny.

"The entire legal community has seen it, John. Your case has been discussed on law school forums for three weeks, and no one has been able to provide an applicable legal framework because there has never been a precedent involving a coin that swallowed an investment bank's money and then spit it out to 30 million poor people."

John put the coin back into his pocket.

"So I'm finished?"

"As I just said, they have no chance of winning."

Evelyn pulled a yellow legal notepad from her canvas bag; it was covered in her handwriting.

"I traced some of the 30 million transfers and used each one to clear the recipient's personal debts: student loans, medical bills, car loans, mortgage payments, credit card debts—all cleared."

She turned the note over.

"Legally, these funds go directly from Morgan Stanley's clearing servers into your personal account without passing through any of your associated accounts, without your signature authorization, without your identity verification record, and your role in the entire financial chain is zero."

John's eyes lit up.

"Then how will they sue?"

"They're not suing about the transfer of funds itself."

Evelyn put the note back in her bag and zipped it up.

"They are suing you for walking into their bank lobby with an inexplicable supernatural object, an act they define as a premeditated financial terrorism. The basis for the lawsuit is Section 215 of the Homeland Security Act and the extended application of the Patriot Act."

John's expression went blank for a moment.

"I went there to deposit money."

"I know you're going to deposit money, and the jury will know you're going to deposit money, but that doesn't matter."

Evelyn's voice finally took on a hint of coldness that was almost imperceptible.

"The important thing is that once the litigation process begins, you have to appear in court, and to appear in court you need a lawyer, and the lawyer needs money. If you don't have money, they win."

She picked up her canvas bag and walked to the door.

"I will try my best to dismantle their cause of action one by one within the six-week budget, but if they add new motions after six weeks, you will need to find new sources of funding."

John stood there, his hands in his pockets, his fingertips tracing the edge of the coin.

The coin's temperature rose a little more under his fingertips.

It wasn't much, maybe a fraction of a degree, but he could feel it.

It's still getting hot.

Since swallowing that 640 billion, it has become a little warmer every day, like a seed growing.

Evelyn opened the door and stood in the doorway for a second.

"John."

"Um?"

"Don't show that coin to anyone."

John tucked his hand into his pocket.

Why?

"Because if Morgan Stanley's lawyers get their hands on the physical item, they can apply to the federal court to seize it on national security grounds, and then you won't even have your last trump card left."

she left.

John closed the door and stood in the 12-square-meter rented room for a minute, lost in thought.

Then he walked to the cot and picked up his phone from the bedside table.

The phone was an older, prepaid flip phone, and there was an unread text message on the screen from a number he didn't recognize.

The message contained only one line of text.

"Check your mailbox downstairs."

He went downstairs.

On the wall of the mailbox on the first floor of the rented house, his number was 307. There was a note on the metal mailbox door reminding people to pay their water bills, and a brown paper envelope was stuffed behind the note.

The envelope was heavy.

He weighed it in his hand; it weighed at least two or three pounds.

The envelope had no stamp, no postmark, and no sender information.

Only at the sealed part was a leaf sandwiched inside.

Dry, brownish-red, shaped like an oak leaf but a size larger than any oak leaf he had ever seen, with deep and symmetrical veins, as if it had been left after a specimen had been pressed for a long time.

He took the envelope upstairs and opened it.

There was a stack of papers inside.

Thick.

He flipped through it; it was 432 pages long. The top left corner had Morgan Stanley's internal watermark logo, and each page's footer read "Internal Audit Report, Top Secret."

He didn't quite understand the financial terminology, but when he turned to page 178, he saw a word.

He recognized the word.

Short selling.

It was followed by a year: 2008.

Then came a string of numbers, so large that they took up three whole lines.

He flipped to the back.

LIBOR.

He had seen this term in the news before; it was related to interest rate manipulation, and it seemed that many banks had been fined for it.

Turn the page to the next page.

List of shell companies.

The names, registered addresses, and fund flow diagrams of 71 shell companies are all listed in a huge folded table, which is as big as a desktop when unfolded.

He placed the documents on the floor, squatted down, and flipped through them for a full forty minutes, from beginning to end.

Then he took out his phone and dialed Evelyn's number.

I answered after it rang three times.

"Evelyn, can you come back now?"

"What's wrong?"

Someone sent me a package.

There was a two-second silence on the other end of the phone.

"What package?"

"Morgan Stanley's complete internal audit report from 2015 to 2024, totaling 432 pages, contains records of shorting government bonds, manipulation of LIBOR, and evidence of tax evasion by 71 shell companies."

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

It took much longer than last time.

Approximately ten seconds.

Who sent it?

"I don't know, there was nothing on the envelope."

John hesitated for a moment, then added another sentence.

"I only picked up one leaf."

"What kind of leaves?"

"Oak leaves, dried, and exceptionally large."

A hurried rummaging sound came from the other end of the phone, as if Evelyn was looking for something.

Then her voice came back, and she spoke twice as fast as before.

"John, listen carefully. Don't touch those documents, don't take pictures, don't make copies, and don't let anyone know they exist. Put the envelopes and leaves back exactly as they were."

Why?

"Because I saw the same leaf in an evidence package in another case two weeks ago."

Evelyn's voice was very low.

"A leaf of a Celtic ancient oak, a tree that went extinct hundreds of years ago. The only place in the world where it has now regrown is the area on the south bank of London covered by the force field of the sword in the stone."

John stared at the dry leaf on the floor, his fingers unconsciously tightening around the coin in his pocket.

The coin's temperature jumped another notch.