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

The resonance begins to spread from the first second.

In the No. 7 underground palace of the Qinling underground base, infrared lighting projects the outlines of 173 bronze terracotta warriors onto the rock wall, where the duty technician, Xiao Zhao, is dozing off with his chin resting on his arm.

The clanging sound of armor plates jolted him up from his chair.

One hundred and seventy-three bronze terracotta warriors stood up at the same moment, including those broken terracotta warriors with their halberds broken and their hands empty, and those injured terracotta warriors whose right arm gears were stuck and could only maintain a half-squatting posture.

They all face the same direction.

Xiao Zhao rushed to the control panel and retrieved the azimuth reading. The pointer was steadily set at 117 degrees east of southeast.

The Pacific Ocean.

He pressed the button on the walkie-talkie three times before finally getting the right channel.

"Academician Qi, in the No. 7 underground palace, all the bronze terracotta warriors stand up on their own, with an azimuth of 117 degrees, facing the Pacific Ocean."

The walkie-talkie carried the voice of Academician Qi, who was clearly still half asleep.

"You mean all of them?"

"All of them, including the eleven terracotta warriors in the scrap sequence, whose leg drive shafts were confirmed to be broken during yesterday's inspection, are now standing up."

Xiao Zhao switched the surveillance footage to a wide-angle view. The bronze terracotta warrior formation in the lens looked like a metal forest being blown by the same gust of wind. Each one faced southeast, standing upright with its spearhead pointing to the sky.

Deeper into the spare warehouse, the unactivated bronze terracotta warriors were also showing slight movements. The crossbowmen's fingers trembled at the point where they were holding the bowstring, and the chariot's axle turned half a circle and then stopped.

At the same time, the alarm in the map room went off.

On the miniature map of Xianyang City in the No. 7 underground palace, tens of thousands of points of light scattered throughout the country lit up once in the same second, like all the stars in the night sky blinking at the same time, then went out, and then returned to a dim dormant state.

When Academician Qi arrived at the map room, the surveillance video had already captured that frame.

He stared at the screen full of bright dots for five seconds, his voice very low.

"Record the timestamp, accurate to milliseconds, and compare it with the time when the Qinling bronze terracotta warriors stood up."

Sixty-eight meters underground in Xianyang.

As Zhou Dazhuang walked back along the dark red metal passage, the tiger tally brand on his right palm suddenly burst into flames without any warning.

It wasn't the warm, pulsating sensation I'd felt before; it was scalding.

The temperature probe reading jumped from 39 degrees to 43 degrees in just two seconds.

His knees bent, and his right hand instinctively braced itself on the ground. With his fingers spread, the instant his palm imprint touched the dark red metal floor, spiderweb-like cracks exploded on the ground directly beneath the palm print, extending nearly a meter in all directions.

The researcher on the walkie-talkie shouted.

"Zhou Dazhuang, your heart rate is 210, and your brainwaves are overloaded across the entire frequency range. Can you even hear me?"

Zhou Dazhuang knelt on one knee on the ground, beads of sweat on his forehead hitting the metal floor with a pattering sound.

"I can hear it, my hand is hot, very hot, but it doesn't hurt."

He glanced back into the depths of the passage.

Fifteen meters away, the bronze skeleton remained kneeling on one knee, but a beam of crimson-gold light shot out from the groove in the center of its chest cavity, piercing straight into the deeper, lower level of the passage. The light left a fist-sized bright spot on the wall, and the position of the bright spot was exactly aligned with the direction marked with the character "Emperor" on the map.

Zhou Dazhuang stared at the light for two seconds.

"Academician Qi, the chest of the skeleton is glowing, and a line is pointing straight down."

There was a three-second silence on the walkie-talkie.

Academician Qi's voice finally came through, carrying a tremor he had never heard in the old man's voice before.

"Don't move, don't touch anything, wait until the temperature drops before leaving."

Cairo National Museum, Restoration Hall.

The two pans of the scale tilted to their extreme angles in opposite directions within the same second.

As the left plate plummeted to its lowest point, the support rod emitted a sharp, metallic whistle, jolting Hassan awake from his nap. The pencil slipped from between his fingers and rolled onto the table.

He saw something he shouldn't have seen.

The two trays tilted to an angle almost perpendicular to the crossbeam, which physically meant that the counterweight was completely unbalanced. But in the next instant, the two trays rebounded simultaneously, like two released pendulums, swinging back and forth three times between extreme angles, before returning to absolute horizontal.

Absolutely.

Hassan picked up the bubble level from the table and stuck it onto the beam. The bubble was perfectly aligned with the center line, with zero deviation.

Before he could write down his observation in his notebook, the scarab beetle's compound eyes emitted two beams of golden light.

Golden light pierced through the ceiling.

The light pierced through the three concrete floors above the restoration hall and through the roof of the museum, forming a circular halo in the Cairo night sky that lasted for four seconds. It was about 200 meters in diameter and visible to the naked eye. At least 40 Egyptian soldiers stationed around the museum looked up and witnessed the halo.

Hassan did not look at the sky.

He was looking at the notebook in front of him.

The notebook was flipped to a blank page by an unknown force, and words began to appear on the paper.

It wasn't ink, it was burning, like an invisible, scalding needle gliding across the paper, leaving behind burnt brown marks.

It is not Arabic, not hieroglyphics, and not Sumerian cuneiform.

It is a completely new combination of symbols. The stroke structure and the fourteen unknown symbols on the bottom of the scale belong to the same system, but the arrangement is one he has never seen before.

His right hand did not tremble.

Within a two-meter radius of the Libra scale, Parkinson's never dares to have an attack.

He picked up a pencil and began to trace each burn mark, his wrist as steady as if it were riveted to the table.

"What are you telling me?"

He asked Libra a question softly.

The scarab beetle's compound eyes blinked at a frequency that jumped from fourteen times per minute to eighteen times per minute, lasted for two seconds, and then dropped back to fourteen times per minute.

Second floor of an abandoned barbershop on London's South Bank.

Arthur sat by the window, the sword in the stone resting on his lap, wiping the water off the blade with a rag.

A new crack appeared on the granite base.

The cracks are not natural cracks caused by weathering; they run almost straight, as if pierced from the inside by an extremely fine needle.

A bright green liquid seeped out of the crack.

The sap solidifies rapidly upon contact with air, shrinking into an acorn smaller than a thumbnail within three seconds. The brown outer shell remains intact, and the embryo glows with a very faint green light.

Arthur picked up the seed and looked at it in his palm for a long time.

He looked down at the Celtic oaks that had sprung up from the ruins on the street outside the window, and then at the seed in his palm.

He put the seeds into his breast pocket.

Siberia, within the Constant Temperature Wall.

Sergei sat on a folding chair at the tent entrance, a temperature logbook on his lap and a pencil tucked behind his ear.

The ball of light on his chest had just burned him, and the temperature had already dropped, but he didn't continue lying down because the temperature pulse sequence of the fire seed showed new content that he had never recorded before.

A series of extremely long pulse combinations.

He pulled out his pencil and quickly drew long and short lines on the notebook: three long, two short, four long, one short, three long, two short, one long, four short, two long, three short, one long.

Andrei poked his head out of the tent.

"Another new term?"

Sergei shook his head.

"It's not a word, it's a sentence, three times the length of all the words before it."

He compared the pulse sequence he had just memorized with the twelve non-repeating words he had previously accumulated. This new sequence contained at least five variants of known words, but with completely different grammatical structures, and also included three new combinations that had never appeared before.

Andrei looked at his expression.

"What are you thinking about?"

Sergei's gaze fell on the string of lines, some long and some short.

"It had been screaming for help hundreds of times. Now it's suddenly saying a whole new string of words."

His finger was pointing to the beginning of the sequence.

"Either it finally got a response, or something happened that made it have to say more."