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

Apartment 307, Queens, New York.

John picked up the hot coin and turned it over to see the other side.

He had already seen the new pattern that appeared next to the Parthenon relief on the front, but there were also changes on the back.

A symbol.

The extremely fine lines were raised on the copper surface, like the patterns that grew out of the coin itself. The angles of the strokes and the proportions of the curves made him feel that they were not like English, not like Spanish, not like any other script he had ever seen.

He took a picture and sent it to Evelyn.

Three minutes later, Evelyn replied with a message consisting of only a question mark and a sentence.

"Where did you get the Anubis Scales base inscription?"

John stared at the message for a long time.

He didn't know what the Anubis Scales were.

He held the coin in his hand; the copper surface had returned to normal temperature, slightly warm, like an old coin that had been warmed up.

But the symbol is still there.

Four seconds.

From the first second to the fourth second, six conceptual weapons scattered in six corners of the Earth's surface completed their first synchronous pulse resonance without ever establishing any connection.

The fifth second.

Everything returned to calm.

The global earthquake monitoring network recorded an unexplained tremor within those four seconds, with a magnitude reading of zero, but every seismograph showed a perfect sine wave spike with a period of fourteen seconds.

Nine thousand five hundred meters deep in the ocean.

During the resonance, the mark between Funina's eyebrows jumped from blue to a bright white and then fell back down. Her water authority perceived all the anomalies that occurred during those four seconds.

She glanced at Mirror One, which was floating ten meters behind her.

"It's like your return woke something up."

Mirror One did not deny it; his gaze swept over Funina and landed on the crystal cocoon.

Both of them turned towards the crimson-gold crack at the same time.

Inside the crack, the 0.07 Hz pulse disappeared.

Funina scanned the edge of the crack three times, but found nothing—no vibrations, no energy fluctuations, not even the slightest disturbance of water molecules.

The entity that had been calling out for who knows how many years stopped calling out in the fifth second after the four-second resonance ended.

Funina's brows furrowed.

"It's stopped barking?"

Mirror One took a step closer to the rift and closed its eyes.

The Voice of the Mind unfolded, and spiritual tendrils probed into the cavity beyond the edge of the crack, retracting after three seconds.

He opened his eyes.

"It hasn't stopped calling."

Funina waited for his next sentence.

"It's listening."

The brightness of the crimson-gold light inside the crack remained unchanged, and the huge fish-shaped outline was still curled up deep in the cavity, with the faint light on the scales rising and falling rhythmically, like breathing.

But the pulse did indeed disappear.

The voices that had been chanting for countless years fell silent four seconds after the six divine artifacts resonated in unison.

.........

After the pulse disappeared, the deep sea was unusually quiet, unlike the depths of 9,500 meters.

Without the low-frequency vibration of 0.07 Hz filling the space, even the background noise emitted when the abyssal residue continuously decomposes water molecules is reduced, as if the entire sea is holding its breath.

Funina counted the seconds.

One second, two seconds, five seconds, ten seconds.

At the fourteenth second, the mark between her eyebrows twitched.

Fourteen seconds, a complete original cycle.

The pulse is back.

But it has changed.

Funina's senses detected the frequency shift the instant the pulse arrived. It wasn't a fine-tuning, but a doubling. The interval between the crimson-gold energy waves surging from the cavity and the crack was compressed from fourteen seconds to seven seconds.

0.14 Hz.

"It sped up."

Her voice was transmitted to the location of Mirror One through the directional vibration of water molecules.

"They're still shouting, but they're shouting even more urgently."

Mirror One hovered five meters to her right and behind, the hem of its black trench coat swaying gently in the deep-sea current. His gaze moved from the rift to Funina's profile, then back to the rift.

"It had been calling for the four-second resonance for countless years without anyone paying attention. Now that someone has taken notice, of course it's getting anxious."

Funina didn't respond to that sentence; she turned her attention back to the surface of the crystal cocoon.

The crack is two meters in diameter, and the purified area accounts for only a tiny percentage of the total area of ​​the outer shell. On the 300-meter-high black crystal, the remaining abyssal residue continues to decompose the hydrogen-oxygen bonds of the surrounding seawater.

She spent more than six hours purifying the area on her own, advancing to a depth of 3.4 meters, which was too slow.

The mark between her eyebrows had faded to the point that it could only cover her upper body after a long period of wear and tear. If she continued at this rate, the time it would take to completely remove the outer shell was a number she didn't want to calculate.

Mirror One opened its mouth.

"I can't help you purify the water; the power over water isn't on my list of abilities."

His tone was calm as he stated the facts.

Funina glanced at him but didn't say anything.

"However," he raised his right hand, palm facing the nearest unpurified area on the surface of the crystal cocoon, "I can handle the crystalline residue."

Funina turned her head to look at him.

Mirror One's five fingers were slightly spread apart, and a layer of extremely faint emerald green light seeped out from the fingertips, extending forward along the water flow. The moment it touched the abyssal residue on the surface of the crystal cocoon, the green light penetrated into it like roots.

Plant control.

As Funina watched the green light seep into the crystalline residue, her eyebrows twitched.

"You're using life-giving energy controlled by plants? This thing isn't a plant."

Mirror One focused its attention on the feedback from its fingertips, and slowed its speech by half a beat when it answered.

"It is not a plant, but its microstructure has organic-like characteristics. Nitrogen-containing side chains are attached to the carbon skeleton, and the arrangement is about 70% similar to the chitinous shell of fungal hyphae."

He paused for a moment.

"Life extract does not recognize species taxonomy; it only identifies one criterion: whether there is activity that can be extracted."

The green light diffused inside the residue crystals for about three seconds, and the purple luster of the crystals began to fade, spreading from the edges to the center, like a piece of glass whose color had been drained.

The residue after the active ingredients were stripped away turned into a grayish-white inert powder, which adhered to the surface of the crystal cocoon. It no longer decomposed water molecules or released abyssal energy, like a dead shell.

Funinna immediately stretched out her right hand, blue light covering the grayish-white powder, and the power of water washed it clean from the surface of the crystal cocoon, revealing the dark original cocoon wall below.

The two steps are seamlessly connected.

The whole process took less than ten seconds.

Fu Ningna looked down at the area after purification, then looked back at the area she had advanced alone over the previous six hours, and made a rough calculation of the efficiency in her mind.

"Three times faster."

"A little over three times."

Mirror One withdrew its right hand, and the green light in its palm dissipated into the water.

"I'll kill it from the front, and you wash it away from behind. A clear division of labor will make things faster."

Fu Ningna looked at him for three seconds.

The perception of the Water Authority scanned his entire body in those three seconds, confirming that his energy output was stable, his mental capacity was still sufficient, and there was no sign of him overexerting himself.

"OK."

She only said one word.

Mirror One turned to face the crystal cocoon, moved to the unpurified cocoon wall on the right side of the crack, raised its hands, and the emerald green light of its ten fingers simultaneously pierced into the surface of the residue.

Fu Ningna followed two meters behind him, her palms covered in blue light, and immediately followed up with a cleansing every time he moved into an area.

Two people, 9,500 meters deep in the ocean, with their backs to the endless darkness and facing a 300-meter-high abyssal crystal cocoon, peeled away its outer shell inch by inch.

There was no conversation.

No conversation is needed.

Mirror One's life absorption extended half a meter to the left, and three seconds later, Funina's water authority precisely covered that half meter; as his propulsion slowed down, her cleansing rhythm slowed down in sync, ensuring that the connection between the two energies remained at the most efficient distance.

It's not about tacit understanding.

It is a precise judgment of the boundaries of each other's abilities by two higher-level beings, and an absolute pursuit of efficiency.