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

One hour later.

The crack expanded from a diameter of two meters to a diameter of eight meters.

Crimson-gold light poured out from the widening crack, illuminating the seawater within dozens of meters of the two people, pushing the darkness further away.

Funina stopped in the light and turned to face the inside of the rift.

The eight-meter-wide opening was enough for her to see the entire interior of the cavity.

A fish.

It is not a ball of light, not a mass of energy, not any abstract concept.

It was a real, huge fish.

Its entire body is reddish-gold, curled up in a spherical cavity about eighty meters in diameter at the core of the crystal cocoon. Its body length is estimated to be about sixty meters. The arc from its head to its tail fin curves into a near-perfect circle inside the cavity.

The scales were dim but still glowing, with a soft, reddish-gold shimmer at the edge of each scale. The alternating rhythm of light and dark was perfectly synchronized with the new frequency of 0.14 Hz pulses, like breathing, like a heartbeat.

Funina's gaze moved from the fish's head to its tail, settling on the tail fin and dorsal fin.

The fins are covered with patterns.

It's not the natural texture of fish, but symbols with clear lines, precise strokes, and orderly arrangement.

Her memory was sufficient to allow her to make the comparison.

These symbols belong to the same system as the fourteen unknown symbols that Hassan sketched at the bottom of the scales.

She had not seen Hassan's copy, but she had seen the base of the scale.

During the Holy Grail War, information from all Heroic Spirits and Masters was exchanged countless times, and the symbol pattern on the bottom of the scales was shared as basic intelligence.

Funina stared at the symbols engraved on the fins for a long time.

"The words on the scales are written on the fin of a fish."

Her voice was so soft that it almost dissipated in the vibration of water molecules.

Mirror One stood beside her, also looking at the fish.

He didn't speak.

Bathed in the crimson-gold light, the shadows of the two people were cast long in the sea behind them, one silvery-white and the other pitch black.

The fish had its eyes closed.

Then, its eyes moved.

It's not about opening your eyes.

The eyeballs rolled once under the closed eyelids, from left to right, slowly and heavily, like a person in a deep sleep whose eyelids are illuminated by a dim light, instinctively sensing the change in the outside world.

Funina's breath hitched for a moment.

Her water authority sensed an extremely faint tendril of consciousness emerging from the fish's forehead, passing through the crimson-gold light, through the eight-meter-wide rift, and touching the edge of her senses.

I only touched it once.

Like a blade of grass glistening with dew, it gently touches the surface of the lake, creating a barely perceptible ripple.

Then it shrank back.

The fish's eyeballs stopped moving.

The rhythmic interplay of light and shadow on the scales, like breathing, returned to normal.

It fell asleep again.

As Funina stood before the rift, she could still feel the lingering warmth of that touch on its edge.

It's not temperature.

It is a fragment of will with extremely high information density but an extremely ancient encoding method, older than any language system she knows, so ancient that it has no grammar, only emotions.

She could read that emotion.

Exhaustion, a long, lingering exhaustion, and deep within that exhaustion, a newly ignited, extremely cautious hope.

.....

For the next three hours, Funina did not perceive a second touch of consciousness.

The giant, crimson-gold fish was curled up at the bottom of the cavity, its scales breathing rhythm stable, continuously outputting 0.14 Hz pulses, but no longer showing any signs of active detection.

The two continued the purification process.

After three hours of continuous high-intensity output, the plant control of Mirror One began to show signs of efficiency decline. The time required for life absorption and stripping of residual activity increased from three seconds to five seconds, and the emerald green light at the fingertips changed from its initial intensity to semi-transparent.

Funina noticed this change.

"You've reached your limit."

It is not a question.

Mirror One withdrew its right hand, the green light in its palm dissipating. It looked at its fingers, clenched its fist slightly, and then relaxed it.

"Not at the limit yet, but not far from it."

"How much more can be cleared if we push for another ten minutes?"

"Less than half a square meter."

Funina compared this number with the overall area.

She had estimated the total area of ​​the crystal cocoon's outer shell during her first orbital scan after the dive: the 300-meter-high cocoon had a surface area of ​​approximately 280,000 square meters.

The two worked together for twelve hours to purify the area, completing approximately forty percent of the total area.

Sixty percent remain.

After twelve hours of continuous consumption, the mark between her eyebrows had faded to the point where it was barely visible to the naked eye. The blue light could only cover the area from her collarbone to her forehead, and the output of the Water Authority in her hands had dropped to less than one-third of its peak.

She can grit her teeth and hold on for a few more hours.

But she doesn't intend to do that.

"Let's leave the rest for now."

Mirror One looked at her.

Funina turned around to face the giant fish inside the cavity.

"It was still sleeping. We forcibly peeled off all its shells because too much of its surface area was exposed to the seawater. In its current state, it might not be able to withstand the combined impact of the water pressure at 9,500 meters and the noise from the abyss."

Her judgment was calm, based on a precise understanding of the deep-sea environment that truly comprehends the existence of "water".

"Forty percent opening is enough for it to breathe on its own. It's safer for it to wake up on its own after it has gathered enough strength than forcibly pulling it up."

Mirror One did not object.

"go back?"

Funina nodded.

I need to eat.

When she said those words, her expression finally relaxed a little from the twelve-hour battle. The corners of her mouth curved slightly, as if she had thought of a specific food.

The two began to rise to the surface.

Mirror One cannot summon ravens in the deep sea. Ravens are made of shadow energy, but under the water pressure of 9,500 meters and in absolute darkness, the density of shadow energy is almost the same as the surrounding environment, so there is no point in summoning them.

But Weather Child can use it.

He fine-tuned the temperature gradient of the seawater within a 100-meter radius beneath him, raising the bottom water temperature by two degrees while keeping the upper layer unchanged, thus creating a miniature channel for rising warm current.

The warm current propelled the two bodies upwards. Funinna wrapped a platform of the Water Authority around the warm current, stabilizing the ascent speed at sixty meters per minute.

The two floated side by side on the blue platform, the surrounding seawater gradually lightening from near absolute darkness to dark blue, and then to indigo.

Four thousand meters.

Three thousand meters.

Two kilometers.

As Funina ascended, her eyes were closed, and the blue light from the mark between her eyebrows began to slowly regain its brightness as the depth decreased and the water pressure dropped.

Mirror One stood to her right, his black trench coat billowing in the rising water, his gaze passing through the brightening seawater to the sky above.

One kilometer.

500 meters.

The sunlight began to penetrate the water layer, initially as scattered spots of light, then as continuous curtains of light, and finally as entire walls of blue-green light.

The hull of the Tanyuan appeared above our field of vision.

On the Tanyuan.

Zhou Ruo had been standing on the stern deck for sixteen hours.

Next to the sixth line in the notebook is still an empty circle; the last buoy signal was received nearly twenty hours ago.

Her legs had been numb for three hours, but she didn't sit down.

The brightness at the entrance to the blue passage began to change over the past hour, from dim to dim, from dim to bright, and now it was so bright that she had to squint to look directly at it.

The inner ring of reddish-gold rays has also expanded from six millimeters wide to nearly one centimeter, and the color has changed from dark gold to bright gold.

She didn't know what this meant.

But she knew this meant something was approaching.

The water surface began to rise.

It's not a wave, but a bulge that's been pushed up from below. It's about four meters in diameter, circular, and has a layer of blue light film on the surface of the water. Its rotation direction is exactly the same as the channel opening.

The bulge is getting higher and higher.

one meter.

Two meters.

At the moment the water film ruptures at its peak, sunlight and seawater explode simultaneously, with golden light and blue water intertwining to create a frame of scattering fragments.

The long, silvery-white hair rose from the water first.

Her soaked hair clung to her cheeks, water droplets trickling down the ends and dripping onto the collar of her white and blue striped shirt.

The blue teardrop mark between my eyebrows was much darker than when I was diving, but it was still glowing.

The moment the heterochromatic eyes opened, the lights on the deck and the Pacific Ocean skyline were reflected in the blue on the left and purple on the right irises.

Funina's feet stepped onto the deck.

There was a person standing next to her.

A black trench coat, loose black hair, a pale face, and around twenty-two years old.

Seawater continued to trickle down his sleeves and hem, hitting the iron deck with a clear, ticking sound, like some kind of unhurried timer.

Zhou Ruo's gaze first fell on Funina, confirming that she was unharmed.

Then her gaze shifted to that person.

Her breath caught in her throat.

She recognized the face.

On the third basement floor of Yokosuka Medical Center, she had been on duty next to Funina's life support pod. The condensation on the inner wall of the pod blurred the observation window, and she had wiped away the condensation countless times to look at the sleeping girl inside.

During those long night shifts, the live recording of the Tokyo Bay showdown, which played on a loop on her phone, was her only companion.

She watched the last thirty minutes of the video no less than twenty times.

Images of a super cyclone rising from the sea, giant shadow ravens with wingspans of 10,000 meters obscuring the sky, and white ripples engulfing everything.

The last frame where the ripples engulfed the black figure.

She remembered that face.

Seven billion people around the world who watched the live broadcast remember that face.

He stood on the deck, his bare feet on the wet iron plate, water flowing down his insteps and mixing with the puddles on the deck.

Zhou Ruo's hand holding the pen was trembling.

After stepping onto the deck, Funina steadied herself, water droplets falling from her hair. She raised her right hand to brush away the stray hairs clinging to her face and glanced at Zhou Ruo.

Then she spoke her first words.

"Where are the cream puffs?"

Zhou Ruo opened her mouth and uttered an incoherent syllable.

Funina tilted her chin slightly towards Mirror One.

"Don't worry about him, he'll explain himself."