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

the other side.

The light bulbs in the restoration room of the Cairo National Museum have been replaced twice.

At 3:07 a.m., Hassan sharpened his third pencil, twirling the lead halfway between his fingers, and the graphite powder fell onto the open notebook like a layer of fine black snow.

For twenty-seven hours, he did not leave this table.

The three notebooks are arranged from left to right. The first notebook records the original copying data of the symbols on the bottom of the scales. The second notebook contains two high-resolution rubbings of Sumerian clay tablets and a printout of data on a deep-sea buoy folded into three sections. The third notebook is laid out in the center, with seven new symbols burned onto the blank pages, their edges glowing with a burnt brown color under the light.

His right hand didn't tremble at all.

Parkinson's disease never flares up within two meters of Libra.

A soft knock came from outside the restoration room door, and Lieutenant Nasser, the Egyptian military's security liaison officer, poked half his face in.

"Professor, the medical team asked me to ask if you would like some tea?"

Hassan didn't even look up, finishing the final stroke with the tip of his pencil, which traced the curve of the seventh new symbol.

"unnecessary."

"You haven't slept for over 24 hours, they recommend lying down for at least 20 minutes."

Hassan put down his pencil, looked up at Nasser, and glanced past the top edge of his reading glasses.

Do you think I look like I need to lie down?

Nasser's gaze fell on Hassan's right hand, his five fingers pressed steadily on the edge of the notebook, without the slightest tremor in his fingertips.

He had seen what the old man looked like after he left Libra; his left thumb and forefinger were constantly rubbing together, and a pencil could slip through his fingers three times.

At that moment, his right hand was as steady as a bolt tightened on a table.

"It doesn't look like it."

"Then close the door and don't knock again for two hours."

After the door closed, the restoration room returned to a quiet state, with only the hum of the fluorescent lights remaining.

Hassan pinched the corner of the Sumerian clay tablet rubbing between his thumb and forefinger and dragged it to the side of the third notebook.

The seven new symbols and the first line of engravings on the back of the clay tablet lay side by side under the light.

The first new symbol begins at the top left corner, extends in an arc to the lower right, and ends in a triangular fold.

He aimed the magnifying glass at the third position in the first row on the back of the clay tablet and adjusted the focus.

The curve, lower right, is followed by a triangular fold.

Same characters.

The strokes are consistent in angle, the line thickness is in proportion, and the curvature of the arc was measured three times using a transparent protractor, with a deviation of less than one and a half degrees.

"The same."

He spoke to the air, his voice hoarse, and twirled the pencil halfway in his hand.

Then he stopped.

wrong.

He flipped the clay rubbing ninety degrees and observed the stroke direction again from the right side.

The Libra version begins in the upper left and ends in the lower right.

The clay tablet version begins with a stroke in the upper right and ends in the lower left.

He placed the two copies side by side, and with his right index finger, he started drawing from the first stroke of the Libra version, simulating the brushstroke in the air. Then he moved his index finger to the clay tablet version and repeated the same action.

The directions are completely opposite.

"Mirror image".

His voice echoed for half a second in the empty restoration hall.

The same symbol, written in a mirror image.

He picked up the second notebook, flipped to the previous translation draft, and pointed with his index finger to the Sumerian phrase that he had spent three days spelling out.

"In deep water."

He held the pencil to his lips, bit it for two seconds, and then pulled it out.

He inverted the clay tablet rubbing by 180 degrees.

The order of the symbols changes the relationship between the morphemes when the order is reversed. The core semantic symbol of "其中" becomes a completely different morpheme when it is reversed.

"under."

Hassan's pencil tip hovered on the paper for nearly four seconds before falling.

In Sumerian, "among" and "below" are never confused.

"Inside" refers to a space surrounded by water, three-dimensional, with boundaries, in which the body is immersed.

"Below" refers to the invisible area below the water surface, a one-way, top-down perspective of observation.

The two concepts are separated by the hierarchical logic of the entire Sumerian religious cosmology.

He turned to a blank page, the pencil fell, and his wrist rotated with precision and stability.

"If the mud tablet is viewed from below the water's surface."

He wrote and read it aloud as he wrote.

"The scales are like looking up from underwater."

A pencil draws a horizontal line on the paper.

"Two civilizations, two continents, and two independently evolved writing systems."

Another horizontal line.

"The same event that occurred deep in the ocean was observed from different directions."

The scarab's compound eyes flashed.

The frequency jumped from fourteen to fifteen times per minute, held for three seconds, and then dropped.

Hassan paused on the paper with his pen, noting the change in frequency in the sidebar.

Do you agree with my assessment?

He turned his head to look at the obsidian scarab beetle on the Libra base, its compound eyes flashing at a rhythm of fourteen times per minute, offering no further response.

"Okay, if you don't say anything, I'll take that as a yes."

He pulled the printout of the deep-sea buoy data from the title page of his second notebook and flattened it.

The encrypted data transmitted in the ninth station indicated the original parameters of the reddish-gold pulse: 0.07 Hz, period of fourteen seconds. Later, the frequency was doubled to 0.14 Hz, with a period of seven seconds.

He looked away from the data and up at the compound eyes of the scarab beetle directly above the ceiling.

Fourteen times per minute.

The pulse period is fourteen seconds.

The two "fourteen"s are hung on different time units, one in "minutes" and the other in "seconds".

The bridge connecting "minutes" and "seconds" is sixty.

One minute equals sixty seconds.

The scarab beetle flashes fourteen times per minute, which is a 1:60 ratio to the red gold pulse that beats once every fourteen seconds.

Hassan drew a circle on the number "sixty" with his pencil.

The sexagesimal system is based on a base-60 system.

The most profound legacy that Sumerian civilization left to humankind is that sixty seconds make one minute, sixty minutes make one hour, and three hundred and sixty degrees make one circle.

The Sumerians claimed that this mathematics came from "wisdom that rose from the water."

"This is no coincidence."

His voice was half a tone lower than before, and he rubbed his temples with his graphite-covered fingers.

"This is the design."

The scarab beetle's blinking frequency remained unchanged at fourteen times per minute, like a calibrated pendulum.

He stood up, bumped his knee on the chair leg, and squatted down in front of the Libra.

The circular relief of twenty-four deities cast fine shadows under the light; the first to twenty-second figures were intact, while the twenty-fourth was normal.

Position number twenty-three is still that smooth concave surface.

He brought his face close, his nose less than five centimeters from the bronze surface.

Then he saw it.

There was an extra layer of water in the center of the concave surface.

The extremely thin liquid film is distributed in a pattern resembling the fingerprint's curve that appears faintly under light, as if someone has just pressed it with their wet fingertip.

"This is new."

He spoke to Libra in a very low voice.

The last time he inspected this concave surface, the hexagonal lattice cut was dry and clean, with no liquid residue.

He picked up a sterile cotton swab from the table, gently dipped it into the concave water stain to collect a small amount of sample, and inserted it into the detection slot of the portable spectrometer.

The spectrometer screen displays the analysis results after thirty seconds.

Hassan stared at the numbers on the screen, nearly dropping the cotton swab from his hand.

The water contains an abnormally high concentration of deuterium, with a deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio 47 times that of ordinary seawater.

He placed the spectrometer on the table, opened the offline marine chemistry database on his laptop, and entered the deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio value to search.

There is no matching natural water source.

He changed his keywords to search for water isotope shift data under extreme pressure conditions.

A theoretical note popped up in the database: Under extreme high pressure conditions at depths exceeding 10,000 meters, the proportion of hydrogen isotopes in water molecules will shift due to the pressure effect, and the magnitude of the shift is proportional to the depth.

The numbers on the calculator appeared after he entered the offset coefficient and the measured deuterium-hydrogen ratio.

The corresponding theoretical depth is 9,500 to 10,000 meters.

Hassan stared at the calculator screen for nearly ten seconds.

The water seeping from the concave surface of Libra comes from the deep sea at a depth of 10,000 meters.

Lieutenant Nasser knocked on the door again.

"Professor, Cairo University Medical School has called for the third time, saying that stopping Parkinson's medication for more than 24 hours can affect dopamine receptor sensitivity."

"Tell them I know."

"professor."

"Not two hours have passed yet, Nasser."

It was quiet outside the door.

Hassan turned to the last page of the notebook. The pencil lay on the paper, the handwriting a little messier than before because he had written quickly, but each stroke was steady and without deviation.

"The twenty-third guardian has been removed from the panel. Did he commit a crime, or did he see something he shouldn't have?"

The pencil tip paused on the paper for a moment.

"Libra is searching for that deleted part in its own way."

"It takes water from the deep sea and places it in the empty space."

"It's like marking coordinates with a substitute, waiting for the original to return."

As he wrote the last line, the frequency of the scarab's compound eyes jumped from fourteen to sixteen.

Not just a second or two.

A full five seconds.

Hassan put down his pencil and stared at the scarab beetle for a long time.

Five seconds is the longest deviation from the baseline to date.

He jotted down the data in the sidebar, closed the notebook, and locked the drawer.

The Parkinson's tremor immediately returned to his hands.

The thumb and forefinger of the left hand rubbed together at a frequency of four to six times per second, and the right hand squeezed twice before stuffing the pencil into the pencil holder.

He didn't go to get the pills.

The lights in the restoration room automatically switched to energy-saving mode after he got up, reducing the brightness by half. The silhouette of the Libra base appeared three times heavier in the dim light than during the day.

He walked to the window.

The Egyptian military outposts outside the museum were brightly lit. After Libra exposed the CIA agent, security was raised two levels, and night patrols were increased to once every thirty minutes.

In the distance, the surface of the Nile River reflects the lights of Cairo, a murky orange band of light stretching to the horizon.

Hassan stood by the window, his hands trembling uncontrollably from Parkinson's disease.

He unconsciously raised his right hand, extended his index finger, and pointed to the distance outside the window.

The direction the finger is pointing is 74.3 degrees south of east.

He himself was unaware of this action.

In the restoration hall behind me, the compound eyes of the scarab beetle on the Libra base blinked continuously in the darkness, fourteen times a minute, no more, no less, like a heart that has been beating for thousands of years.