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

Langley, Virginia, on the third basement level of the CIA headquarters.

The encrypted door at the end of the corridor pops open after fingerprint and iris authentication, revealing an oval-shaped analysis room without windows.

Three walls are covered by a huge holographic projection: on the left is a thermal imaging overlay of the Kolwezi mining area in Congo; in the middle is a 3D model of solidified water in the Daka Bogra area; and on the right is a time-series animation of vegetation index in the Juba refugee camp in South Sudan.

Eleven people sat around an oval table, with a dense stream of data scrolling across the embedded screen on the tabletop.

When Patterson pushed the door open, everyone's eyes simultaneously looked up and then quickly returned to their respective screens, as if it were a conditioned reflex trained by someone.

He sat down in the head seat and tossed the startup briefing onto the table.

"Have you seen them all?"

Chief criminal psychologist Lydia Gray peeked half her face out from behind a stack of printed papers, her eyes bloodshot behind her glasses.

"I read it three times, and each time I came to a different conclusion."

Patterson's gaze swept around.

"At the first formal meeting of Project Hunter, I don't need your nonsense. I need a target to track."

He tapped the table with his knuckles.

"Start with the process of elimination, tell me what this thing is not."

Senior analyst Collins, sitting second from the left, pushed a document marked with a red seal to the center of the table.

"The first exclusion is that ancient artifacts will naturally revive."

He stood up, walked to the left wall, and drew three circles on the holographic projection with a laser pointer.

"The Congo's Flames are triggered when your hands are covered in scars from labor."

The light spot moved to the center.

"The trigger for the floods in Dhaka is civilians whose homes have been flooded more than three times in the past decade."

The light spot moves again.

"The seeds of South Sudan are triggered by not eating solid food for more than three consecutive days and losing at least one immediate family member during a famine of more than three consecutive years."

Collins turned off the laser pointer and turned to face Patterson.

"General, of the six known ancient conceptual weapons—the sword in the stone, the coin, the scales, the tiger tally, the winter fire, and the fish in the Mariana Trench—none of them possess this kind of screening mechanism that is so precise as to be on a sociological level."

Patterson's finger stopped on the table.

"continue."

"The triggering logic of ancient artifacts is usually related to bloodline, faith, or physical contact. It's simple, straightforward, and doesn't discriminate against anyone."

Collins picked up the printout and shook it.

"But the triggering conditions for these three new things are like a carefully crafted social welfare application form: child labor scars, flood damage records, famine bereavement certificates, each pointing to a specific vulnerable group, while systematically excluding soldiers, capitalists, politicians, and anyone who holds power."

He slammed the paper back onto the table.

"The precision of this kind of rule design cannot be achieved by an ancient artifact that has been dormant for thousands of years simply waking up on its own."

Patterson didn't say anything, but simply turned his gaze to the female analyst next to him.

"Weber, the second exclusion."

Sociologist Anne Weber stood up and, instead of walking to the projection wall, lifted the tablet directly from her seat.

"The second exclusion is the leakage of a country's secret experiments."

She swiped the screen, and three projection coordinates lit up simultaneously on the world map.

"Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of Congo; Dhaka, Bangladesh; Juba, South Sudan."

She turned the tablet around so everyone could see the map.

"The three points are located on three continents, with the closest straight-line distance between them exceeding 5,000 kilometers. They belong to three completely different geopolitical regions, and there are no known intelligence channels, logistics links, or personnel overlaps between the three delivery sites."

Patterson frowned slightly.

Is it possible for China to have this problem?

Weber shook his head.

"We assessed all countries with global deployment capabilities: China, Russia, France, and the United States, including ourselves."

She brought up an evaluation matrix on the tablet.

"The conclusion is consistent: no country's intelligence agency could simultaneously conduct such a precise deployment in three isolated third-world countries within 72 hours, while achieving zero footprints, zero communication traces, and zero personnel exposure."

She put the tablet down.

"If any country can do this, then its intelligence capabilities are beyond our comprehension, and the discussion itself becomes meaningless."

Patterson paused for a few seconds, then turned to the third person.

"Rogers, the third one."

Behavioral logic expert Rogers didn't stand up; he simply leaned back in his chair, twirling a pen in his hand.

"The third exclusion is the coincidental behavior of multiple independent extraordinary individuals."

He paused, as if organizing his thoughts.

"After the Holy Grail War, there were indeed sporadic supernatural events around the world, but the number of known supernatural individuals is very small. There are only a handful of people who possess ancient concept weapons, and each of them is under the surveillance of intelligence networks of various countries."

He threw the pen on the table.

"Moreover, the underlying rules and structures of these three new weapons are highly unified. They all have conceptual-level exclusive triggering conditions, are all targeted at the suffering groups at the bottom, and all have a sense of propagation design."

Rogers drew three parallel lines on the table with his fingers.

"If it was made by three different people, then they either shared the same teacher or the same brain. The probability of such a coincidence is even lower than being hit by a meteorite three times in a row."

Patterson stacked the three exclusion reports together and pressed them down with his palm.

"Okay, it's not an antiquities restoration, not a national experiment, and not a coincidence involving multiple people."

He raised his head.

"What is that?"

The entire analysis room fell silent for a few seconds.

Lydia Gray straightened up from behind the stack of printed papers and pushed up her glasses.

"General, before answering that question, I need to mention something we discovered in our propagation analysis."

She stood up, walked to the middle wall, and pulled up a timeline.

"When were the Congolese Flame Boys' videos first uploaded online? When were the aerial videos of Dhaka's Unsinkable City first uploaded online? When were the videos of South Sudan's Green Miracle first uploaded online?"

The three time points light up sequentially on the axis, with precise intervals marked.

"The interval between the first and second items was thirty-six hours, and the interval between the second and third items was less than forty-eight hours."

She turned around.

"Our communication analysis team conducted a simulation: if you want three events to create the maximum cumulative effect in the global public opinion arena, what is the optimal interval between their releases?"

Patterson stared at her.

"How many?"

Thirty to forty-eight hours.

Gray tapped three nodes on the timeline with his index finger.

"It just so happens that the popularity of the first event has entered a high plateau period after its explosive phase, and public attention has begun to decline slightly but has not yet dropped significantly. Launching the second event at this point will trigger a cognitive superposition effect. The public will automatically associate the two events, and the intensity of their emotions will not be additive, but multiplicative."

Her finger drew an exponential curve in the air.