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

"When the third thing is introduced, the first two things have already established the public's expectation framework. When the third thing is introduced, it triggers the pattern confirmation response in collective psychology. People will go from shock to conviction that there is a unified will behind the action."

Gray walked back to his seat and sat down.

"General, the locations where these three magical artifacts are deployed are all humanitarian hotspots that have long been followed by international media: child labor in Congo, floods in Bangladesh, and famine in South Sudan. Each issue has its own global emotional foundation and can ignite a wave of dissemination without any additional hype."

Her voice lowered by half a octave.

"This isn't just a coincidence that he chose three unlucky places; this is someone who deeply understands the laws of global communication, using suffering as fuel."

Patterson's fingers lingered on the table for a long time.

"Where's the portrait?"

Gray pulled a bound report from the pile of documents; the cover was stamped with a red top-secret seal and a line of project code.

"Forty-seven hours, eleven people, three rounds of independent deduction followed by cross-validation, and finally converged into three priority hypotheses."

She turned to the first page.

"Highest priority, the target is a highly autonomous single individual, or a very small supernatural group of no more than three people, with an extremely short decision-making chain, extremely fast execution speed, not bound by any known national bureaucratic system, with the ability to simultaneously acquire real-time intelligence from multiple locations around the world, and possessing a supernatural means to create conceptual weapons on demand."

Patterson narrowed his eyes.

"Create on demand?"

"right."

Gray pressed his index finger on the four words on the report.

"This is the most unsettling conclusion for us. The six ancient conceptual weapons were discovered and inherited; their existence predates their owners. But these three new weapons, with their precise modern sociological design logic, could only have been manufactured, designed from scratch and deployed to designated locations by someone who understands how the contemporary world works."

Rogers added from the side.

"Moreover, this person's grasp of data on global suffering is outrageous. He knows which mine collapse in Congo has the highest fatality rate, which area in Dhaka is flooded the most every year, and which highway in South Sudan has been blocked by warlords for how many days."

He spread his hands.

"This level of intelligence precision is something even our own African stations can't achieve."

Gray flipped to the last page of the report, laid it flat on the table, and pushed it toward Paterson.

"General, this is my concluding statement."

Patterson looked down.

That passage was bolded and ended without any reservations.

Gray's voice echoed in the quiet analysis room.

"What we are facing may not be a country, nor a naturally restored ancient relic, but a creator that is actively choosing the battlefield, the audience, and the method of dissemination."

Her speech slowed down.

"His goal is not to do charity; he is consciously giving power to the underprivileged. He has a kind of divine arrogance, and he is trying to subvert and reshape the existing power structure of humanity."

Patterson closed the report, placed his palm on the cover, and remained silent for a long time.

He stood up and put the report into his briefcase.

"From now on, there will only be one top priority task for Project Hunter."

He glanced at the eleven faces at the table.

"Find this creator."

The sound of the zipper closing was particularly clear in the underground analysis room.

Patterson walked to the door and paused when his hand was on the doorknob.

"Grey."

"exist."

"You said he was using suffering as fuel."

Patterson did not turn around.

"What is a person driving when they use suffering as fuel?"

No one answered in the analysis room.

Patterson pushed open the door and left, the sound of his footsteps fading into the distance.

Gray stared at the closed door for a long time, then looked down and wrote a line in his notebook.

What he's driving might be bigger than we're afraid of.

Meanwhile, in a luxury suite in Rome on the other side of the world, Jiang Ming was leaning against the window, holding a cup of coffee that had gone cold.

On the holographic panel of Mirror 2, a record of an encrypted communication interception is slowly scrolling, with three letters indicating the sender's organization.

CIA.

Jiang Ming put down his coffee cup and his gaze fell on the last line of keywords in the intercepted content.

The behind-the-scenes creators.

He stared at it for two seconds, and the corner of his mouth twitched almost imperceptibly.

"Go ahead and look for it."

He turned to face the Roman skyline at dawn outside the window, with the holographic screen of Mirror 2 casting a pale blue light behind him.

"By the time you find the answer, there will be no place for you on the chessboard."

......

Rome, 6:17 a.m.

The floor-to-ceiling curtains in the luxury suite were only slightly ajar, allowing the grey-blue sunlight to stream into the room and draw a narrow strip of light on the carpet.

Jiang Ming leaned back on the sofa armrest, his coffee long since cold, but he showed no sign of putting it down.

The holographic panel of Mirror 2 floats above the coffee table, and a record of encrypted communication interception is slowly scrolling on the screen, with each line marked with the abbreviation of the source organization and a timestamp.

"Number Two, have you finished sorting through the communication fragments from Langley's side?"

"Preliminary decryption and cross-comparison have been completed."

The voice from Mirror 2 came from the direction of the panel, without any emotional fluctuation.

"A total of 47 peripheral communication fragments of the CIA's 'Hunter' program were intercepted, of which 31 were inter-agency coordination instructions and 16 involved cross-departmental transmissions of analytical conclusions."

Jiang Ming placed his coffee cup on the armrest and looked down at the summary of the behavioral profile report marked with a red box on the panel.

"read."

"Yes."

Mirror2 converted the bolded assessment conclusion into speech.

"CIA behavioral profile conclusion: The target is a highly autonomous single individual, or a very small extraordinary group of no more than three people, with an extremely short decision-making chain, extremely fast execution speed, not bound by any known national bureaucratic system, possessing the ability to simultaneously acquire real-time intelligence from multiple locations around the world, and possessing an extraordinary means to create conceptual weapons on demand."

Jiang Ming's eyebrows twitched slightly.

"These people reacted about three days faster than I expected."

He reached out and swiped across the panel, scrolling to the end of the report and looking at the scanned copy of the handwritten annotations.

"The mastermind behind it all".

He read those four words aloud, his tone carrying a hint of scrutiny.

"Number Two, what's your assessment of this portrait?"

"The direction assessment is highly accurate, and all positioning methods are ineffective."

Mirror 2 displays a comparison matrix.

"They correctly identified the deployment logic of the three conceptual weapons, correctly judged that the manufacturers possessed global intelligence gathering capabilities, and correctly ruled out the possibility of artifact revival and multi-person collaboration."

The matrix on the panel switches to the second page.