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

Pacific Ocean, deck of the Explorer.

Funina sat cross-legged on the stern deck, a blanket wrapped around her chin, her bare feet on the cold steel plate, her toes curled up in the cold.

She ate only three of the second plate of cream puffs Louis brought her, drank two and a half cups of hot chocolate, and the third cup was already cold by the time it was placed next to her.

She had her eyes closed.

The mark between my eyebrows shimmered with a faint blue light in the sea breeze, its depth a shade darker than it had been the day before.

The edges of the light were somewhat grayish. Zhou Ruo compared it with the color chart in the manual, and the closest description was dark water gray-blue.

The blue channel rotates one meter away, its light steady, with faint, residual reddish-gold pulses appearing and disappearing at the edges.

Zhou Ruo stood three steps away at the designated distance, holding a record book that had been turned to page forty-seven.

Her gaze swept over Funina's breathing rhythm every fifteen seconds and over the changes in the light and color at the entrance of the passage every thirty seconds.

She has maintained this rhythm for nearly thirty-six hours.

Funina's shoulder twitched.

Zhou Ruo immediately tightened her grip on the pen.

Fu Ningna opened her eyes, her expression unlike any Zhou Ruo was familiar with.

It wasn't the disgust when eating a substandard cream puff, nor the impatience when facing Chen Jianguo, nor the indifference when concentrating before diving.

It's confusion.

This was the first time Zhou Ruo had seen something like this on Fu Ningna's face in all the time she had known her.

"It stopped."

Zhou Ruo's pen touched the paper. "What stopped?"

"pulse."

Funina turned her head to glance at the entrance of the passage, her tone no different from when she complained about the cream being over-whipped—relaxed, with that ingrained impatience.

"The one that used to come every seven seconds."

Zhou Ruo quickly flipped to the latest page of the record book, which showed the last recorded time of the 0.14 Hz main pulse.

Are you sure?

"Complete silence began nineteen minutes ago."

Funina's bare foot rubbed against the steel plate, her toes touching the bottom of the cooled hot chocolate cup.

"Not only is the main pulse, which occurs every seven seconds, gone, but the baseline at 0.07 Hz at the bottom layer is also gone."

Zhou Ruo closed the notebook, turned around and ran towards the cabin door.

"Sonar chamber!"

Her voice was amplified by the metal walls of the corridor and reached the ears of the communications soldier.

Thirty seconds later, a long sonic boom echoed across the deck via walkie-talkie.

"Confirmed. The 0.14 Hz main pulse has returned to zero, and the 0.07 Hz residual baseline has disappeared synchronously. There is currently no identifiable periodic signal. The active sonar has swept three times, but the beam is thrown into a vacuum; there is no echo, and nothing is reflected back."

The formation command system switched to emergency mode within one minute.

All observation equipment on the Tanyuan and the two Type 055 destroyers was set to maximum sensitivity.

Supervisor Zhang proposed releasing the backup deep-sea probe over the communication line, but Chen Jianguo cut him off before he could finish speaking.

"Did you salvage the equipment wreckage from below 8,000 meters last time? The Deep Sea Overlord cost 200 million yuan. A single deep-sea probe made by the Hua family isn't much cheaper. Throwing it down there is just sending metal debris into that stagnant water."

Manager Zhang remained silent for three seconds before giving up.

Chen Jianguo's voice switched directly from the encrypted channel to the deck intercom.

"Ms. Fulina, what is your judgment?"

Funina did not answer immediately.

Zhou Ruo stood inside the cabin door, clutching the corner of the record book in her hand.

She noticed that Funina tapped her right index finger twice on her knee before stopping.

Eight seconds.

Zhou Ruoshu's.

"It's not dead."

Fu Ningna's voice was so soft that the sea breeze almost blew the words away.

"The water still remembers it."

Zhou Ruo took half a step forward and then stopped.

The specified distance, three steps.

"If it were dead, the water below wouldn't be so calm; it would be chaotic. The molecular structure of the entire trench would collapse in a chain reaction, and I can feel it here—more clearly than any seismic wave."

"But now there's nothing there, it's as quiet as someone holding their last breath."

She looked down at the deep indigo light reflected off the steel plate at the entrance of the passage.

"Before, I shouted every fourteen seconds because I didn't know if anyone could hear me. Later, I doubled it to once every seven seconds because I knew someone was coming and I was desperately trying to catch them."

She touched the cold glass of chocolate with her toe.

"They don't even count to seven seconds anymore."

Zhou Ruo's pen stopped on the paper, and the ink smudged into a small dot.

"It saved its last bit of energy for me to get down."

The sound of Chen Jianguo breathing came through the walkie-talkie.

Funina raised her head and looked at the line where the sea met the sky in the distance. Her expression slowly changed from confusion back to her usual indifference.

"But this also means it's weaker than I thought and won't last much longer."

The sunlight on the sea fell on her face, highlighting the gray ring around the mark between her eyebrows.

She stood up, kicked off the blanket beside her feet, and walked barefoot onto the cool steel plate to the edge of the passageway.

"I'm going down now."

Chen Jianguo was silent for four seconds on the channel. "You still have twelve hours left to rest."

"There are no more twelve hours left."

Zhou Ruo closed the notebook, her whole body tensing up.

Funina turned around to look at her.

Three things.

Zhou Ruo nodded.

"First, keep an eye on the blue light at the tunnel entrance. If the color changes from dark indigo to white, have the formation retreat fifty kilometers."

Zhou Ruo's lips moved slightly. "Why fifty kilometers?"

"White is not an explosion."

Funina drew a line on the steel plate with her toes, a meaningless action, but her hands and feet were always busy.

"But the white color means that the water below has started to disregard the laws of physics. If you get too close, your ship's hull will forget that it is made of steel."

Zhou Ruo wrote down this sentence word for word in the notebook.

"Second, have Louis make twenty more cream puffs; I want to eat them when I come up. Reduce the whipping speed of the cream by half a speed again; it was off last time."

Zhou Ruo drew a number on the back of the cream puff.

Funina's bare feet were already on the edge of the passageway. Blue water light climbed up from the soles of her feet, over her ankles, and formed a very thin film of water on her calves.

She didn't look at Zhou Ruo; her gaze was fixed on the center of the swirling water.

"third."

The tone changed.

It became so light that when Zhou Ruo later reconstructed the conversation in her notebook, she repeatedly checked three times to make sure she hadn't misheard.

"If I don't come up in more than forty-eight hours, don't send anyone down."

Zhou Ruo raised her head.

Funina had her back to her, her short hair blowing to one side in the sea breeze, revealing the fine downy hair on the back of her neck and the edge of the mark between her eyebrows that shone with a grayish-blue light.

"Don't make that face."

Zhou Ruo did not speak.

Funina's shoulders tightened slightly, then relaxed again.

"It's not because I'm unimportant, it's because if that fish down there can't hold on, the trouble won't just be about one person dying."

Zhou Ruo's hand gripped the pen tightly, her knuckles turning white.

She opened her mouth slightly, something stuck in her throat, and in the end, she just lowered her head again and wrote the third entry in the notebook.

No further questions were asked.

Funina stepped into the passageway.

The water light rose from her ankles to her knees, then to her waist, and finally to her shoulders.

Her loose, white and blue-streaked short hair transformed into a flowing mist in the blue light.

At the last second, the tip of the ahoge trembled on the shiny surface, and then the whole person sank vertically into the rotating blue entrance without splashing a single drop of water.

The entrance to the passage changed from bright blue to deep indigo within three seconds.

It was deeper and darker than the first dive.

Zhou Ruo stood at the stern, her logbook pressed against her chest. The wind blew from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, carrying a cool, unusual scent that didn't belong to the normal ocean.

The deep indigo light from the passageway cast a slowly rotating dark circle on the steel plate.

The humming sound of a mixer starting up came from the direction of the kitchen.

Louis is opening his third bag of flour.

Zhou Ruo wrote the time in her notebook and drew a downward arrow next to it.

She closed the pen cap, squatted down at the stern, placed the notebook on her knees, and pressed one hand on the steel plate, feeling the faint vibrations transmitted through the water to the hull.

There were no pulses at all.

The world below 10,000 meters was so quiet that only Funina remained.