Lin Ye’s tactical boots crushed the congealed alien slime coating the wreckage of the Starship Canglu, his knuckles turning pale from the sheer force of the pressure, while the “Deep-Space Fang” in his palm sent out a fine, high-frequency tremor. As a lone, stand-in assault specialist with the 7th Interstellar Marine Corps, he had already been scouring this derelict starship—missing for three days—for seven hours. No sooner had he pried open the warped hatch than a former comrade, now controlled by a parasitic organism, suddenly burst forth from the ventilation ducts. The creature’s joints were grotesquely dislocated, slime dripping down its jawline, and its guttural roars shook the rusted fragments off the bulkheads. Without hesitation, Lin Ye lunged forward with his dagger; the blade of the “Deep-Space Fang” instantly activated its built-in high-frequency oscillation module, effortlessly slicing through the parasite’s hardened exoskeleton. A pungent, acrid smell of burning mingled with a metallic stench as the fumes filled the compartment. Just as he leaned against the wall to catch his breath, the dagger’s tremor suddenly intensified: faint blue fluorescence lit up the hidden patterns etched into the blade, pointing precisely toward the ship’s core reactor chamber. Lin Ye reached for the pulse grenade at his waist—only to be startled when the dagger, on its own, slipped free of his grasp, hovering midair and slowly drifting toward the core compartment, as if drawn by some unknown force slumbering deep within the vessel. Meanwhile, his tactical helmet display abruptly flashed an unauthorized line of encrypted code: “Host match complete. Initiating trace-back procedure.”