As her ring finger brushed against the swirling powder-blue patterns etched along the dagger’s blade👆, interstellar mercenary Casey suddenly realized that the employer’s label—“an ordinary antique artifact”—was anything but mundane🔪. This was Casey’s ninety-ninth gray‑area mission; the client had simply asked her to retrieve the item from the underground archive beneath the domed city’s ruins, with a reward sufficient to cover three months’ maintenance for her bionic eye👛. When she shattered the radiation‑stained tempered glass, her prosthetic leg registered a faint resonance🦿—a vibration that grew stronger the deeper she ventured into the archive—until she finally came upon the dagger in a waterproof storage locker: no rust, its swirling patterns almost alive, emitting a soft glow under the dim emergency lights🌌. Scanning the fragmented archival records, she learned that this object had been brought back by a twentieth‑century interstellar expedition from a collapsing nebula in the Sagittarius Arm🧬—originally a component attached to the wreckage of an ancient, god‑like vessel, later carved and polished into the shape of a dagger. It could silently consume the spacetime turbulence surrounding its wielder and even dissolve otherworldly projections that should never have existed🔮. Just as Casey finished reading the final line, a viscous, writhing sound echoed from the ventilation shaft behind her—the rift‑corroding creature that had followed her inside. Ordinary bullets were utterly ineffective against it👉👈. Instinctively, she drew the dagger and gripped it tightly; when the blade sliced through the creature’s body, not even a whimper escaped before the vortex‑like patterns reduced it to tiny flecks of energy, all absorbed into the blade’s intricate纹路✨. Wiping the blade clean, Casey stepped out of the archive. Her communicator crackled with the employer’s anxious query: had she secured the item? Had she been attacked by the alien‑infested beast?🤳 She weighed the warm dagger in her hand, glanced at the secretive interstellar‑church emblem tucked into the corner of her employer’s avatar on the screen, and smiled without replying. Instead, she cut the transmission and turned toward the monorail leading into the Rift Zone🚝. Who said that divine artifacts must be entrusted only to those who spout lies?🌠