The neon‑lit, acid‑laden rain pattered against the leaky zinc roofs of Neo‑Tokyo’s undercity 🌧️. Bio‑enhanced mercenary K, holding his breath, huddled in a half‑meter‑wide ventilation duct, his knuckles repeatedly brushing the gradient blade of the dagger tucked into his trouser leg. This was an experimental artifact he’d salvaged three months earlier from the sunken R’lyeh research station at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean 🔬. NEOM, the corporation that monopolizes neural technology, had captured the lingering fragments of an ancient god’s scattered soul and infused them into a specially engineered crystalline material, 3D‑printing the dagger’s iridescent, color‑shifting blade. The skull motif carved into the handle served as the soul’s anchor; each swing of the blade siphoned away the target’s conscious entropy, dragging their dying consciousness into the extradimensional space connected to the weapon’s core 🔮. K’s mission this time was to assassinate an independent intelligence broker holed up in the undercity—someone who held damning evidence of NEOM’s clandestine excavation of an ancient‑god relic and its subsequent massacre of the indigenous population. He licked his cold‑metal‑gleaming lower lip, flicked the dagger free, and watched as the blue‑to‑pink gradient of the blade cast a soft, ethereal glow through the dim tunnel ✨. Suddenly, an unbearable, faint itch rippled through the handle; the hollow eye sockets of the skull began to ooze a pale green, viscous fluid matching the blade’s hue. Only then did K realize, with a jolt, that he’d been staring down at his own lower back—where a wound from a firefight days earlier had turned gray and rotted without him even noticing. From the moment he took hold of this blade, the fragment of the ancient god’s soul had ceased fixating on its various targets; it had long since set its sights on K himself—a living anchor brimming with neural enhancements and boundless vitality. Outside the ventilation duct, the measured, composed footsteps of the intelligence broker echoed closer. Unbidden, the blade tilted ever so slightly, its razor‑sharp tip already quietly aimed at K’s own throat 🩸.