His fingertips brushed against the raised spines on the short blade, and a chilling metallic coldness shot straight up his spine to the crown of his head 🤕. As a scavenger eking out a living in the interstellar wastelands, Lin Ye pried this short blade from the wreckage of the abandoned Battle Cruiser No. 79: the skull-shaped hilt is inlaid with dark-gold carvings, the knuckle-like grip is wrapped in twisted thorns, and three tiny skulls at the crossguard seem to be staring intently into his eyes 👀. The moment his fingertip pressed firmly against the grip, countless fragmented images exploded in his mind: starports engulfed in flames, roaring bioengineered soldiers, and warship power cores instantly consumed by inferno ⚡. He suddenly realized: this was the “Soul-Eating Thorn Blade” of the legendary Ancient Interstellar Death Corps, said to absorb the mental energy of defeated foes to empower its wielder. But just as he reached to slip the blade into his radiation-proof backpack, the cruiser’s hatch was violently slammed open, and a low-frequency growl—alien and inhuman—echoed from beyond. The blade’s spines began to glow hot, the skull sockets flared with an eerie, ghostly blue light 🔵, and the metal buckles of the backpack were instantly crushed into dust by an invisible force field.