As his fingertip brushed across the gradient‑tinted blade, the bionic skin’s sensors detected interlayer phase fluctuations as minute as 0.02 angstroms🔮, confirming to Lin Ye that this artifact—pulled from the debris pile of a salvage vessel—was no mere mass‑produced training prop from interstellar military stockpiles. In the Alpha Lyrae star system, thirty light-years away, a cleanup operation against rebel remnants had just concluded. The charter for wandering salvagers clearly stipulated that all unclaimed military fragments could be disposed of at will—except for items marked “phase‑eroded”🔏. He pressed the hilt against the viewport; cold blue starlight filtering through Pluto’s orbit seeped into the bridge via the hollowed‑out design, casting swirling stellar patterns on the main control panel—not an error from stamping or machining, but spatial ripples left only by a phase‑blade that had endured more than ten hyperspace jumps📡. The Alliance publicly announced that the entire Seventh Tactical Squadron had perished in service, with every weapon onboard disintegrated in the turbulence of hyperspace, reduced to nothing even at the molecular level. Yet this blade still bore the faint impression of the captain’s wedding ring, etched into its surface, and its temperature was a full three degrees colder than the ship’s constant ambient setting🧊. Lin Ye activated the salvage ship’s spectral analyzer; the waveband emanating from the blade precisely matched the cryptic broadcast the Alliance had censored seven days earlier, with half a still‑undecoded coordinate tacked onto the end of the frequency—a clue pointing toward a vacuum‑dark region in the Sagittarius arm, labeled “spatial anomaly”⚫. Clenching the hilt, he felt the powder‑blue gradient of the blade press against his wristbone, while the bionic framework transmitted an almost imperceptible pulse, as if a lock had finally aligned with its matching key—so it turned out that the so‑called “massive sacrifice” had been the squadron’s desperate attempt to hide, along with a secret the Alliance sought to keep hidden, within a spatial fold from which not even light could escape. This dagger was their sole trail dropped for the outside world🧩. Outside, asteroid fragments skimmed past the hull, and just as the alarm began to shriek, Lin Ye had already entered the coordinates into the navigation system. The hexagonal cutout at the hilt’s tip slotted perfectly into his wrist’s neural interface, and a pale pink phase field spread along the nerve pathways. Far off in that dark region, an exceedingly faint signal flickered✨.