As his knuckle grazed the dagger’s blade, whose surface shimmered with gradient patterns, the neural interface at the tip of Lin Ye’s finger flared with a faint blue glow⚡. In the rubble-strewn underbelly of Old New York City, he had tracked his target across three star sectors—now the figure crouched just thirty meters away in a rusted ventilation duct, its low-frequency hum barely masking the target’s rapid, labored breathing. This dagger was something he’d salvaged seven years earlier from the wreckage of the United Government’s Ark‑class experimental vessel; faint energy fields lingered within the etched grooves of its blade, enough to evade both thermal imaging and metal‑detection systems🔍. He hadn’t taken this job for the million‑star‑credit bounty—it was the encrypted terminal carried by his target that held the core data from the Ark’s catastrophic explosion. The United Government, eager to conceal the truth behind the accident, had long since placed all those who knew the details on their hit lists. That data was the only evidence he possessed to seek justice for his sister. When the patrol drone sweeping the alleyway passed over the ruins, Lin Ye pressed himself against a crumbling concrete wall, causing the dagger’s gradient patterns to dim. On the drone’s sensor display, only ordinary debris appeared🗿. He edged closer to the ventilation opening; the blade’s gradient motifs resonated with the blue glow emanating from the interface, and the entire weapon seemed to radiate an almost imperceptible halo of light. Just as he was about to pry open the iron grille of the vent, a voice suddenly echoed through the duct, traveling directly along the energy‑infused grooves of the blade straight into his neural interface: “You’ve finally arrived. The thing she left for you… it really did lead you here.”📡 Lin Ye froze, his grip tightening around the hilt. He had never spoken of this dagger’s origins to anyone—not even once—and he had never revealed that the person who perished aboard the Ark was his sister. From the duct emerged a figure, slowly stepping forward. With a flick of the back of the neck, they exposed a gradient energy pattern identical to the one adorning the dagger’s blade; at the very center of that pattern lay a tiny star emblem✴—the same symbol Lin Ye had carved onto his sister’s bracelet when he was seven.