My knuckles still tremble as I pry open the rusted seal of the hibernation pod⚙️. Lying quietly on an insulating carbonized pad is a dagger with a delicate pink‑blue gradient—of all the relics salvaged from this three-hundred-year-old scout ship, only it remains perfectly intact. We’re a ragtag crew of scavengers who dismantle decommissioned warships in the Beta Cygni battlefield, and we’ve never seen a blade so exquisite: the gradient shifts smoothly from misty blue at the hilt to soft pink‑white at the tip, with sharply defined facets that, despite being unsharpened, can effortlessly slice through three-centimeter‑thick cut‑resistant canvas. My partner, Old Joe, couldn’t resist pocketing it right away to trade for some rum back in the port city—but that very night, he was found slumped by the airlock entrance, his throat cleanly slit, the wound aligning precisely with the blade’s edge. Everyone chalked it up to an accident, but something about it didn’t sit right with me. Last night, while sifting through Old Joe’s belongings left aboard the ship, I stumbled upon his stored CT scan of the blade’s cross‑section—and discovered that hidden within the blade’s spine lies a miniature array of coordinate points, pointing straight to the core of the dark nebula where we’re currently anchored. Three centuries ago, what the Inquisition branded as “void‑worshipping heretics” were actually a band of archaeologists who had defected from the Interstellar Federation. They’d unearthed prehistoric ruins here—artifacts capable of rewriting humanity’s understanding of the cosmos. The Inquisition blew open the entrance, and only this single blade survived, carried down as a key🔑. Just as I entered those coordinates into the nav‑console, fine blue particles began drifting outside the viewport, and the dagger’s gradient pattern started to glow faintly. My hand, reaching toward the hilt, seemed to have slipped free of my control✨