The smell of ozone mixed with low-temperature disinfectant water seeped into his nostrils. Lin Ye’s fingertips brushed against the frost on the inner shelf of the refrigerated cabinet, prying open the encrypted compartment labeled XM‑73. There, nestled quietly within the folds of a half‑rolled body bag, lay this short blade. Three days earlier, a deep-sea exploration team had hauled up from the bottom of the Mariana Trench—12,000 meters below sea level—a fragment of a sunken vessel that bore no resemblance to any known civilization. The ship’s hull was etched with grotesque, indecipherable nonlinear symbols; only this short blade remained firmly lodged in the control console slot of the captain’s cabin, its entire surface showing not the slightest trace of oxidation. As a special forensic pathologist at the Interstellar United Academy, Lin Ye’s mission was to determine the origin of this artifact within twenty-four hours and rule out any potential biohazard. He placed the blade under the dissecting table’s floodlight, where the skeletal patterns interlocking along its edge revealed faint, pulsating dark veins beneath the cold glow. Last night, he had been haunted by relentless nightmares: countless starships bearing skull emblems disintegrated and exploded in the void, scalding black blood splattering across the bridge’s observation windows, while unearthly wails pierced deep into his cranial nerves. This morning, his team leader confided privately that three of the seven crew members involved in the salvage operation had already gone mad; the remaining four all exhibited twisted bony growths beneath their cerebral cortexes. In another seventy-two hours, the entire underwater base would be utterly cleared by orbital fusion bombs. Lin Ye pulled out his neural interface, hesitated for a few seconds, then pressed its connector against the skull motif adorning the blade’s guard. Instantly, the data stream breaching his consciousness firewall delivered the answer: this was no alien weapon at all—it was a vessel sealing the remnants of an ancient deity. Anyone who deliberately touched it became a conduit for the deity’s reincarnated spirit, and those deranged explorers were merely nourishment prepared in advance to awaken that spirit. The interface’s alarm began flashing frantically red, and the base’s blast‑proof doors locked automatically. Gazing at the bone spurs slowly rising on the back of his hand, Lin Ye gripped the blade and suddenly smiled: so it turned out that the “clearance” spoken of by the higher-ups had, from beginning to end, been nothing more than a sacrificial altar prepared for this primordial god.