His knuckles scraped against the frost that had condensed on the wall of an abandoned migrant ship. Lin Ye, a scavenger, flicked his wrist and pried the short dagger free from the rib‑like grooves where it had been lodged in the cabin’s plating⚔️. As a semi‑legal smuggler and salvager eking out a living in the asteroid belt, he’d seen plenty of bizarre gear abandoned by the Alliance—but this fully low‑poly‑designed dagger still triggered three consecutive risk‑identification alerts on his implanted tactical retinal implant⚠️. The cabin’s oxygen‑leak alarm buzzed incessantly, and the residual heat from the main reactor still baked the soles of his boots. Just three days earlier, this vessel had been packed with genetically mutated seed cargo bound for Proxima Centauri to kickstart colonization; now, all that remained were bodies frozen into crystalline icicles throughout the hold—and this single dagger, untouched by even a trace of blood🩸.

He slipped the dagger into his waterproof utility pouch, then piloted his salvage craft away from the ghost ship that had drifted for half a month. Only as the gravitational tides of the jump maneuver slammed against the hull did he finally pull the dagger out and examine it in the palm of his hand—the raised facets along the handle perfectly aligned with the load‑bearing channels of his prosthetic limb, while the two sharp points of the crossguard snugly fit into the grip‑slots of his palm. It was as if, from the moment it was assembled, this weapon had been custom‑made just for him🧩. During a refueling stop at an asteroid port, the Alliance’s Black Sail squad—sent to crack down on smuggling—was already waiting outside the docking bay. Three precisely aimed laser beams swept across the salvage craft’s shielding, and the commanding captain barked over the comm system: “Hand over all recovered items, or we’ll reduce you to space‑borne radiation dust☄️.”

As Lin Ye stepped out of the hatch clutching the dagger, he wondered: what could a cold‑forged blade without a sharpened edge possibly do against a soldier clad in third‑generation powered armor? Then his hand moved of its own accord—sliding the dagger gently along the thermal vent seam at the back of the suit’s neck. The towering man, nearly two meters tall, collapsed without a sound, his body limp. Not a speck of grease marred the blade’s edge—it sliced through room‑temperature butter as easily as butter🧈. The remaining soldiers opened fire, spraying volleys of bullets. Huddled behind a hydrogen‑storage container, Lin Ye looked down to see a faint blue glow emanating from the blade’s surface, accompanied by muffled low‑frequency whispers—echoes of consciousness left behind by the migrant ship’s captain who had died three days earlier: “It’s not salvage—it’s a seed🔮. The Alliance claims the planetary‑adaptation genes we’ve engineered are mutant viruses and must be sealed off and eradicated. We embedded the complete genetic core within the dagger’s crystalline nodes; it’s been drifting here for half a year, waiting for you—your mother was one of those migrants who escaped Alliance quarantine, and your veins carry our blood🩸.” Lin Ye tightened his grip on the dagger, the crystalline facets of its blade reflecting the same cold, hard light in his eyes, while the click of his opponent reloading already echoed in his ears✨.