He tapped the knuckles against the dark-energy circuit groove on the wolf-head bone hilt of his blade ⚙️, and Kavi, the Soul Hunter, saw a line of encrypted code pop out from his tactical wrist gauntlet—this was the signal source of the target he’d been tracking across three star systems, and it turned out to be bound to this very short blade he’d just scavenged from the black market. The spine-like ridges along the blade’s edge are crafted using the Old Empire’s Soul-Binding technique; each raised section is inlaid with the lingering soul fragments of ferocious beasts once hunted by that era, while the alloy cord wrapped around the cross-hilt still bears traces of stardust from the Dead Silence Star.

Seventy-two hours ago, the Ember Remnant organization intercepted the soul-core sample he’d been guarding—a key capable of reactivating the Old Empire’s dark-energy weaponry. But when he stumbled upon this blade at the black market, the soul-core’s resonance signal suddenly spiked to full strength. As Kavi stepped into the abandoned Imperial space station, the crimson beam of the emergency lights swept over the blade, and the spine-like ridges began to emit a faint azure glow 💠, accompanied by a faint whisper of soul language—not the roar of a beast, but the static of communications from the Ember Remnant.

With a sudden spin, the blade’s edge sliced through the rusted steel plating of the station, and a dark-purple soul shadow shot forth from the blade—no beast, but the remnant soul of the Ember Remnant leader. It was this very individual who had once been hunted by the blade, yet during the soul-binding process secretly concealed the soul-core’s key within the blade itself.

The wrist gauntlet blared a piercing alarm, and the station’s dark-energy reactor began to overload. Clutching the short blade, Kavi watched as the reactor core grew ever brighter, and suddenly realized: he wasn’t tracking the key—he was being led straight toward destruction…🔴