The moment his fingertips touched the matte indigo blade, a bone-chilling cold ran through Karen’s neural synapses, making his cybernetic arm twitch involuntarily❄️. As a senior member of the deep-space salvage team, he had never encountered such a strange artifact on the edge of the Orion Arm in 2198🌌—the "Abyssal Soul-Devouring Hollow Claw Blade"🔵. He was crouching in the half-collapsed storage compartment of the "Styx Explorer", which had been missing for three months, surrounded by scattered wreckage of scientific equipment, cracked data pads, and alloy bulkheads corroded by eerie dark patterns that glowed faintly in the dim cabin light. The damaged holographic log on the bulkhead played in fragments, its audio distorted by static: the expedition team discovered this blade deep in the crust of the dead planet Y-79, a world wrapped in a thick layer of tentacle-shaped stardust that blocked all long-range signals. Its intricate hollow patterns were not carved by hand, but natural runes that could channel raw void energy, and anyone who touched it would be infected by the fragmented consciousness of ancient star spirits that had been dormant for eons⚡. Karen tried to yank his hand back in panic, only to find that his flesh-and-blood fingertips were already fused with the ring-shaped grip of the blade, the cold void energy spreading up his arm like ivy. Vivid, terrifying images flooded his mind: a colossal behemoth with hundreds of suction-cup-covered tentacles tearing through the hull of a starship, its roar shaking the fabric of space🐙; robed priests of a long-lost alien civilization using this blade to slice open a nebula energy core, their eyes glowing with the same indigo light as the blade🔋; thousands of disembodied consciousness fragments wailing in the endless void, their voices merging into a deafening chorus that echoed in his skull🔊. At that exact moment, the emergency alarm on his salvage ship, the "Raven", blared to life, red warning lights flashing across the cabin. Rushing to the viewport, Karen froze—outside, the swirling stardust had begun to converge into a massive, unblinking eyeball shape, its pupil a swirling vortex of dark energy. The communicator on his belt emitted a low-frequency tremor that matched the hum of the blade in his hand, and a distorted, guttural voice whispered in a language he had never heard, but somehow understood: "You are now the vessel..."