Kael’s knuckles whitened with exertion, sweat soaking through his aramid fiber tactical gloves as he clamped down tightly on the matte blue piercing dagger🔦. This was a replica of an ancient civilization’s sacrificial blade, printed 72 hours earlier using an unknown biological polymer extracted from the calcified base of the ruins’ altar, via a portable 3D printer—the scan prototype was a fragment of a stone blade embedded in the relief crack🏛️. Now, he was the only member of the entire exploration team still retaining his sanity: three geologists had gone mad after touching the relief, smashing their helmets with pickaxes; two security officers had been dragged into the rift by gelatinous tentacles seeping from the void, leaving only fragments of their tactical vests behind🩸. Three minutes ago, this dagger had just sliced through a translucent tentacle protruding from the void rift, and the three holes on the blade were emitting a hum synchronized with his brainwaves, as if responding to some kind of call from the depths of the abyss👽. Kael stared at the eerie patterns emerging on the blade, visible only under ultraviolet light, and suddenly realized that this printed piece, which he had thought was a self-defense weapon, was actually an offering used by the ancient civilization to “appease” the void entity—the holes were meant to hold the blood cores of living creatures, to delay the void’s consumption of the planet💀. The alarm for rift expansion suddenly shrieked in his tactical helmet, and the hum of the blade grew more intense, even starting to vibrate his arm slightly. On the helmet’s tactical display, communication requests from the colonial fleet were flashing wildly, and out of the corner of his eye, countless flickering, eye-like light spots began to emerge from the depths of the rift. Kael didn’t know what choice to make: follow the ancient civilization’s ritual, fill the blade’s holes with his own blood core, and seal the rift with his life; or flee back to the landing pod with the dagger, letting the abyss devour this planet and lead the void’s threat to humanity’s colonial system?