My knuckles, still dusty from prying open the sealed hatch of the derelict stasis pod, haven’t stopped trembling 🛠️. This pastel gradient dagger lies motionless on the charred heat insulation pad, the only intact object left on this 300-year-old sunken scout ship. We are a crew of scrap scavengers, tearing apart abandoned warships in the ancient battlefield of Cygnus Beta to sell raw materials for a living, and none of us have ever seen such a stunning blade. The gradient shifts from foggy blue at the end of the hollow handle to soft pink at the sharp tip, with sharp angular cuts that look like it was carved from condensed stardust itself. It has no polished sharp edge, but it can slice through a 3-centimeter thick cut-resistant canvas like it’s warm softened butter 🧈. My partner Joe grabbed it first and wanted to trade it for aged whiskey at the port station, but he was found lying dead outside the docking hatch that same night, his throat cut clean open right against this dagger’s flat blade. Everyone says it was just an accident, that Joe slipped while handling the untested weapon, but I can’t shake the odd, crawling feeling that something is very wrong here 🧐. Last night, I sorted through Joe’s forgotten belongings left on our salvage ship, and found an encrypted 3D scan file of the dagger’s cross section. Hidden in the interlayer of the blade’s ridge is a miniature lattice of encrypted navigation coordinates, pointing straight to the core of the dark nebula where our ship is currently anchored. Three hundred years ago, the so-called “void heretics” the Inquisition wiped out here were actually a group of archaeologists who defected from the Interstellar Federation. They uncovered a prehistoric alien relic that could rewrite all human knowledge of the universe here, the Inquisition bombed the entrance to the ruin, and only this dagger, the only key to the relic, was left drifting in the debris 🔮. I just finished decoding and entering the coordinates into my ship’s navigation system when fine glowing blue particles started drifting past the observation porthole, the gradient texture on the dagger began to glow softly, and the fingers I stretched toward the handle have slowly started moving on their own, completely against my own will 🌌