The acrid smell of ozone and street synth-narc fills the undercity walkway, the hum of passing anti-grav cabs thrumming up through the cracked pavement under my scuffed boots 🥽. I’ve been hunting this dagger for three standard cycles, ever since my salvage team got wiped out on that derelict research outpost drifting at the edge of the Kuiper Belt. Every fixer I talked to laughed at me, said it was just a fancy 3D printed cosplay prop for rich nobles that larp as cyber bounty hunters on the holonet 🕹️. Only the old fence in the sewers didn’t laugh, he showed me the hololog: my first mate, a man who’d replaced his entire skeleton with reinforced chrome, could take a point-blank plasma bolt to the chest and keep walking, and this tiny blade cut through his armor like it was wet tissue paper. One tiny scratch, and his whole neural net flatlined, no spark, no warning scream, just dropped like a sack of scrap 🔪. The old fence said the blade’s core was carved from a shard of crystallized dark matter that fell through the atmosphere 120 standard years ago, the soft gradient color comes from residual dark energy leaking out, it shifts and changes to match the user’s unique bio-signature 🧬. I drained every credit from my off-shore account to buy it, now I’m holding it in my hand, and I can feel it humming soft against my palm, matching the slow, steady beat of the dark matter fragment that’s been growing inside my left lung ever since that outpost accident. It wasn’t a random accident, wasn’t bad luck. This blade was calling me here, all along, wasn’t it 🪐?