Chapter 3: Sealed Father’s Name

"This body has been confirmed."

Greta's words still hung in the damp air of the warehouse, carrying the musty smell unique to old archives. I clutched the rain-soaked handover receipt in my pocket, my knuckles white from the force of my grip. The officer closed the registry book, and the metal clasp clicked with a sharp snap that sounded unnaturally loud in the silent warehouse. He glanced at Ulrike, who had her hands shoved in her jacket pockets and was staring at the puddle in the corner without saying a word.

We couldn't stay here long. The police cars would arrive any minute, and Otto Frank's people might already have eyes on this lead. I pulled Greta toward the exit, the windshield wipers of distant cars on the highway scraping out a monotonous rhythm. If we wanted to get to the bottom of what happened to my father back then, we couldn't count on police case files—those sheets of paper were thin as autumn leaves compared to the biological code of a deep-space mothership.

By the time we got back to the archives room at Humboldt University, it was already late at night. The rain outside had turned into a fine, dense mist, and the streetlights smeared their halos across the glass. Greta pushed an old-fashioned desk lamp toward the edge of the table, and its warm yellow circle of light fell on the stack of yellowed files.

"Your father, Wolfgang Vogt," she opened the index card, her voice pressed low, "in his 1983 tax filing, there's an anomalously large inflow of funds. The source is listed as 'overseas spice trade.' It drew major attention from the tax office at the time, but the investigation was immediately halted by a lawful seal order from the Foundation."

I stared at that line. Spice trade. A chef's family, suddenly getting into the spice business in 1983, and overseas no less? In the industry, that was a joke. Unless those "spices" were a cover, and the real cargo was hidden in the lining of shipping containers—or they weren't meant to be eaten at all.

"Why would the Foundation be interested in a chef's family?" I asked.

Greta pushed up her glasses, the lens reflection hiding her eyes: "Because Wolfgang was a member of the Icarus's first ground docking team. After he disappeared, all private files related to him were sealed by Otto Frank under the pretext of 'protecting national security.' This inheritance is, in reality, hush money."

Just then, the electronic lock on the archive's iron door beeped.

A man in a gray suit walked in, followed by two security guards. Otto Frank himself hadn't shown up—only his lawyer, a middle-aged man with eyes sharp as a scalpel.

"Mr. Wilhelm Vogt," the lawyer began, his voice so flat it had no rise or fall at all, "the Otto Frank Foundation, pursuant to the family trust agreement of 1998, formally requests that you sign this waiver. Regarding the assets related to the 'spice trade' left behind by your father, you have no right to interfere and no right to access the underlying files. Upon signing, we will deposit the equivalent euro amount into your account and thoroughly destroy all crystal samples in your possession."

I looked at Greta. She set down her magnifying glass slowly, as if afraid of disturbing something sleeping.

"I'm not signing," I said.

The lawyer raised an eyebrow: "You may refuse. But the consequence is that the Foundation will pursue legal channels to freeze all operating licenses for your restaurant and retroactively trace every source of non-traditional ingredients you've used over the past ten years. In Berlin, a chef lives on his reputation. Once that reputation is tainted, you won't even have the chance to sell bread."

Ulrike stepped out of the shadows, a short, thick baton in his hand, though he didn't swing it. He just stood there like a moving wall. "He's threatening me," Ulrike said, his voice rough, "but that doesn't mean I have to roll over. Still, Wilhelm, think it through. Is this about some expired honor, or is it about that human life?"

"That human life." I pointed at the files on the table. "If my father really died to cover something up, then the biological code hidden in those crystals is the key to unlocking the truth of his disappearance. And the antidote to save the people still alive."

The lawyer sneered: "Code? You think this is medieval alchemy? On that mothership, those things are called 'cognitive loads.' If decryption fails, your nervous system burns out in three minutes. Are you sure you want to gamble with your brain?"

I didn't answer. Instead, I reached out and lifted the corner of the file folder. Inside wasn't an ordinary ledger—it was a handwritten table of ingredient ratios. The edges of the paper were scorched, as if it had been rescued from a fire.

"This isn't a spice table." I picked up one page and walked to the light.

My fingers moved across the numbers. As a chef, I dealt with ratios every day. Grams of salt, sugar crystallization rates, fat melting points. But the numbers on this page were arranged in an extremely bizarre way. They didn't conform to the dosage logic of any known ingredient.

"Look here," I pointed at the third row. "'Black pepper'—the amount is two hundred milliliters per kilogram of base liquid. That's impossible. That's a liquid form, and the concentration exceeds the physical limit of solubility. Unless the base liquid isn't water, but some kind of high-concentration biological solvent."

The lawyer snorted dismissively: "That's your father's ravings. What does a cook know about chemistry?"

"What he knows is structure." Greta suddenly cut in共产主义. She leaned over, staring at the numbers. "Wilhelm, look at this sequence. It corresponds to the biological cabin seal protocol for the third layer of the Icarus's cargo hold. The so-called 'spices' are actually code names for biological enzymes. Every bottle of 'spice' corresponds to a damaged biological module."

I looked up and stared the lawyer in the face: "You said it was hush money. But what my father left behind is a map. A map marked with taste and smell. If you mix these ratios, you can simulate the biological signal frequency of the mothership's core. This isn't for cooking—it's for communication."

The lawyer's expression finally changed. He put away the waiver, pulled a black folder from his briefcase, and slammed it on the table.

"Since you're so persistent, look at this." He opened the folder to reveal a freeze order. "As of this second, your bank accounts, restaurant license—even your residency rights—are under judicial freeze. The Foundation doesn't care whether you starve. What we care about is not letting those codes fall into the wrong hands."

He stood up and straightened his cuffs: "You have twenty-four hours. Either hand over the crystals, or wait for the police to arrest you for 'illegal possession of dangerous materials.' Chairman Otto doesn't like dirty work. He likes clean victories."

After the lawyer left, only the buzzing current of the desk lamp remained in the archives room.

Ulrike tucked his baton back into his waistband: "Twenty-four hours is enough time for you to burn this building down. But burning it won't make the code disappear—it's still in your head. You need somewhere to hide it."

I looked at the handwritten ingredient table. The paper was fragile; any moisture would turn it into a mushy mess. And my restaurant had to open at seven the next morning—hundreds of people waiting to eat. If I handed over the crystals, I'd be safe. I could go on being head chef, keep winning my Michelin stars, keep pretending that the father who died in deep space never existed.

But I remembered the crushed bottle cap pressed against the chest of that corpse in the warehouse. What was inside it? A distress signal, or a last ration?

"Greta," I asked, "the 'base liquid' in the third-layer seal protocol—is there any corresponding physical substance in existing literature?"

Greta flipped through the pages, her fingertips brushing the paper with a rustling sound: "No. This is the only copy. No one but your father ever recorded the actual material source of these code names. But if we want to extract the signal, we need a physical sample as a reference frame. Without a reference, decryption is blind flight."

I looked at the page. The numbers were densely packed, like some ancient star chart. With his last strength, my father had disguised the secrets of a starship as a stack of recipes.

"Then use my restaurant as the reference frame," I said. "We're closed tonight. All ingredients sealed. I'm going to run a test in the kitchen using these 'spice' ratios."

Ulrike frowned: "You're joking. Your kitchen has no biological solvent, no thermostat bath—just ovens and frying pans."

"I have thermodynamics knowledge, an extreme sensitivity to smell, and a stubborn idea." I grabbed the page and tucked it into the inner lining of my apron, pressed tight against my skin. "If the ratios are right, the smell will tell me whether I live or die. If they're wrong..."

"If they're wrong, you'll go to your grave smelling like this." Greta closed the archive box with a dull thud. "Remember, Wilhelm. Deep space doesn't forgive mistakes. It only records results."

By the time we walked out of the archives room, the rain had stopped. The Berlin night sky hung low, and in the distance the Brandenburg Gate loomed faintly in the mist, like a giant tombstone.

I stood by the roadside and pulled out my phone. The screen lit up, and I hesitated for a moment. I didn't call the restaurant. Instead, I opened the photo album and pulled up a picture my father had taken while he was alive. In it, he stood in front of a stack of unfamiliar shipping containers, holding a crumpled slip of paper, grinning like a child. The handwriting on that paper and the ingredient table I'd seen tonight came from the same hand.

I deleted the photo. Kept it local, then enabled cloud sync deletion trace blocking.

What I was about to do next wasn't cooking—it was dismantling a buried history.

I turned and walked toward the old car parked by the road. Ulrike was already in the driver's seat, the engine rumbling low and steady. I didn't get in. Instead, I doubled back two steps to a public trash bin by the curb.

Clutched tight in my hand was a copy I'd just made in the archives room—a handover receipt stamped with the Foundation's official seal. That was the "legal evidence" they demanded, the tool they tried to use with money and injunctions to erase the truth.

Flames leaped up, licking at the white paper in the night. The edges curled, blackened, crumbled to ash, and fell on the wet, cold asphalt, extinguishing instantly.

I brushed the black ash off my hands and watched the last wisp of smoke dissolve into the cold wind.

I pulled the car door open and slid into the passenger seat. Through the window, I could still see the handwritten ingredient table, stuffed into the gap of the seat cover. The numbers on that page, in the dim interior light, looked like countless pairs of opened eyes.

"Drive," I said. "To the port. I want to find out exactly which 'spice' ships docked in Berlin in 1983."

Ulrike stomped on the gas, and the tires threw up a curtain of water from the puddled road. Berlin's lights shattered in the rain, then reassembled.

I closed my eyes, and my father's voice echoed in my mind—the only fragment I'd ever heard on a recording of him talking about his work.

"Remember, flavor doesn't lie. As long as the base is pure, even spices dug out of a grave can produce the breath of the living."

I opened my eyes and looked at the Humboldt University tower receding in the rearview mirror. The building looked especially lonely in the fog, as if waiting for an answer that would never arrive. And I was about to take this map and drive into the abyss that had swallowed my father.