Chapter 2: The Dead Man's Coordinates

The wind at the edge of the sea fog carried the sharp, metallic tang of blood, piercing through the gaps in the broken blinds like countless tiny needles.

The faint blue glow of the backup battery struggled against the deep darkness, the flickering light casting restless shadows. Alexei stared dead-eyed at the screen. The twisted smile in the shadow of his father’s silhouette was still vivid enough to make him nauseous, as if it had been burned permanently into his retinas. Cold sweat had long since soaked through the inner lining of his tactical vest, dripping down his spine and sending shivers of icy dread through his body.

Just as his fingertips were about to touch the edge of the keyboard, his portable comms terminal vibrated violently in his palm. The sudden jolt of static shattered the frozen silence. A line of encrypted text from Vera popped up on the screen—short and lethal: "The intake timestamp and the video sequence have a logical break. Come to the underground archive. Now."

Alexei’s hand hovered in mid-air, fingers trembling slightly. The chill hadn’t faded; if anything, the unexpected plea intensified it, as if his blood had instantly frozen in his veins. He quickly cut the terminal’s active tracking signal and hammered a complex interference code into the keyboard, forcing a block on any signal sniffers the military might have deployed nearby.

As the operation completed, the rhythmic, urgent thud of military boots outside the office seemed to fade for a brief moment. It was the only window they had, and it was closing fast. He snatched up the notebook with the old satellite maps tucked inside, spun around, and charged toward the door, his movements sharp and precise, wasting no motion.

The mag-lev transport was already waiting downstairs, its low-frequency hum sounding like the breathing of a sleeping beast. As he approached, the mechanical heartbeat of the engine grew more urgent, waiting for him to ignite it.

Inside the deep port district, rain streaked across the transparent canopy of the mag-lev transport in blurred white lines. The wipers swung rhythmically but couldn’t clear the dampness from the view. Alexei gripped the control stick, his knuckles turning white from the pressure. The craft weaved through the narrow tubes, dodging abandoned maintenance brackets. Each close pass sent a screech of metal-on-metal through the chassis.

His brain raced. Who was that smiling stranger? Why did he appear in the old photos taken after his father’s death? What exactly was the logical break Vera mentioned?

The transport took a sharp turn, the intense centrifugal force slamming his body against the side. A flash of wet concrete wall whizzed past, water droplets spraying out, before the craft slid out of the pipe and stopped at a hidden underground entrance. This had originally been the terminal pumping station for the city’s drainage system, but it had long since been converted into a secret backdoor to the forensic archive.

Alexei cut the lights, checking his portable scanner by the faint glow of the emergency indicators. He took a deep breath, expanding his lungs to their limit, and pushed open the heavy airtight door.

The hinges let out a dull grinding sound that echoed through the empty underground space, like the sigh of an ancient machine waking up, waiting for an inevitable showdown.

The air inside the archive was cold and humid, carrying a distinct smell of old paper mixed with cryogenic fluids. The odor stung the nose and sent goosebumps crawling up his scalp. Vera stood at a metal workbench. Under the dim yellow light, her figure looked slender, but her clenched fists radiated a tense strength, ready to spring at a crisis at any moment.

Seeing Alexei enter, she quickly spread out a yellowed paper dossier on the table. Her fingertip tapped a timestamp that had been altered multiple times. The once crisp printed font had been smudged into a blur of black ink, looking like clots of dried blood.

She looked up, her gaze sharp as a knife, driving straight into Alexei’s eyes. No pleasantries. Only a sense of imminent urgency. Alexei stepped up to the table, his eyes sweeping over the tampered traces. His brow furrowed, and he subconsciously rubbed his aching temples.

He noticed that even though the timestamp had been changed three times, the data stream for the body’s cold-storage intake next to it remained intact. Every temperature curve, every record of the vault being opened, corresponded perfectly with the officially declared time of death. Nothing was missing.

This contradiction baffled him. If the body had never left the cold storage, why had the authorities altered the cause of death three times?

Vera’s voice was low and calm, sounding unnaturally clear in the empty archive. Every syllable seemed to hit the ground with impact. She pointed to a small line of text next to the data stream—a notes field that could only be viewed with the highest level of clearance.

Her finger lingered on that line, a flicker of hidden pain crossing her eyes. It was the anger of a forensic archivist whose professional integrity had been trampled, and her sorrow was plain to see. Alexei leaned in and saw the short code. It was a communications frequency identifier exclusive to the Ruins exploration team.

In that instant, he understood the stakes. It all pointed to the same source. Behind those seemingly absurd contradictions lay a carefully designed trap.

Vera pointed at the data stream: “The cold-storage data hasn’t been touched. The body hasn’t moved. They only altered the cause-of-death records to cover up the truth.”

Alexei frowned, his gaze moving rapidly across the page: “Three alterations to the cause of death? What are they actually afraid of? A broken chain of evidence?”

Vera let out a cold laugh, a sarcastic arc pulling at the corner of her mouth: “They’re afraid the truth gets out. They want to wash your father’s disappearance up as an accident so everyone shuts up.”

Alexei took a deep breath, trying to make sense of the power dynamics at play. If the body really was in cold storage, then the story of “accidental death of an exploration team member” was a pure lie. The authorities were trying to forge a fictional truth by tampering with the archives to hide the fact of his father’s real disappearance.

This kind of systemic falsification meant powerful interest groups were behind the scenes, and this force had clearly infiltrated the deep layers of the forensic system. It was terrifying.

Vera quickly pulled out several black reels of film from an archive cabinet. They were raw backups of the port district surveillance footage from the two hours before death, unprocessed by the cloud AI, meaning they retained the most authentic details.

She inserted the reels into a portable reader, and the images flickered onto the wall. The grain was heavy, with old-age noise, the light dancing on the cold walls. In the footage, his father’s back appeared near a blind spot in the surveillance. He hadn’t headed toward the sealed Ruins center; instead, he turned alone into a long-abandoned underground drainage channel.

The entrance to that channel had been completely filled in by city planning ten years ago. But in his father’s footage, it stood wide open, as if it had never been sealed, creating a jarring sense of dissonance.

Alexei stared at the screen, his heart rate spiking. The drumbeat in his chest felt like it was about to break through his ribs. He quickly pulled out the notebook with the old satellite maps and imported the coordinates his father had left into his portable navigation system. The map on the screen instantly expanded, blue dots jumping, until it settled on a blank area in the northeast corner of the port district.

On the city planning maps, that area was a void. No buildings, no roads, not even terrain data. It was as if a corner of space itself had been erased, which was deeply unsettling. Yet the navigation system provided a precise location, pinning the coordinates to a nonexistent, hollow street district.

This discovery confirmed that his father’s satellite map wasn’t a forgery. It recorded an anomalous geographical structure after a physical spatial fold or interstellar dimensional shift. That unfamiliar smile might have come from the other side of that dimension, where the boundary between reality and illusion had long since blurred.

Just as Alexei was trying to grasp this surreal discovery, a dull explosion reverberated from outside the archive. The walls shook, and dust rained down, tapping a gritty rhythm against the metal tables.

Dmitri Belousov led a squad of engineers in through the broken wall. They were clad in thick blast-proof armor, their weapons glowing with a dangerous light. Their orange-red goggles looked like the eyes of beasts in the darkness.

Dmitri stood at the broken entrance, his gaze sweeping the room until it settled on Alexei. A complex curve played on his lips—a mix of respect and helplessness. He raised his hand, signaling the engineers behind him to hold. His voice cut through the broken doorframe, carrying the weight of an undeniable command.

He had come to destroy those raw films and arrest the two of them. The conflict reached a critical point instantly; the air was thick with the smell of gunpowder and ozone.

Through the smoke, Dmitri shouted, “Hand over those films, Alexei! For your father, and for your own sake!”

Vera shoved Alexei aside, her voice low and commanding: “Don’t listen to him! He only wants to destroy the evidence and cover up the fact that they murdered your father!”

Dmitri raised his energy rifle, the muzzle trembling slightly: “I didn’t murder anyone. I’m just executing a cleanup order to protect the city’s security.”

Olga Volkov’s voice suddenly crackled through the quantum-encrypted channel, calm and decisive, like an undercurrent beneath the ice. She had remotely hacked Dmitri’s engineering lockdown code and used the Ruins’ own Antimatter Engine to jam the engineers’ weapon systems.

The air around them began to warp, light bending in eerie refractions. The engineers’ weapons let out a high-pitched shriek before failing, sparks flying everywhere. Dmitri’s expression shifted slightly, but he adjusted his strategy quickly. He moved forward personally, trying to control the situation in close quarters. His steps were steady, each one carrying a lethal pressure.

Vera took advantage of the chaos to quickly read the last encrypted segment of the raw film. In the footage, his father stood in an unfamiliar room. The background was a deep starfield—a scene impossible to see on Earth, vast and cold. His expression was calm. He held a document in his hand.

He looked at the camera, his eyes showing a resolute determination, as if he had already prepared to die. Then, he picked up a pen and solemnly signed his name. The document read: Voluntary Death Declaration.

Alexei felt a wave of dizziness, the floor seeming to spin beneath him. His father had willingly signed this document. It meant he hadn’t passively disappeared; he had actively chosen a more dangerous path—a road leading to an unknown dimension, lonely and resolute.

The main vault on the archive’s lower level slowly opened under the interference of the Antimatter Engine, the sound of massive gears turning sharp in the silence. Vera placed the films inside, completing the final backup with practiced, precise movements. Dmitri broke through the perimeter, closing in on the two of them. His energy blade flashed a lethal blue light, illuminating their tense faces.

Alexei stepped back, pressing the old satellite map tightly against his chest. It was the last memento his father had left him, the key to unlocking all the mysteries. He could almost feel the warmth coming from the past. He looked at Dmitri, his eyes no longer holding fear, but a resolute trust. His gaze pierced the man’s helmet, reaching straight into his soul.

He knew that from this moment on, they were no longer just seekers. They were survivors in this interstellar dimensional storm, facing whatever lay ahead—whether it was the abyss or the stars.