Chapter 1: The Ghost of the Louvre

Deep in the night, the Louvre in Paris was as silent as an enormous tomb. Only the air conditioning hummed low in the archive room three floors underground — the most honest breathing of a modern building. In that space, cut to seamless precision, the air seemed to have congealed, heavy with an old, suffocating oppression.

Lucas Moeller sat at a desk piled with microfilm reels and data terminals, his fingertips drumming unconsciously on the rosewood surface with a faint, regular tapping. In the dead silence the sound stood out sharply, like a countdown, striking his nerves one beat at a time.

On the screen scrolled a high-definition spectral analysis of Vermeer's seventeenth-century View of Delft. To his eyes those pixels were not data but wounds in history. Every deviation in color was a crime carefully covered up, glowing with an eerie fluorescence under the cold blue light of the monitor.

He frowned, his gaze drifting between two versions of the color wheel. The air smelled of old paper mixed with ozone, and loneliness crept soundlessly over his ankles like a tide, beginning to eat its way up to his knees.

He felt a cold that sank into his bones — not only because of the air conditioning, but because here, deep inside this palace of the finest achievements of human civilization, he felt himself to be a complete outsider.

Supervisor Javier staggered in, crashing through the heavy soundproof door, his shirt collar in disarray, sweat sliding down through his stubble and leaving dark trails on his pale face. He was gasping for breath, his eyes sweeping the room in terror, as if countless pairs of eyes were watching from the darkness.

In that gaze there was not only fear but a despair on the verge of collapse, as though he had seen some horror no one could look at directly. Lucas raised his head and, seeing this usually steady old colleague lose his composure, felt alarm bells go off in his mind.

He knew that somewhere in the skeleton of this centuries-old building, something had broken — perhaps trust, perhaps some kind of balance.

Before Javier could speak, from the far end of the corridor came the sound of metal rollers grinding over thick velvet carpet — creak, creak — piercing in the dark, silent room, like the sound effect of some creature's bones rubbing together. The sound was slow and heavy, yet carried a machine-like precision.

Lucas glanced toward the corner. A cleaner in a gray uniform was pushing a cart loaded with bins past him, his movements stiff and sluggish, as if his soul had been drained out of him. The track left by the wheels was eerily straight in the shadows cast by the moonlight, as if it were not a man pushing the cart but some program driving the shell of a body.

The cleaner's face was hidden in the shadow of his cap brim, his expression unreadable. Only his feet in black rubber boots showed — each step landing extremely lightly, yet extremely steadily, sending a chill down the spine.

Lucas's gaze locked onto the View of Delft on its stand, sealed under its glass cover. Even through the thick bulletproof glass, the street in the painting seemed a few degrees blurrier than he remembered, its golden street lamps veiled as if under a film of gray.

An indescribable sense of wrongness seized his heart. That intuition had rarely failed him in ten years of archaeology and historical research; like a needle, it lightly pierced the shell of his reason, foretelling that some irreversible tampering was under way.

Faintly, he sensed the pigment grains deep within the frame shifting at a microscopic level — a betrayal the naked eye could not catch.

Suddenly, deep in his consciousness, a mechanical chime sounded that did not come through his ears — cold, precise, with an electronically synthesized tremor. At the edge of his vision, pale blue streams of data lit up, floating on his retina like a holographic projection, and the interface of the Time Regulation System slowly unfolded.

The transparent digits danced in the darkness like a modern variant of some ancient incantation. Lucas felt a wave of dizziness; the world turned transparent and slow before his eyes. He counted silently to three and activated his ability, rewinding time by ten seconds.

The dust around him froze in midair, suspended in the beams of light like a motionless nebula. Only his consciousness could move freely through the cracks of the frozen spacetime. The sensation, beyond all reason, thrilled and frightened him at once; he felt as if he were peeking at God's hole cards.

He strode quickly to the cleaner and, in the instant the man was about to swap the original for a spare canvas core, seized his wrist in a dead grip. In that moment he felt the muscles tense under the bone — the tremor of surging adrenaline, like touching a bar of red-hot iron.

The cleaner whipped around, terror and savagery flashing in his eyes. The custom solvent sprayer in his hand dropped to the floor with a faint fizzing sound, its pungent smell like a chemical weapon leaking inside the temple of a museum, corroding the last trace of purity in the air.

The system chime sounded again; the pale blue streams of light shattered abruptly, and time flowed once more. The cleaner's motion froze at the very instant he was about to flip the frame, his fingers white with exertion, his knuckles cracking.

Lucas did not hesitate. He shouted for help, his voice piercing the silent corridor and alerting the police on patrol. Red and blue beams from the patrol lights poured into the dark gallery, cutting it into alternating shards of red and blue. Light leapt across the glass covers; the air was thick with the smell of panic and tension, and even the dust flickered.

The police quickly subdued the struggling cleaner; the clink of handcuffs against the metal stand rang out crisp and clear, almost flippant amid the tension. In the confusion, Lucas took down the partially swapped canvas core and showed the evidence to everyone present.

Javier backed away, his face deathly pale and trembling, whispering the code name of that Brussels organization, his voice thin as a thread yet perfectly audible, every syllable driving into Lucas's eardrums like a nail.

Lucas stared in the direction the cleaner had been led away, a chill rising in his heart. This was not merely a theft. It was a fuse leading into the depths of darkness; light it, and it would detonate the underground art-trading network of all Europe.

In the corner of his vision, the system interface popped up, showing an initial award of five hundred points. The string of digits glowed faintly in the darkness, absurd and real at once, and Lucas shivered. Before the cleaner was put into the police car, a cold smile curled his lips and he called out, low, a clue that froze Lucas's blood — pointing to the money-laundering network behind him.

The voice scattered in the wind, yet coiled around Lucas's heart like a venomous snake. Lucas watched the police car's taillights vanish into the night along the Seine, the red dots merging into the flowing river. He knew that from this moment on, the trajectory of his life had left its original orbit and entered unknown territory.

Behind him, the Louvre still stood in the moonlight, solemn and indifferent, as if everything that had just happened were only a deep-night hallucination.

Javier: "That is the mark of 'Ghost.'"

Lucas: "You mean that money-laundering syndicate in Brussels?"

Javier: "They never launder anything clean. They only manufacture ghosts."

Lucas: "We have to look into that cleaner's file."

Javier: "Don't. They will erase every trace."

Lucas: "I have already seen the points. I can leave traces behind."

Javier: "You're insane, Lucas."

Lucas: "Maybe. But this time is different."

Javier: "Be careful. Don't turn yourself into the next ghost."

Lucas: "I'll come back alive."

Javier: "I hope so, old friend."

Before dawn, Paris lay under a layer of gray-blue mist, the air damp with the smell of river water. Lucas stood by the wooden railing of a bridge over the Canal Saint-Martin, holding between his fingertips the black badge left at the scene of the cleaner's arrest, stained with blood. On the back of the badge was engraved a minimalist geometric figure, like a maze, or some ancient rune.

He brought the badge close to the dim halo of a street lamp, trying to make out the fine scratches, but the system interface flickered again and a line of red warning popped up: [Target entity marked. Tracking chain about to initiate. Countdown: 00:04:59.]

Only five minutes left. Lucas did not hesitate. He leapt onto the motorcycle parked at the roadside, its engine roar tearing through the silence. On his phone screen, Javier's message was still pinned at the top and pulsing; that code name, "Ghost," haunted him like a phantom.

The Brussels laundering syndicate was not merely washing dirty money from the art black market. They were using high-value forged paintings as carriers to build a transnational financial black hole. And that cleaner was only a pawn placed in Paris — to test Lucas's ability, or to probe the Louvre's security for weaknesses.

The motorcycle threaded through the empty streets, Lucas's mind racing. The ten-second limit of his rewind had left him somewhat flustered in the clash just now, but the points the System granted had rewarded his sharpness. Five hundred points — enough to trade for one longer expansion of his field of vision, or one more precise memory rewind.

He needed more information. He needed to know which branch that cleaner belonged to, and what exactly the "Ghost" mark meant.

The countdown ticked to its final ten seconds. Lucas braked hard and stopped in front of a twenty-four-hour convenience store. He grabbed his backpack and rushed in. The clerk was a sleepy young man who, seeing his movements, instinctively reached for the alarm — but Lucas had already paid, not even waiting for change. He burst out the door, mounted the motorcycle, and melted into the night again.

This time he did not go back to his apartment, but rode toward the industrial zone at the city's edge. Instinct told him the people who cleaned up traces would be there. The countdown on the system interface had reached zero, and a new path unfolded across his retina like a glowing blood vessel, pointing north.

Lucas drew a deep breath, the cold air filling his lungs and clearing his mind. He knew this lead would not take him to a simple truth. It would take him into a labyrinth built of lies, greed, and death.

Two kilometers from the destination, his phone suddenly vibrated. Not Javier — an unknown number. On the screen appeared a line of text: "Looking for this?"

Attached was a photo of that black badge, soaking in a jar of formalin. Lucas's heart contracted violently. He realized he was being tracked in return. The other side was not only monitoring his movements — it was waiting for him to walk into the trap.

The motorcycle raced along the rugged mountain road, its headlight cutting through the heavy night. Lucas gripped the handlebars, knuckles white. He no longer thought about whether to stop, no longer weighed the risks, because in the corner of the system interface the points were ticking slowly upward, as if tempting him toward a crazier choice.

The road signs ahead were blurred and unreadable, but that glowing vessel pointed the way, deep into the heart of the darkness. He knew that from this moment on, he was no longer an ordinary appraiser. He was the hunter — and also the prey.