?Chapter 950:
Clicking it open, she was met with a molecr form of staggeringplexity—unlike anything she had ever seen before. Ste knew her biological mother had been a researcher, so stumbling acrossplicated forms wasn’t entirely out of ce. But this one was on another level.
She tried breaking it down, but the jumble of letters and numbers left herpletely lost.
After going through so much trouble to ess the chip, she wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. Gritting her teeth, she pushed herself to keep going. She searched through online archives, scanned research databases, and dug through papers, but nothing matched.
The whole morning slipped away with no progress.
Byte night, Ste was slumped over her desk, lost in piles of scribbled notes, her eyes bloodshot from the effort.
Then, almost by ident, her gaze caught on a dot on the screen.
Since the document was in JPG format—essentially an image of a handwritten form—Ste hadpletely overlooked the speck during her initial examination. But after hours of searching and getting nowhere, she kept zooming in, more out of stubbornness than hope, until the smudge filled the screen.
The shock hit her then. What she thought was an ink blot wasn’t random at all; it was a watermark, so faint it could vanish without the perfect angle and light. Anyone else would’ve dismissed it as ink, but Ste knew better.
Ste kept zooming, not letting go. Luckily, the scan was sharp enough that the mark held up under heavy ergement.
What emerged looked like an eagle with its wings folded in, stylized and simple. The sight jolted something in her brain. It echoed the emblem she had seen on that old film reel, only pared down to a basic form. Her heart hammered, and every breath grew shallower.
Every story starts at g?lnσν????s﹒??оm
This file her mother had hidden away… it carried that same mark. If the watermark matched, then her mother’s work had been stamped by Alonzo’s crew. Amon hadn’t been lying.
Ste swallowed the shock and forced herself to think fast. She rerouted, looking at the form through that new angle. Letters and symbols that had seemed random before now started to line up differently; she stripped off bits that felt like red herrings and tried to match the backbone of the sequence against everything she knew.
She couldn’t say for sure she’d nailed it yet, but she had time, and she intended to try every possibility.
Hours slipped by without notice. The world outside paled into dawn while she hunched over the screen, hair in a loose mess, notes and coffee cups scattered around her.
When the first thin light crept across the room, Ste bolted upright, pale and shaking.
She finally understood what she was looking at.
It was a synthetic toxin she’d never encountered before, capable of inflicting severe brain damage in a short time, leading to confusion. Prolonged or high-dose exposure could even cause irreversible harm.
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