The elevator hummed in its descent, soft light washing over Merlin's reflection in the glass panel. The city stretched endlessly beneath him, a constellation of artificial stars blinking through the night fog.
But his mind wasn't on the skyline. It was on the single, vanishing message still burned into his memory.
You shouldn't have touched the Lazarus core.
The words had disappeared from his phone seconds after appearing, no trace, no metadata, no number. Just gone, like a phantom whisper swallowed by the void.
Merlin tapped the screen again, scrolling through his recent logs. Nothing. Not even a record of the notification.
"…Ghost line," he muttered under his breath.
There were whispers of such things even in the novel, secure communication networks that operated through fragmented mana pulses, invisible to normal digital channels.
Used by mercenaries, black market traders, and the kind of people who moved in shadows between nations.
