Prologue
They called him Nameless. Not out of mystery, but necessity. He had no family, no digital footprint, not even a birth record. Just a badge and a reputation as the Department of Global Integrity's best detective. When things went beyond human logic, when fear crawled through data lines and murder whispered through particle fields, they called Nameless.
Now, something darker than murder stirred beneath the glowing skyline of Neo-Hiroshima-Nagasaki.
Chapter One: Signals Beneath the Skin
Neo-Hiroshima-Nagasaki was a living monument. A city built atop the ruins of obliteration, stitched together by cybernetic veins and automated sorrow. The old world died here. Twice. Now it trembled again.
Tremors. People called them earthquakes. Nameless knew better. These were not tectonic. They were rhythmic, pulsing like a signal—a code buried in the soil. He'd seen it before, in warzones reduced to radioactive glass.
Then the scientists began to vanish.
Physicists. Engineers. Neurobiologists. All blacklisted for their ethics violations. All disappearing without struggle, like they'd never existed. All last traced near the city's old energy sector—an area sealed after the Reactor Implosion of 2171.
In every data fragment, in every surveillance glitch, the same name whispered through static:
Foxglove.
Chapter Two: The Burnt Archive
Nameless found a clue in the ruins of an old university. A burnt document, half-erased by time and flame, marked with an alchemical sigil: 🌺. It wasn't just a signature. It was a creed.
His heart stuttered. He had seen that symbol once engraved into the casing of a prototype energy weapon his father had designed.
A man named Dr. Erion Vale.
Official records said Erion died in 2165. Suicide, they claimed, after a lab explosion that leveled half a city block. But Erion was no ordinary man. And Nameless had always suspected the story was a lie.
Now the lie was waking.
Chapter Three: The Cult of the Bloom
Following energy signatures, Nameless discovered a hidden lab beneath an old botanical dome. The scent of decaying flowers mingled with blood. There, he found a room lined with nutrient pods. Inside: the missing scientists.
Still alive.
Barely.
Their brains wired into a massive neural lattice. A biological computer. A living bomb.
At its center, a message etched in bone:
THE FOX BLOOMS IN ASH.
Chapter Four: The Father
Nameless found Erion in the forbidden zone—the Black Scar, where the earth still wept radioactive tears.
He was older, gaunt, but radiant with madness. Surgical instruments hung from his belt like jewelry. His voice was honeyed venom.
"My son returns."
Nameless raised his weapon. Erion laughed.
"You were never meant to stop me. You were my final test. My perfect rat. And now you lead me to the last switch."
He pressed a button. Name less's gun backfired, shredding his hand. He collapsed.
Erion knelt beside him, stroking his hair like a priest preparing a sacrifice.
"Do you know what Foxglove does to the heart? It slows it... gently... until it stops."
Chapter Five: The Last Bloom
Erion dragged Nameless into the core chamber. The final activation required a blood match. A father. A son. One mad, one dying.
Nameless tried to resist. But the damage was done. His blood completed the sequence. The neural lattice hummed.
Outside, the city froze.
Then vanished.
Not in flames.
Not in ash.
Just... gone.
Epilogue
They found Erion's body in the ruins, lips smiling, chest cut open. Stitched into the flesh were the words:
"The world was a wound. I healed it with fire."
Some say Nameless never existed. That he was just a fragment of guilt in a madman's dying mind. But in the digital void left by the vanished city, a signal still loops:
"I see you, Father. In every silence. I am still watching."
The Fox has bloomed.
And the world will never smell the same again.