⚙️ S1.5 Galaxy Dynasty Cipher: Resonance Calculations

The mine records played back in fractured light across the chamber wall. Silver veins—once steady, endless—now flickered with interruptions. Lines broken. Patterns twisted. Someone had tampered.

Cipher leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eyes burning into the projections. He let the Resonance Chamber run the full ninety days. Every report. Every shadowed deal. Every whisper of sabotage.

Names blurred. Faces sharpened. He paused one frame—an overseer leaning too long at a console, hand sliding something beneath his sleeve. Another—an unfamiliar emblem scrawled into the dust outside a gate. He traced it with his finger on the projection. Not Spiral Court. Not local. Outer Rim, maybe.

“Too clean to be rebellion,” he murmured. His voice barely stirred the air, but the chamber caught it, threaded it into tone. “Too sharp to be coincidence.”

He played the sequence again, faster this time, eyes darting between glyphs of loss. Four collapsed terraces. A resonance leak that nearly bled an entire chamber dry. A sabotage disguised as a systems test.

All in the ninety days he and Luma were… gone.

Cipher sat back, running a hand down his face. The body was new, but the gesture was old, instinctive. He hated that gap. That missing time. To be alive and yet not present. To return and find the world had moved without him.

Still—he had survived worse.

He called up the contact tree. Old names surfaced like ghosts. Some he trusted. Some he didn’t. All of them had threads he could pull. He began sorting them: who had been present, who had vanished, who might have turned.

“First the emblem,” he muttered. “Then the leak. Then the traitor.”

He tapped the projection, locking each problem into a chain. His chain. His work.

But beneath it all, something else flickered—the memory of Luma’s voice earlier that day, soft but urgent, watching the Flight School children. The way her hum had caught on the edge of wanting.

He pushed the thought down, deeper than the silver veins, where it couldn’t touch his calculations.

“First the emblem,” he repeated, locking the chamber sequence. His jaw tightened. “Then the leak. Then the traitor.”