139. A call to Past.

The fire crackled in the stone hearth, throwing flickering light across the grand library. A storm loomed in the distance again, but Ethan barely noticed. His sleeves were rolled to his elbows, and documents, case files, and old digital logs covered the oak desk before him.

Most of them were over twenty years old—faded, incomplete, fragmented.

But it was the name that kept appearing in the margins of every report that haunted him:

Dr. Naehr.

Ethan clenched his jaw and tapped through another encrypted file. "There's something missing," he murmured.

The data didn't add up. There were too many redacted files, too many connections hidden behind aliases and fake institutions. Naehr wasn't just another rogue scientist—he had help. Infrastructure. A history no one wanted to expose.

And the more Ethan looked, the more he realized: the real story didn't begin twenty years ago. It started much earlier.