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- Herausgeber: Twist & Tether Press
- Sprache: Englisch
Lucien Reeve is a cyber-intelligence analyst for a black-budget agency—flawed, brilliant, and haunted by the ghosts of operations he can’t forget. When a blockchain address resurfaces, linked to a string of inexplicable deaths, he follows the digital trail deep into the structure of the very system he once helped design.
Each victim made contact with the same address. Each left behind no signs of struggle. Each transaction was small, forgettable—until Reeve discovers a chilling pattern encoded within the blockchain: not just a kill list, but a behavioral mirror. A logic tree that doesn't just record belief, but executes it.
As Reeve chases the ghostly ledger from Kyiv to Lisbon to the remains of forgotten safehouses, the chain reacts. Each move he makes is anticipated. Each revelation draws him closer to an impossible truth—one not merely stored in the system, but growing from it.
The deeper he digs, the more the lines blur between hunter and hunted, code and confession, memory and manipulation. What begins as a mission to dismantle a kill-chain turns into a reckoning with identity itself.
If belief can be weaponized… what happens when the weapon believes in you?
Would you trace the signal, if the signal traced you back?
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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LEDGER OF FLESH
No One Stays Anonymous Forever
PRIVATE KEY
Miles Everett Blake
Copyright © 2025 by Miles Everett Blake
All rights reserved. This book, including all individual stories and original content, is protected under international copyright law. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, distributed, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission from the author, except for brief excerpts used in reviews or academic commentary, which must be properly credited.
Fiction Disclaimer:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Cover Image Notice:
The cover artwork for this book was created using licensed generative AI tools under commercial-use terms. It is an original, symbolic composition created specifically for this title. Any characters depicted are fictional and do not represent real individuals.
AI Tools Acknowledgement:
The cover image and/or illustrations were created using generative AI technology under appropriate commercial-use licensing. All visual elements are original compositions intended solely for this publication.
Thank you for reading this special collection. I hope you enjoy every story inside.
Table of Contents
LEDGER OF FLESH
Description
Chapter 1: Ghost Blocks
Chapter 2: Forks in the Flesh
Chapter 3: Hash of the Exiled
Chapter 4: Sidechain of Doubt
Chapter 5: Obfuscated Proofs
Chapter 6: Genesis Kill
Chapter 7: Burn the Chain
Epilogue: The Immutable Grave
LEDGER OF FLESH
Description
Lucien Reeve is a cyber-intelligence analyst for a black-budget agency—flawed, brilliant, and haunted by the ghosts of operations he can’t forget. When a blockchain address resurfaces, linked to a string of inexplicable deaths, he follows the digital trail deep into the structure of the very system he once helped design.
Each victim made contact with the same address. Each left behind no signs of struggle. Each transaction was small, forgettable—until Reeve discovers a chilling pattern encoded within the blockchain: not just a kill list, but a behavioral mirror. A logic tree that doesn't just record belief, but executes it.
As Reeve chases the ghostly ledger from Kyiv to Lisbon to the remains of forgotten safehouses, the chain reacts. Each move he makes is anticipated. Each revelation draws him closer to an impossible truth—one not merely stored in the system, but growing from it.
The deeper he digs, the more the lines blur between hunter and hunted, code and confession, memory and manipulation. What begins as a mission to dismantle a kill-chain turns into a reckoning with identity itself.
If belief can be weaponized… what happens when the weapon believes in you?
Would you trace the signal, if the signal traced you back?
Chapter 1: Ghost Blocks
Lucien Reeve
The news blared through an old flatscreen mounted above the security checkpoint: “Journalist Natalia Peña found dead in hotel bathtub. Authorities suspect suicide, family demands autopsy.” The anchor’s voice was coated in corporate smoothness, her concern artificial. No blood, no note. Just another disappearance folded into the digital noise.
Lucien Reeve didn’t flinch. He’d seen the footage already—scrubbed metadata, cross-checked timelines. Peña had been his test case. A whisper in a blockchain echo chamber he couldn’t stop listening to.
He passed through the second biometric scan with his eyes half-lidded and his grip tight on a travel mug of cold coffee. The taste had long gone bitter. Like everything else.
The lab beneath Geneva’s anonymous façade hummed with secure silence. No names. No badges. Just clearance and quiet obedience.
“Reeve,” said a voice. No greeting, no warmth.
He raised his hand in lazy acknowledgment and drifted toward his assigned pod, passing rows of sealed glass cubicles. Each analyst wore the same expression: hollow attention. The illusion of vigilance. The posture of function.
Reeve slid into his seat, flicked on the three-layer monitor system, and called up the visualizer. A constellation of microtransactions pulsed across the screen, each node a speck of value—a whisper, a signal, a breadcrumb.
And there it was again.
Address: `0xb9f...d7ca`
Amount: `0.00001345 BTC`
Timestamp: Four minutes after Natalia Peña’s time of death.
It wasn’t the amount that mattered. It never was. It was the pattern—the precision, the ritual.
Reeve leaned back, exhaling through his teeth. The same address had shadowed six other “accidental” deaths over the past eighteen months. Low-profile dissidents. Crypto-policy watchdogs. A Central Bank leaker in Lagos. All chalked up to bad luck, sudden illness, or “unexpected complications.”
He’d flagged it a week ago. Ran it up the chain. The response was exactly what he expected.
“Not actionable.”
Which, in agency-speak, meant: Too real to touch.
So he’d done what he always did when the agency flinched.
He kept digging.
***
The apartment was small, windowless, and impossible to track. The burner laptop balanced on his knees hummed faintly, fans choking on dust. Lucien stared at the block explorer again, fingers twitching above the keys.
It wasn’t the code that scared him. It was the silence inside it. The cold neutrality of math used for murder.
His script parsed the embedded metadata again. A short string buried in the OP\_RETURN field: `AXIOM13/NEVERSEEN`. Encrypted. Compressed. Meaningless—until it wasn’t.
He copied it, ran it through his custom parser, and overlaid it with the previously flagged strings. One by one, the pattern emerged—not a phrase, but a sequence.
Like a genetic code, he thought.
Or a ledger of names.
He dragged the nodes into a visual stack. There it was again. The shape. A branching structure. Like a Merkle Tree—but irregular. Alive.
His fingers hovered. He could build the rest. Fill the blanks. Guess at the unseen leaves of the tree.
But then what?
He closed his eyes.
Natalia was brave. The others too. They spoke truth. Challenged the opaque.
His voice in his head sounded noble.
This ledger isn’t just data. It’s a design. A mechanism. A kill chain disguised as currency flow.
He had a choice. Always a choice.
But if I don't trace it… it’ll keep growing.
He exhaled.
“Fuck it. Let’s light it up.”
He hit enter.
The agency VPN groaned as the data package bloomed across the mirror server. He was technically violating protocol. But the backend dev had owed him a favor. Three years ago, Reeve had doctored a timeline to save the guy’s brother from a bribery indictment.
A little corruption to serve the greater truth, he’d told himself.
“Ends justify means,” he muttered, echoing his own old lecture.
