Wolfcrown - The Binary Ghost [https://i.imgur.com/Rt2Ccs7.jpeg]

I - Nakamoto

Of all the feasible things that some individual could expect to find in that unhealthy and borderline apartment of Wolfcrown, the last of them would perhaps be an extensive worn-out map of lithographic print of Medieval Europe stapled from corner to corner on the wall of his desk. That had been a particularly painful map to find, as it had cost him his right hand, his past right hand that would give way to a prosthetic, his gerund prosthetic that would spend much of its synthetic life covered by a Nappa leather glove, leather attentively tanned in some industrial park in Pakistan and with a thermal interior of the most comfortable cashmere wool, a thermal interior that would never really serve its faithful purpose as a prosthetic hand was incapable of feeling textures or heat for comfort. Planned obsolescence.

That enigmatic map, added to the countless documents, newspaper clippings, and portraits stapled around the verticality of those walls, scattered in several rooms of the apartment, and finally also crumpled in an overflowing pile of recyclable waste, guarded, at least to Wolfcrown's credulous mind, the answer he needed to find to solve that case, a case that, due to his physical and mental exhaustion, byproducts of the last two years of unsuccessful endeavor, would be, by unanimous decision of his conscience and increasingly old age, the last of his career.

That enigmatic map was not rare for representing a period in history that was a good dozen centuries away in the past, that enigmatic map was rare for depicting the territorial demarcation of Europe during the Dark Ages, a period that had been erased from history books about Europe simply because it was indescribable. A period that marked the fall of Rome with a scourge of misery, repression, poverty, and much superstition. A territory that once represented a great empire would be divided into hundreds of micro-states representing the first and most authentic decentralization in human history.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Planned obsolescence.

Wolfcrown would not have known that decentralization would become such an obsessive topic in his life, a topic whose only reason for becoming his work was the simple fact that he had responded to an email from an anonymous user who claimed to represent the conglomerate of corporations and individuals with the largest reserve of bitcoins on the entire globe.

Wolfcrown would not have known that by answering yes to that email, he would instantly receive a transaction of one thousand bitcoins sent directly to one of his cryptocurrency hard wallets. A transaction that apparently represented only the down payment for the beginning of the investigations, a transaction that represented a meager sum compared to the true reward if he were able to deliver that work as a detective. What Wolfcrown actually knew was that what they were asking of him was bordering on the impossible, the unspeakable, the unfeasible, because ghosts usually exist only in the imagination, and finding the person responsible for, in the year 2008, igniting the spark of the fire that would collapse the world economy and decentralize the monetary power of banks and states, would be the most difficult investigation of his life.

Satoshi Nakamoto was a ghost.