The discovery that the Phantom Frequency had been feeding on humanity's intellectual and creative peaks for millennia redefined their mission. Julian's warehouse, once a mad scientist's lair, now felt like a desperate, brilliant command center in a war for the very essence of human thought. The walls pulsed with intricate timelines, quantum scar patterns, and historical data points, all converging on the chilling realization that humanity had always been watched, and harvested.
"It's like a cosmic shepherd, culling the brightest sheep," Marcus observed one bleary-eyed morning, staring at a holographic projection of global disappearances correlating with bursts of human innovation. "The Renaissance artists, the Enlightenment philosophers, the scientific pioneers of the early 20th century…
