He checked the Bitcoin blockchain. Ordinals explorer. The inscription wasn’t an image. It was a 12-word seed phrase, encrypted with a simple Caesar cipher—shift of 3. John had left his recovery seed on the blockchain itself, hidden in an NFT that cost him $0.50 to mint in 2014. The bottle cap was just the index. The real key was always public, always there, waiting for someone to think like a paranoid miner from the early days.

And somewhere, in a cabin that no longer had a owner, John’s ghost smiled.

She shook her head. “Just me. And he wasn’t online much after 2018. He moved to a cabin. No social media. No friends visiting. He just… mined and held.”

“I’ll need everything,” he said. “His old computers. Phones. Journals. Passwords he reused. Names of ex-girlfriends. The make and model of his first car. And I need to know—was there anyone else who knew him well enough to guess?”

“He always said Bitcoin would outlive him,” she whispered. “I didn’t believe him.”

Plural.