The Cobalt Blindspot

The alarms at Mount Natagumo Biosecurity went off at exactly 03:14 AM.

By the time corporate cleanup crews breached the Level-4 containment sector, Dr. Hashibira—the lead researcher developing a highly controversial, self-replicating cellular regenerative compound—was gone. Every server on the local subnet had been wiped to zero. The only remaining artifact was a single, low-resolution image file left sitting on an air-gapped terminal, titled specimen_9.png.

The company’s advanced automated triage AI immediately swept the file and dismissed it as employee junk data.

But Dr. Hashibira left a final note scribbled on a physical paper chart:

"The collectors hunting this network see only the three swordsmen I left in plain sight. Their shallow algorithms cannot perceive the lethal weave resting in the deep azure wavelengths. Look past the blades, isolate the host, and extract the source."

Step past the automated logs, look beneath the surface of the pixels, navigate the dead ends, and uncover the true hidden architectural sequence.

The hidden flag is divided into three separate parts. Each part must be recovered through the forensic trail left inside specimen_9.png. The parts are not presented as a complete flag during extraction.

After recovering all three parts, concatenate them in the order discovered to form the flag body. Finally, wrap the complete concatenated string in the required rvcectf{...} format.

#Provided Files

• specimen_9.png

#Flag Format

rvcectf{...}

Hint: The three parts must be discovered separately; do not expect any individual artifact to contain the complete flag.