The heavy lift groaned as it carried them three miles beneath the mountain roots of Planet #100. The air grew progressively colder with every thousand feet, smelling of stale liquid nitrogen and ancient metal.
Thick plates of black void-iron lined the shaft. Every joint was sealed with lead gaskets to prevent spatial radiation from leaking into the lower crust.
When the blast doors parted with a deep hydraulic hiss, Sub-Vault Zero opened before them.
The chamber was vast, dark, and silent. In the center, the hexagonal diamond pillar stood twenty feet tall, pulsing with sharp crystalline light. Thousands of sapphire runes floated in the freezing air, spinning in complex orbital patterns that stretched all the way to the vaulted ceiling.
Xing Yao walked alongside Lin Mo, her boots clicking softly on the dark star-alloy floor. Her mechanical ocular cores clicked quietly, lenses shifting focus as they parsed the dense optical data floating in the air.
“The encryption on this terminal is unlike anything we have encountered on the Silk Road,” Xing Yao said, her metallic voice laced with caution. “It uses ninth-tier spatial quantum compression. My regular navigational scanners cannot even pierce the outer registry.”
“It is Imperial-grade Wall Street tech,” Su Wan said, consulting her tablet. “The Blood-Tax Star Chamber was cruel, but their technology was mostly brute force. They did not have mathematicians capable of writing a self-executing spatial foreclosure algorithm.”
