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There is more down there.

Much more.

And if the League already suspects that, they are hiding it.

I stop in front of a secured equipment locker.

The seal light glows red.

Restricted access.

Naturally.

I glance around the tent. Empty.

Outside, distant voices drift through the wind. Someone laughs near the generator stacks. Somewhere farther out, metal crashes against stone followed by Brakk shouting something anatomically impossible at a cargo loader.

I crouch beside the locker.

“Okay,” I whisper to myself. “This is technically unethical.”

Then I pull out my scanner.

Ten minutes later, I am inside the restricted geophysical imaging lab beneath the western survey tower.

The room is dark except for instrument lights and the massive holographic projection sphere suspended in dead center of the chamber. Cold air spills from cooling vents along the floor, carrying the sharp metallic scent of superconductors and sterilized electronics. High-end gravimetric scanners line the walls beside resonance mapping arrays expensive enough to bankrupt most universities.

I stare at the equipment in offended admiration.

“Oh, you bastards,” I whisper.

Because none of this appears on the official expedition inventory.

The League absolutely knows there is something deeper beneath the ruins.

Which means they are already lying to the academic teams.

That realization should make me angry.

Instead, it makes me excited enough to feel slightly nauseous.

I slide into the primary imaging chair and activate the central scanner array. The system demands authorization credentials.

I smile thinly.

“Embarrassingly optimistic,” I tell the console.

The override takes forty-three seconds.

The projection sphere flickers alive around me, filling the chamber with layered wireframe geology scans of Nareth-Kul’s excavation zone. Surface trenches appear first. Then deeper thermal mapping. Structural density overlays. Seismic voids.

My breath catches.

The visible ruins are only the topmost layer.

Beneath the excavation lies an enormous descending network stretching miles into the rogue planet’s crust. Vast geometric structures intersect and spiral downward in impossible precision. Chambers larger than cities. Hollow corridors. Symmetrical voids nested inside denser formations.

The scanner recalibrates.