The group walked deeper into the Sanctuary. And the deeper they went, the quieter they became.
It wasn't the comfortable quiet of people at ease. It was the quiet of minds working too hard to spare energy for words. Every corridor they passed through, every chamber they glimpsed, every piece of technology they saw along the walls added another layer to something that was becoming very difficult to process.
They saw fabrication bays where automated systems assembled components with mechanical precision, moving in coordinated patterns without a single human operator in sight. They saw power generation facilities that shouldn't exist outside theoretical physics papers.
They saw things that had no business existing yet.
