This wasn't a harvesting site.
This was a transit point.
Small.
Temporary.
Used only to move collected origin elsewhere.
He followed it.
The trail didn't lead through normal space. It led sideways—into a layered region between mapped worlds. A place that wasn't empty, but wasn't claimed either.
Asher stepped in.
The environment changed immediately.
There was no sky. No ground. Just structured space—flat platforms, anchored paths, artificial gravity. Everything here was built to function, not to live.
And at the center of it all—
A structure.
Large. Expanding. Incomplete.
It wasn't a city.
It wasn't a domain.
It was a framework.
Asher understood it at once.
They weren't stealing origin to rule a world.
They were building one.
Not a natural domain.
Not a sovereign system.
A manufactured world core, designed to run without balance, without correction, without limits.
Poison origin had been the test material.
Easy to isolate.
Easy to control.
Others would follow.
