The Deputy Manager's jaw didn't just drop. It practically hit the ground.

Wasn't it claimed to be a secret prison? Not only did they take it over, but they were also planning to recycle it?

"Borrowing? Sir, with all due respect, taking the walls, the plumbing, and the high-grade reactor cores usually falls under the technical category of grand larceny on a planetary scale," the Deputy Manager whispered, his four arms twitching in anxiety.

"Are you sure we will be fine?" he asked. "There won't be any problems in the future, right?"

"What problems? Think of it as an aggressive renovation where the original owner is permanently unavailable," Leo replied with a grin. "Besides, I hate to see good scrap metal go to waste. It's bad for the environment."

"I... I see. Environmentally conscious looting. Very noble, sir." The Deputy Manager pulled out a digital tablet, his fingers flying across the screen.

"I know a demolition crew out of the Rim Galaxy. They're called The Termites..Their motto is 'If it's bolted down, we'll take the bolts too.' They don't ask questions as long as the credits are shiny and the NDA is backed by a credible death threat."

"Perfect. Tell them they have a week to arrive. Within two weeks, I want them to strip the upper levels before we move to the lower floors, and tell them to bring extra-large crates. We're taking the lights too."

As the Deputy Manager walked back to the ship to make the most illegal phone call of his career, Leo turned back toward the prison entrance.

Leo took the lift back down. He reached the command center just as the young man bypassed a triple-encrypted firewall.

"Sir! I found the manifest for the lower floors!" the man shouted, his eyes wide. "But... there's a problem."

"What problem? Is there a dangerous prisoner on floor zero?" Leo asked, leaning over the console.

"No, sir. Actually... On floor zero, it doesn't make sense at all. Look at it yourself," the young man said, pulling the details on the screen.

The screen revealed the details of the prisoners on the lowest floor. To Leo's surprise, the lowest floor only had one prisoner.

In the database, the prisoner had no name. There was only a single image on the screen, along with a single line written under it.

"Must not let her see you..."

The image belonged to a human girl. She looked quite ordinary, if one was to ignore her eyes. Her pupils had a visible star shape hidden beneath them, and there was a mark on her cheeks that appeared something like a crack.

Leo stared at the screen, frowning.

There were a total of five prisoner floors here. The highest floor was where he was locked, and where this uprising began. There were close to a thousand prisoners on this floor, all of them being freed.

The second floor had only a little over a hundred prisoners. The third floor had over fifty, and the fourth floor only seven.

However, all of them had clear details that mentioned what they had done, and how dangerous they were.

Each of the prisoners were given a threat level, and most of them even had their abilities mentioned in the database that Leo could access.

There were also the names of the contractor that had sent those prisoners here in these files. But

Leo was more intrigued by the lowest floor, which only had one prisoner with an almost blank file.

There was no threat ranking assigned to the prisoner. That entire section was blank. The only clue he received from her file was that she shouldn't be allowed to see them for some reason?

"Can you pull up the security footage from that floor?" he asked the prisoner who was acting as a technician for him.

"Apparently there are no cameras there. There are also no signals from the explosive collars either. I think... We shouldn't mess around with the lower floors," he suggested to Leo.

Leo crossed his arms and closed his eyes. Was it really worth the risk? He did have the ring from Selene that could save his life twice, but what if the situation was so dangerous that it wasn't enough.

After all, even the wardens appeared to be scared of the lowest floor.

"Who is the person that sent the prisoner here?" Leo asked. "Or is that an empty field as well?"

If he hadn't seen the warning and didn't know how the prison system worked, he might have actually believed that the girl on the lowest floor was an ordinary girl.

After all, in the file image, she looked like she was a child.

"Though why does it feel like I have seen her before?" he mumbled to himself, but he just couldn't grasp the feeling.

"You're right. There is no name of the sender," the young prisoner answered.

Leo closed his eyes and lost in thought. He was dying out of curiosity, but he was also a little scared.

If the prisoner was that dangerous, then he absolutely needed her. But what if she was beyond what he could handle with just Selene's ring?

"Hidden files, no sender, no threat rank, and a warning that sounds like a nursery rhyme from a horror movie," Leo mumbled, his eyes narrowing at the star-shaped pupils on the screen.

"Sir, if the wardens, people who literally torture S-rank criminals for fun, didn't put a camera in there, it's because they didn't want to see what was happening. Or worse, they didn't want her to see the camera."

"Or," Leo said, a thrill of reckless curiosity overriding his common sense, "It's the most valuable asset in this entire facility. Think about it. The higher floors are filled with muscle and chaos. But the basement? The basement is where you keep the crown jewels."

"But the warning, sir! Must not let her see you. What if she has some crazy ability like being able to grant you instant death?"

"That's absurd. If she had such a broken ability, how would she be caught?" Leo shook his head immediately. "It can't be that crazy, right?"

He kept staring at the girl's image. Those star-shaped pupils... they felt like a distant memory that he had forgotten. It felt like a puzzle piece he didn't know he was carrying.

"Unlock the lift for Floor Zero," Leo ordered, his voice dropping a little.

"Sir, please... How about you send someone else? If something happens to you, what will happen to our freedom?"

"Unlock it. I want to verify something myself. This strange feeling…is this just my misconception?"

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