Beneath the capital of Aryavrat, in the tunnels that hadn't seen light since the War of Algorithms, footsteps echoed through dust and memory.
Priya Dharan moved like a shadow.
As Ashoka's principal secretary and intelligence head, she carried no title in the public eye. To most, she was just an aide—sharp-eyed, silent, forgettable.
But in reality, she was the spider at the center of Ashoka's unseen web.
And today, the web was stretching into dangerous territory.
Inside a hidden facility known only as Vault Varuna, she met with the first of the "ghost minds"—men and women whose names had been wiped from all official records after the fall of the Scientific Mandala.
"Dr. Iqbal Varshney," she greeted a wiry man with silver-rimmed lenses and trembling fingers. "Quantum fusion specialist. Tried to build an energy matrix that didn't need AI oversight. The Directorate buried your project and exiled you to the ice mines of Talos Theta."
He looked up from a cracked tablet. "So what? You here to finish the job?"
"No," Priya said. "I'm here to offer you a laboratory. Unlimited resources. And the promise that your inventions will fuel an empire."
His eyes gleamed. "Under whose flag?"
She held out a datapad showing Ashoka's crest—the blazing sun over the planetary crown of Suryaansh.
He smiled. "Then let's build a sun."
In the ruins of the old Hiranaygarha spaceport, she recruited a forgotten crew of orbital mechanics who once designed subspace corridors for Earth's elite. In a junkyard outside the polar ridge, she found an engineer who rebuilt a broken battle droid into an autonomous tank. In the black markets of Kshir, she bribed three underground guilds to smuggle forbidden tech components into Aryavrat's rising core.
Everywhere she went, she carried Ashoka's vision—not with speeches, but with blueprints and gold.
She wasn't alone either.
Her second network—the Chhayalok, or "Shadow Eyes"—was growing.
Spies, codebreakers, former intelligence officers, hackers, and even street children trained in observation. They passed messages through neural implants, dust-coded graffiti, and modulated bird-song drones.
They mapped every remaining noble house's weakness. Intercepted foreign transmissions. Infiltrated the supply chains of the very pirates Ashoka was about to declare war on.
And more importantly—they found the hidden scientists still loyal to the Earth-AI Treaty.
Priya watched their data logs with cold focus. Some still worshipped the rogue artificial intelligences that once tried to enslave mankind. Others had gone into hiding when the AI conflict erased half of Earth's satellites and turned Delhi into a black glass crater.
"We'll need them," Ashoka had told her.
"Even the traitors?"
"Especially the ones who know how to break chains."
Back in her operations chamber, Priya watched the build logs of Project: Vikas—a sprawling mega-foundry rising silently beneath Aryavrat, masked as a geothermal plant. Here, the first line of plasma battle cruisers would be born. Here, the weapons of tomorrow would be forged: rail-lances, ion disruptors, lightwave cloaks, and something new—something ancient yet reborn—
A prototype of the Agni Core—a miniaturized atomic sun, developed from lost Vedic reactor blueprints once dismissed as mythology.
Priya smiled.
The gears had begun to turn.
Ashoka would soon march not with rusted armor and ancient glory—but with the full weight of science, strategy, and secret power behind him.
And when the stars burned once more in the name of House Suryaansh, the galaxy would learn—
The empire hadn't died.
It had simply been waiting.