Mas Amedda opened a holographic projection before him, displaying several somewhat blurry images. Pointing at the projection of a star, he said, "Although the Duchy of Dawn has imposed an extremely strict blockade on its borders, and the Vaxian are an exceedingly xenophobic race who rarely travel to other planets, our agents have been unable to bribe any of them or infiltrate their territory. However, our most advanced wide-area deep-space probes have still captured a large number of still images of Vaxian Planet."
He filtered and arranged the key images one by one, then continued, "There are simply too many of these photographs. Without corresponding real-time intelligence to support them, the Imperial Security Bureau would not normally examine them. At present, we have compared and screened a total of 14 billion images of the Vaxian system. We can now roughly understand the process by which they constructed the Star Ring."
He pointed to one of the images again. "Look, this photograph was taken about eight years ago. Here, on this side of the Vaxian star, a shadow appeared. Based on the deep-space probe's resolution, the diameter of this shadow should have exceeded ten thousand kilometers... From that point onward, the shadow remained and continued expanding. That is why we concluded that construction of the Vaxian star's Star Ring likely began nine to ten years ago."
"And that is precisely the issue Little Kuat raised." Mas Amedda brought up a long list of data. "According to reports from our intelligence officers elsewhere, mining operations at several major mines within the Duchy of Dawn reached their peak around ten years ago, then gradually declined back to normal levels. This is extremely strange. Even if Dawn Star Planet had completely emptied all those mines, it would have been impossible to build even one-third