The information Modir Wilde revealed in the finer details of his notes piqued Gawain's interest.
No matter how he looked at it, the food and drinking water mentioned by that adventurer from six hundred years ago sounded like... canned food and bottled water.
This inconspicuous detail gave Gawain more to ponder. He had previously realized that dragons were an intelligent race with a history older than humanity's, and therefore might possess a civilization more advanced than any nation on the continent. Yet only now did he begin seriously considering just how far a civilization capable of developing continuously without regard for the Magic Tide might have progressed—
Canned food and bottled water themselves were nothing remarkable. Cecil could produce them easily enough now—in fact, similar products had already appeared—but the canned food Melita had brought Modir was a sign, one that prompted Gawain to think deeply. His thoughts could not help but expand in that direction, gradually extending to strange questions such as whether dragons ate in Human Form or dragon form, whether the two forms had vastly different appetites, and how eating in human form sustained the enormous consumption of dragon form. But soon, his scattered thoughts converged on a question he had long overlooked:
A race like the dragons, unaffected by the Magic Tide and clearly possessed of curiosity just like humans... after developing for so many years, why had they not entered the space age?!
Did they not yearn for the stars? Or did dragons depend so heavily on planetary environments that they had encountered a bottleneck in leaving the planet? Or had they simply gone down the wrong technological path, leaving them unable to break through the atmosphere even after countless years?
Gawain vaguely felt that this was probably an extremely important question, yet no one