Our group walked slowly through the tiny village, brimming with curiosity. Everything around us looked peaceful and serene, yet in our eyes, everything here felt wrong—nothing but wrong. Everything was profoundly out of place.
This was located in Merrowa's capital region. From the perspective of a cross-world empire, it could be considered the bustling center and a political hub. It was only a dozen or so light-years from the Capital Star of the Merova People, a distance that could be crossed in the blink of an eye for an interdimensional civilization. This was not a primitive planet. In the Merova People's coordinate database, it was marked as a directly administered territory, with a long-standing planetary government. Under normal circumstances, all this would have meant highly advanced technology, massive modern cities, private spacecraft racing around the entire planet, and traffic officers in space stations wearing red armbands as they stopped passing starships to check for drunk flying...
But all we saw before us was a primitive village, crude handmade tools, and ignorant natives who rose at dawn to work and rested at sunset. The village was clearly at a very low technological level. Most of its houses were square structures built with rough planks and logs for frames, then filled in with earthen bricks fired through primitive methods. Their roofs were slanted thatch, seemingly made from the long, tough, hairlike wild grass growing on the nearby plains. The village did not even have roads in the true sense. The naturally level ground between the houses served as paths. The surrounding homes showed little sign of planning, with square thatched huts of varying sizes built haphazardly and unevenly spaced apart. Between the houses stood primitive carts with their wheels and axles fixed together, along with strange tools whose uses I could not