"The age of gods is beyond mortal comprehension."
With that one sentence, Sailin had summed up the attitude of more than half the people in this world toward "ancient civilization": they did not understand it, but they knew it was formidable, and no one dared study it properly—not even clergy like her dared meddle with it casually.
By now, I could more or less guess what had happened on this planet. The historical truth was probably something like this:
A very, very long time ago, a highly advanced civilization had existed on this planet. They had at least achieved deep-space travel, and they must have developed military technology matching their level of civilization as well—the Particle Rifle I saw last night was proof enough. Civilizations capable of development, skilled in warfare, fond of probing every suicidal secret in the universe, and crowded with several different races on one planet all shared one trait: they were exceptionally good at killing themselves. Wiping out their entire species was simply too easy for them.
And so, some years ago, they finally lived up to both the laws of civilization's development and Murphy's Law. Maybe an internal war broke out. Maybe they went too far while researching extreme technology. In any case, they destroyed themselves.
But that collective disaster did not result in the complete extinction of civilization. Some people tenaciously survived, and a very small number of them fortunately preserved fragments of technology—and magic as well. In fact, I even suspected that the ancient civilization had destroyed itself in a war between technology and magic. What those people had been thinking back then was impossible to know, but they clearly believed that the apocalypse had been caused by encountering technology beyond their civilization's level too soon. So instead of immediately using the technical