After leaving the tavern, Old Dimitri led Li Aoz and Qiu Ran through the winding alleys and containers of Sikkim Settlement. He opened a manhole cover and led them down.
"Is this... a sunken ship?"
Qiu Ran ran her fingertips over the alloy panels lining both sides of the corridor and said in surprise:
"The entire Sikkim Settlement was actually built on a ship... It's hard to imagine. Just how big was this ship?"
"It was a small cargo ship, less than a million tons. In the Old Era, that counted as small. It didn't even have a nuclear reactor. Warships and aircraft carriers from the Old Era were often five or six hundred meters long."
Dimitri spoke with a hint of longing. "The Outland used to have a great deal of water, gathered into oceans. But after that war, Malefic Calamity's red-and-black clouds swept across heaven and earth. The oceans either froze into ice and were buried beneath snowstorms and sand, or turned into permanent snowfields and drifted away with the wind."
"The old world seemed like everything was huge." Qiu Ran looked enviously at the spacious corridor. "Even Frostplate doesn't seem to have ships this large."
"That's right. The old world had excess production capacity. The fashionable clothes they made in a single year could have clothed billions of people for a thousand years," Dimitri said.
"That's amazing... Everyone back then must have been rich. Otherwise, every household would need a huge wardrobe to fit hundreds of outfits."
"Not really. According to excavations by scavengers, most clothes were discarded after being worn only a few times." Li Aoz shrugged, shattering Qiu Ran's fantasy. "In truth, the Old Era wasn't much different from now. The poor stayed poor, and the rich stayed rich. It was just that their quality