"Four thousand years ago, Celeste Morne entered the Taris underground city through this mine shaft. If she had entered through the proper entrance, she and her companions would have faced endless Rakghouls," Zerakas said. "They entered the underground city, but from that point onward, she lost contact and vanished without a trace. This is where the documentary trail ends, but it is where ours begins."
"And what are you basing your advance on?" Darth Malthael asked.
"Psionics," Zerakas said. "Our Shelak Tribe guards the Xel'Naga temples and excavates ancestral Relics. Compared with Xel'Naga ancestral Relics that date back tens of thousands of years, clues from the Taris underground city four thousand years ago are still quite fresh."
As they continued deeper, the surroundings became increasingly dark and secluded. Huge underground excavation and mining machines lay crookedly scattered across the ground.
There had been corpses all along the way.
By now, they had probably seen tens of thousands of bodies. And those were merely a tiny fraction of the people who had died from the Rakghoul plague—the factors that had reduced Taris's population from tens of billions to several hundred million were threefold: emigration, Orbital Bombardment, and Rakghouls.
Moreover, as they went deeper, the condition of the corpses on the ground began to change.
The deeper they went, the more normal the bodies became. At more than five hundred meters below the surface, the corpses had decayed normally into skeletons, though the bones remained black.
"The black dust is a mixture of microorganisms infected with the Rakghoul plague that died during the Orbital Bombardment and scorched matter. The Rakghoul plague has a very unusual form, which is why this dust has never dispersed or settled. Cleaning it up would not be difficult, though it would take quite some time." Zerakas once