"Mm." Sun Hang nodded.
Several Liquid Metal threads trembled at his fingertips, slicing the resin encasing the medal into several pieces.
Sun Hang picked up the somewhat dirty-looking medal and brought it close to his nose for a deep sniff.
"What does it smell like?" Wang Xiyi asked with amusement as she watched him.
"Like copper rust. This medal should be made of a copper alloy," Sun Hang said.
Just as Sun Hang had said, the silver plating on the medal's surface had worn away badly, exposing the bright golden brass beneath. The early Medal of Patriotic Hero awards of the former Siberian Federation had all been pure silver, but as the war progressed, multiple silver mines within the Federation—especially in the Ural Mountains—fell. Silver abruptly became an extremely scarce industrial resource. This was especially true in electronics and chemical engineering; the lack of raw materials meant that even with factories in the rear operating at full capacity, they could barely meet the front line's demands.
As a result, all kinds of silverware were collected and sent to the smelters. Although the Federal Government was not so desperate as to take back the soldiers' medals, to reduce silver consumption in this area, the Medal of Patriotic Hero issued in the middle and later stages of the war was mostly changed to relatively less scarce brass, with only a thin layer of silver plated onto the surface.
"This thing isn't an anomaly," Sun Hang added. "I can't smell an anomaly on it."
"If you say it isn't, then it probably isn't." Wang Xiyi nodded. "When it comes to sensing anomalies, even professional detection equipment can't match the accuracy of your nose... What I'm curious about, though, is this: if this medal isn't an anomaly, how was it preserved?"
When the Death