"...Was this what happened in this Central Nexus control room all those years ago?"
Combining the information from the visions of the past he had witnessed with the intelligence on Brain-Eating Worms he had already guessed at before.
At this very moment, Ian had pieced together the truth buried within the Redwood Ruins Cluster for nearly a thousand years—and learned the true identity of the mastermind behind it all.
There was no doubt about it. The Redwood Natives were descendants of the researchers from the Pre-Epoch Civilization's Redwood Base sixteen hundred years ago.
During the Calamity of Falling Skies, thanks to thorough disaster preparations, Redwood Base had not suffered the annihilating devastation that had befallen the Pre-Epoch Civilization's surface cities. Instead, it had been preserved remarkably intact.
Yet for certain reasons—and also to ensure their safety—they had chosen to avoid the lingering aftermath of the surface disaster, hiding within the base to build an ecosystem, preserve the knowledge they possessed, and maintain the entire facility.
But without a sufficient population, knowledge would decay.
Even if flawless manuals of knowledge were all stored in electronic devices, printed into books, or carved onto stone tablets, knowledge would still decay so long as one teacher misunderstood something, so long as a single descendant of any generation failed to comprehend the knowledge they were meant to inherit.
Every researcher in Redwood Base had been a genius and an elite, but they could not ensure that every generation of their descendants would also be elite—so long as there was one ordinary person, their knowledge would be lost.
There was far, far too much knowledge that could not be self-taught merely by reading textbooks... knowledge that might not be passed on even with a teacher guiding one hand over hand.
Therefore, to preserve knowledge, they at