After discovering the corpse, everyone followed Duanmu Huai and began... scavenging the body.
That's right. This unlucky fellow had obviously encountered some kind of monster, been torn to pieces, and had a large chunk bitten off. The problem wasn't that, though. The problem was that the victim's equipment was... surprisingly complete.
"The clothes are well-made and of decent quality."
Duanmu Huai glanced at the fragment of clothing in his hand and scanned it.
"Looks like these Undergrounders lived pretty well."
"Really?"
"Of course. To be honest, I originally thought that in an underground environment like this, it wouldn't be strange if they had regressed all the way to tribal life, wearing animal skins and eating raw meat."
Duanmu Huai had quite a bit of experience with this. Many Empire ruin planets were like that. A once-glorious technological civilization would collapse into ruins, only for a bunch of uncivilized savages who ate raw meat and wore animal skins to be holed up inside, as if they had returned to primitive society... He had no idea how such a regression in civilization had come about.
This world was the opposite. Although it had been ruined for the most part, its technological civilization seemed fairly advanced so far. At the very least, it hadn't fallen all the way to the level of savages. Was this what one would expect from a Forge World of the Tech-Priests? Sure enough, it wasn't following the same script as those other places.
Then there were the weapons...
"Close combat, huh? Mm, this is a fine civilization."
Duanmu Huai picked up the sword that had been snapped in half beside the corpse and nodded in satisfaction.
"Looks like the metallurgy and forging technology of this Underground World has gotten off the ground."
"But that's really strange, Knight."
Ann