Captain Shi's shock was entirely understandable to Bronze Coconut Scholar.
From his perspective, it really was a little unbelievable. He, too, thought those Surface World scholars must have had their heads slammed in a door. Otherwise, how could they have been so naive?
"At first, I was just as shocked as you," Bronze Coconut Scholar sighed. "But after I joined the Academy and slowly worked my way up to where I am now, I realized they weren't stupid. The Academy's leadership had simply used a little trick back then. They were just too good at playing the victims."
"Playing the victims? How?" Captain Shi was still confused.
"Put simply, they pretended to be weak. Those scholars had no idea what the Underground World was like, or how powerful it was. The Academy's leaders did everything they could to paint the Underground Race as a miserable people, like a band of homeless primitives living in caves and on the brink of extinction. They claimed that unless they could return to the Surface World, their people would vanish completely within a century or two."
"And they believed that?"
"They did. They really believed it. A few of those old fossils, especially, had their compassion stirred up completely. Of course, some didn't believe it. One of the people in their group was a relatively young woman. She was stubborn as a mule and flatly refused to cooperate, denouncing the Underground Race's capture of them as a monstrous conspiracy. The Underground Race was full of wicked ambition, she said, and their tales of suffering couldn't be trusted..."
Captain Shi smiled bitterly to himself. Well, she wasn't wrong.
"But the woman was extraordinarily stubborn. She kept resisting and would rather die than give in. The old scholars in the group, meanwhile, had been fed so