The Kasmatanik Steppe was one of the largest grasslands on the planet Franlo. In the past, it was also a favorite spot for herders, except that centuries of grazing had left it looking like a patchy scalp. Some areas with sufficient water still had meadows, while most high-elevation locations were Gobi deserts.
Ground-penetrating radar could locate underground cavities, and to many people, treasure hunting on Franlo should have been as simple as picking up dropped money.
Yet, once they arrived, they discovered that the entire planet was hollowed out underneath, layer upon layer, looking quite like the internal structure of a sponge with its subterranean network riddled with holes.
According to calculations, there were tens of billions of large and small underground cavities in the shallow layer alone, with even more undetectable ones in the deep layer, which forced people to revert to more primitive methods—using human labor to go down into the holes and see what was there.
Of course, most of the time robots were enough to go down, but if there were any discoveries, delicate work was still safer left to a living person to go down and oversee in person.
At this moment, in an underground looter's shaft somewhere on this grassland, a lone treasure hunter was fiddling with his new discovery. An illumination drone hovered silently overhead, but its dim light was not enough to light up the entire underground space.
He had discovered a huge ancient relic, which was a giant worm cast from a black, unknown alloy. It looked somewhat like a maggot and somewhat like an earthworm, but in essence it should have been a robot.
The Mechanical Worm was probably hundreds of meters long and about six or seven meters in diameter. Its lower body had short and numerous arm-like feet,