But now that the other party had asked this question, Gray felt he should try to guess the higher answer, after all, it was a matter of politeness.
"Are you of royal blood?"
The old man in gray shook his head:
"Too high."
"Are you one of the court nobles trusted by the royal family?"
"It's still too high."
"Are you a regulatory official at a mine? Or perhaps a transportation manager?"
Hahahaha.
The Grand Foundry Master suddenly laughed:
"Look, look, the kingdom is clearly a distant past, but the spiritual imprint it left behind will take who knows how long it will take to completely disappear."
He glanced at Gray and said with a smile:
"I know you guessed it, but you're afraid to say it for fear of angering me. Isn't that also a legacy of the kingdom?"
"Actually, it's no big deal. If you don't want to talk about it, I'll just say it myself."
"I'm a miner, not a foreman, not a shift leader, not any job that allows for slacking off, but the kind of miner that best fits the definition of 'miner'."
As if to prove he wasn't lying, the Grand Foundry Master turned around and extended his left hand toward Gray.
It was an extremely rough hand, and although decades had passed, the labor of its youth had left indelible marks on it.
Thick calluses were still clearly visible on the joints and palms, but what surprised Gray the most was that the Grand Foundry Master only had three fingers on his left hand.
His ring and little fingers are composed of intricate mechanical structures, with Psionic Energy flowing through them.
Seeing that Gray's attention was clearly focused on the two mechanical fingers, the Grand Foundry Master smiled and said:
"It's dark inside the mine, and accidents of all sizes always happen."
Not knowing what to say to Gray, the Grand Foundry Master continued:
"More than a hundred years ago, a few minor nobles on the border of the kingdom conspired to launch a rebellion, which was unsurprisingly quelled quickly."
"Although those nobles died, the people in their territories suffered."
The last king was furious about this, so he ordered everyone in several territories, whether commoners or serfs, to be sent to the mines to work until they died.
"I was only eight years old at the time, and I wasn't even as tall as a pickaxe handle, but I was still sent here with my younger brother and everyone else in the village."
"Most of those people died on the way, but the rest made it to the mine alive. After being scattered, they were divided into many teams."
"After that, my brother and I stayed here and kept mining. We would get up at dawn, pick up our picks and start digging. At night, we would squeeze into a wooden house with more than forty other people and sleep soundly."
"As for food, after being skimmed off layer by layer by those people, there was hardly anything left to eat by the time it reached us, so miners died almost every day."
"At that time, all I could think about was eating and working. My younger brother was a little better off than me; he would sometimes think about how to be lazy by using tools."
"This went on for many years, until one day, something seemed to have changed."
The Grand Foundry Master reminisced about the distant past and sighed:
"Later I learned that it was the arrival of Demonic Tide."
The old man in gray spoke at a pace as unhurried as his steps, yet his voice carried through the stone walls of the corridor to everyone's ears.
" The Demonic Tide is a very strange thing. It comes quickly because even ordinary people can feel the difference between the presence and absence of the Demonic Tide. It happens in an instant, and after that moment, the world has been completely changed."
"The reason it takes so long to arrive is that, although you can sense that something has changed, it is difficult to detect the anomaly immediately."
"It wasn't until one morning when we woke up and found a miner's hand fused to the pickaxe beside him that we realized the problem was serious."
"But this was a low-probability event at the time, and the supervisors above turned a blind eye to it, so there was nothing we could do."
"By then, some time had passed since the arrival of the Demonic Tide, and while we continued mining, the outside world had long since descended into chaos."
"The nobles in charge of overseeing the mining area changed repeatedly, but each new noble would tell us: 'You just need to keep mining, don't worry about what's going on outside.' -- even though we had no idea what was happening outside."
"Until one day, the last wave of nobles guarding the mines ran away, as did the overseers and foremen, and there was no sign of them returning."
"The miners realized they were finally free, so they packed their things and prepared to run away in different directions. The mine had very little food reserves, and it was out of the question to become self-sufficient by farming. They couldn't survive here unless they could eat the ore."
"The group of guys who ran away came back not long after. They said there were monsters outside that were even more terrifying than nobles. That was the first time I knew that there were such things as Blood Corpse."
"The advantage of a mine is that it's easy to defend and difficult to attack, and you can have as much stone as you want."
"We quickly gathered tens of thousands of miners who couldn't escape here. They collected the grain that the nobles couldn't take and hid it in the mines. Then they built makeshift fortifications outside, intending to hold out for as long as possible."
At this moment, everyone was captivated by the story told by the Grand Foundry Master, and even though the players had the ability to speak, they did not want to interrupt.
Once the game ends today and this video is released, everyone will know the history of the Graycast Corridor.
They will create the next blockbuster!
Gray, equally engrossed in the story of the Grand Foundry Master, couldn't help but ask subconsciously:
What happened next?
The old man in gray thought for a moment and said:
"Although the Blood Corpse have no brains, their combined charge is something our rabble cannot stop."
"We barely held out for almost a month. Many people died, and our food was almost gone."
"However, one day, two powerful figures suddenly arrived from the south. They killed all the Blood Corpse in the mine, saved our lives, and took us to a nearby piece of land suitable for planting."
"We all really wanted those two to stay and lead us, but they said they had more important things to do."
"They left afterward, and I never saw those two powerful figures again until a few days ago..."
At this point, everyone knew who the "two powerful figures" the old man in gray was referring to were.
Everyone looked at the two Short-Eared Elf, and even the Grand Foundry Master nodded slightly to them.
Seeing everyone's gazes directed at him, Nuowa puffed out his chest with a smug look on his face.
"Hmph, now you know why you wanted me to be your witness, right?"