Chapter 905 — Anomalies in the Record
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
The information Mo Jin Wilde had let slip through the finer details of his notes had caught Gao Yang's interest.
No matter how one looked at it, the food and drinking water that adventurer of six hundred years ago mentioned seemed to be... canned goods and bottled water.
This inconspicuous little detail set Gao Yang thinking further. He had of course realized before that dragons were a wise race with a longer history than humanity, and might therefore possess a civilization mightier than any nation of the continent—but only now did he begin to seriously ponder just how high a civilization that could ignore the magic tide and keep developing might have risen—
Canned goods and bottled water were nothing remarkable in themselves; the Cecil of this age could easily produce such things (in fact, similar products already existed). But the cans Metzen had brought Mo Jin were a sign, a sign that sent Gao Yang's thoughts racing. His mind couldn't help but expand in that direction, even gradually drifting toward strange questions like "do dragons eat in human form or dragon form" and "is there a huge difference in appetite between the two forms, and how does the feeding efficiency of human form sustain the enormous consumption of dragon form"—but soon his scattered thoughts converged and pointed at a question he had long overlooked:
A race like the dragons, immune to the magic tide and clearly as curious as humans... they had developed for so many years, so why had they not yet entered the space age?!
Was it that they did not yearn for the stars? Or was it that dragons were so highly dependent on their planetary environment that they hit a bottleneck in the process of leaving their world? Or was it simply that their tech tree had never branched the right way, so that countless years had passed and they still could not break through the atmosphere?
Faintly, Gao Yang felt this was probably a crucial question—yet there was no one here who could answer his doubts.
"I'll ask Metzen next time..." After pondering for a moment, he murmured softly to himself. "Her name actually appeared in this travelogue... it really is time I asked her about it."
As he spoke, his gaze returned to Mo Jin Wilde's written record:
"...Over the following days I explored most of this island of steel—I mean the places that could be entered. This ruin must have been abandoned for who knows how many years; a lonely atmosphere hung everywhere about it. Yet these ancient structures were themselves extraordinarily solid. After untold years of wind and rain they remained indestructible. Apart from the unimportant structures, the material of these pillars, foundations, and roofs was sturdier than any man-made material I have ever seen, and possessed excellent magic resistance besides...
"...X month, X day. The day the dragon lady had agreed to return arrived, and my earlier unease proved true—she did not come.
"...X month, X day. After waiting one more day, Metzen still did not appear... I could not help recalling her strange behavior when she left, her dreadful mental state... It seems she truly forgot, and even wiped all memory of me from her mind entirely. This is an incredible yet only possible explanation. I cannot help but wonder what on earth happened to that dragon lady to produce such disturbing results.
"...I know no other dragons, so I have no way to compare whether this is some kind of 'illness' among dragons, but I suspect it all has to do with this island of steel itself. This is a forbidden place, a place even dragons fear... Now I have been left here. As a more pitiable fellow, I doubt I have the right to worry about a dragon's health. I must first solve the problem of my own survival.