Chapter 397: The Exile Grounds (1)

Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio

[Scribes?]

After hearing this term, the Silent Empire didn’t seem to be unfamiliar with it. It was obvious that they knew about this civilization.

“Yes.” The higher-up of the Exiled confirmed it before continuing,

“Before we came here, the scribe told us about the biggest abnormality in this galaxy, which is the current Wound. He suggested that if we really can’t do anything, we can come here in the future to seek inspiration.”

“However, we didn’t think that it would reach the point where things couldn’t be done, so we never paid attention to this place. We only valued the natural cosmic environment here…”

“However, it’s a pity that after a long period of confrontation, we finally realize the gap. The gap brought about by time is really difficult to cross.”

“We might not be favored by time. For this reason, we have no choice but to take another path and pay more attention to this Wound Galaxy.”

“Although the scribes are indeed a bunch of nasty fellows, at least there’s nothing wrong with their judgment. Something that can catch their attention must have something unique about it…”

According to them, the abnormality of the Wound was provided to them by the scribe. Although it was impossible for this galaxy to not attract attention, due to the danger of those subspace rifts, the research that could be carried out was rather limited.

Normal civilizations basically wouldn’t spend time and effort on such an unknown harvest. At most, they would build an observation station to monitor anomalies or use it as a natural barrier like the Exiled’s initial choice.

However, the scribe had clearly pointed out that there was a big secret here, and he believed that it was the last resort that the Exiled could choose. It was difficult not to suspect that they had actually known what these things were and might have obtained some information from them.

In fact, the scribe’s main purpose for bringing the Exiled here wasn’t to activate the cage, but for these cracks related to the void.

When the Exiled’s upper echelons recounted these matters, it was obvious that they had already suspected the scribe’s goal.

After all, they had interacted with this group of people before and knew that they were indeed a group of bad fellows.

However, although the people of the Silent Empire seemed to be deep in thought, they seemed to have expected this. What interested them more was the history of the Exiled.

[You said, “Before we came here”? Oh, that’s right. The name “the Exiled” doesn’t sound like a local civilization. However, we used to think that you only had some indescribable encounters in this galaxy… Now, it seems that there’s another explanation?]

Regarding this, the upper echelons of the Exiled fell silent for a while, as if they were discussing how to answer.

After a while, the higher-up in charge of negotiating with the Silent Empire continued,

“It’s not a secret. If you had the heart, you would have gotten a rough history from our teaching materials long ago…”

“That was a long time ago, really a long time…”

“We don’t originate from a civilization in this galaxy. Our true origin comes from another place. It’s a galaxy group that’s very far away from here and has very few metal resources.”

“It’s not that a single planet is lacking, but the metal resources of the entire galaxy group are rather scarce. Due to this reason, our path to civilization has taken too long.”

“In the history of our natives, the Stone Age lasted the longest. Due to the lack of improvement in tools, productivity would forever stagnate at the basic level, or it would take countless times to improve a little. This made us use stone tools for a long time.”

“In the future, when compared to the development of some native civilizations, we discovered that on the same time scale, we stayed in the Stone Age for about five to ten times longer than other civilizations.”

“Can you imagine? The difference in time might be enough for a civilization to be born and destroyed dozens of times, but we’re still using tools made of stone to manually knock on food over and over again.”

The Exiled’s past seemed to have been born in an area that lacked metal. It was indeed not impossible for life to be born in such a place, but it took a lot of luck for a civilization to appear.

Moreover, even if a civilization was born, its development would basically be limited to a certain upper limit because the lack of metal had an unavoidable huge impact.

Progress in society required the development of productivity, and productivity was closely related to production tools. The Exiled did not seem to be a psionic race, and their native era most likely required mechanics to produce huge transformational progress.

On the other hand, it was basically impossible for mechanics to be separated from metal. Almost all machines related to innovation needed metal to be made.

Not only could precision parts only be made of metal to maintain sufficient stability, but it was also because metal was the easiest material for lifeforms to obtain from nature. It had the best physical properties.

Perhaps in the future, civilization would be able to artificially synthesize some plastics that were comparable to metal, but before they progressed to this stage, they would need metal to help them progress to this stage..