The Guardian System: The strongest Summoner's quest to save his family Chapter 386: A City Like a Corpse (3)

Another building had rows of what looked like power capacitors studding its walls.

The discovery made him pause. The Ignis he fought were feral monsters made of rock and fire, but they had once been people.

The blade-arms and armor plates fused to their bodies weren't natural growths; they were manufactured.

They had been a technological species before the apocalypse twisted them. Looking at the scale of the ruins and the complexity of the broken machinery, their level of technology might not have been that far from humanity's before the System arrived.

They had built telescopes and satellites, established laboratories to push the boundaries of their understanding, and had likely been on the verge of interplanetary exploration before everything went wrong. Without the System to regulate the mana, their entire civilization had collapsed into the feral nightmare he was walking through now.

The knowledge didn't help him now, but it stuck in his mind. It was a reminder of what happened when a civilization failed the test represented by the coming of mana.

Regardless, introducing the System had transford everything about how humanity operated and survived.

Before the System arrived and changed the rules of reality, humanity's technological advancent had been progressing at a rapid pace, having launched satellites into orbit around Earth.

They had built and maintained operational space stations. They had been developing detailed plans and conducting preliminary research for establishing permanent colonies on Mars.

The Ignis had likely done the sa, and possibly better, given the sophistication of their equipnt. This telescope wasn't so crude device cobbled together from salvaged parts. The dishes on the other building weren't makeshift either. They were designed for long-range communication or data collection.