I looked around once more, my senses straining, and was met with pure, undisturbed silence.
There was no single sound aside from my own slight, hitching panting, the air still and heavy in this forgotten place.
My gaze swept across the scattered, broken dead bodies of those pale, dwarf-like creatures, strewn like grotesque dolls all over the rocky floor of the dungeon below where I stood.
Then, something caught my eye, rolling almost languidly towards the west of my line of sight: a small, bright orange object, tumbling weightlessly on the uneven ground at the far, shadowy end of the cave.
I quickly, yet cautiously, walked towards where the object was heading.
I didn't bother to chase it; it wasn't going anywhere fast.
It finally bumped gently against the damp cave wall and came to a rest.
I got close to it and stooped to pick it up.
It was a crinkled, discarded wrapper from some kind of processed food.
It had a garish, stylized picture of some food item that I clearly hadn't ever seen or, God knows, eaten before in my entire damn life.
The mere sight of this flimsy wrapper, this ghost of sustenance, made my stomach rumble loudly once again, a hollow, painful clench.
I couldn't read the fancy, foreign-looking script of this food product's name, but I knew from experience that stuffs like this always had identifying details printed somewhere on them – information regarding where and when they were manufactured.
So, I turned it over to its less colorful back and scanned the fine print.
I saw "Higashi-sumiyoshi" clearly legible as part of some longer address, which might possibly be where it was made, or perhaps sold, or some other equally irrelevant detail.
The southern and central parts of Higashi-sumiyoshi were notorious slums, sprawling urban cancers much like my own beloved Sumiyoshi shithole, while its northern part edged into the comparatively wealthy Conquest district.
Some of the older guys back home, the ones who'd been around, used to mention it having a few operational factories still chugging along.
I looked away from the wrapper clutched in my hands, down to the dusty, debris-strewn ground, and tried to mentally trace the wrapper's improbable journey here.
I walked slowly in that general direction, my eyes scanning for any subtle clues, and soon I reached a shadowed corner that initially looked like yet another depressing dead end.
But then, tucked away on the left side of that gloomy corner, I spotted a small, almost concealed opening, roughly the height of my knee from the cave floor.
I knelt carefully on one knee and observed it closely, every nerve ending tingling with a mixture of hope and apprehension.
There was some kind of strange, green, semi-solid, viscous substance clinging around the rough-hewn walls of the narrow opening, with tiny, iridescent bubbles slowly forming and then silently popping on its glistening, pulsating surface – it almost appeared as if the damn thing was breathing, somehow alive.
I cautiously placed my right palm a bit closer to it, feeling for any change, and I began to perceive a very soft, almost ethereal sensation of moving air, a faint, cool draft.