Shen Luguang keeps his lips pressed tightly closed for a moment -- the scholar-cultivators living in the imperial palace would also be best suited to study this monstrosities and weaponize them, if such a thing is even possible, but he's not going to give Liu Feiyu another chance to shoot down his ideas -- but he's always been incapable of suppressing his own curiosity for long. Eventually he has no choice but to open his mouth and ask, "What do you mean, 'whatever' it did? What do you think would have killed you, if the worm hadn't intervened?"

Astarion's phrasing is just odd, okay?? As a scholar Shen Luguang is trained to notice that sort of inconsistency.