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それ以外、つまり冒険者の半数以上は未だLV1のもとで燃え燻っている。
I am having trouble understanding the last part of this sentence. What does のもとで do here?
Also, how do you figure out the exact meaning of compound words? I tried looking up 燃え燻る but I can't find it in a dictionary. The story I'm reading has a lot of these words that I can't find in a dictionary.
Thanks!
～のもとで means "under (control of) ～", of course, but I think this usage of もとで is not very natural. This sentence would have been perfectly fine without that (i.e., "未だLV1で燃え燻っている"). Or maybe the author wanted to express a feeling of "can't get rid of the LV1 group" by using that. Anyway, I recommend that you don't try to learn something new from this part.
燃え燻る seems to be very rare (I couldn't find another example of this combination in BCCWJ Corpus), but I think it's just a literary variation of 燻る. 燻【くすぶ】る literally means 'to smolder, to burn without flame', but it often figuratively means 'to be without much success', 'to live idly, just waiting for a chance', etc.
