Once he secured the monument, Lucky manipulated the gravity being exerted on his body and flew back to the portal. He quickly emerged back above the crystal city before its energy fizzled out and the disappeared into the void.
"That was close, Lucky! What if you became trapped on the other side!"
Lucky behaved as if he never heard his scoldings and bumped the monument into his grip. Ves looked at the thing with a strange expression.
"What is this?"
Although he called it a monument, it might not have served such a purpose to the aliens that originally constructed it. Why would they go through the trouble of constructing a crystal city that could open a portal to another place entirely? Why would they leave nothing behind on the other side except for this string of runes?
As he inspected the metallic monument, he realized that the monument's runes corresponded to the runes placed across the city.
"Is this a key somehow?"
Ves had the sense that he got ahold of a passphrase that allowed him to unlock a secured data pad. He frowned a bit. All of this smelled like a puzzle or a test. What kind of alien species was bored enough to set all of this up?
These long-dead alien pranksters left a hell of a mess behind for him. If he wanted to make some progress, he had to follow the clues laid out before him. The runes looked like a good start.
"Hitting the spiral structures with a laser activates a mechanism. Since the rune monuments in the city are made out of the same kind of crystal, then I bet that they can be activated in the same way."
The aliens erected hundreds of rune monuments, each with their own unique shapes. Ves had already tasked his hazard suit to map them all out, so he understood their distribution.
Looking up from above, the runes corresponded with a spiral, but in the shape of a galaxy. It didn't quite conform to the galaxy's appearance in modern times, which made him suspect that this species must have lived an extremely long time ago.
"How many hundreds of millions of years have passed? This city stands as timeless as ever. How come it hasn't been buried beneath a mound of soil?"
Perhaps this planet used to be dotted with crystal cities, but time and neglect had buried them all under the forest and the soil.
"Maybe the place I originally emerged from also contains a means to go back."
If the crystal city didn't offer any solution, then he could only return to the deadly forest and excavate some clues from there.
He stepped closer to the city and tried to touch a crystal rune monument, only for his fingers to slip right through them. "Seems like they can't harm anything in a dormant state."
Ves stepped back again and shot a random monument.
Just like with the spirals, the rune monument glowed and pulsed in white. It persisted in this behavior for over ten minutes before fizzling out.
"I see. Nothing happens if only one of them is active."
He thought he should be able to get a result if he transferred power to the correct sequence of runes within this timespan. Ves looked back at the metallic string of runes in his hand and started to gain a headache?
"Do the aliens read from left or right, or right from left? Do I need to read top to bottom or bottom to top?"
What would happen if he lighted up the wrong sequence? What if he blasphemed the tiny alien's religion by enacting their ritual in reverse?
After several minutes of procrastinating, Ves decided to go out on a limb and read the runes from left to right, going down a row at the end.
He started to raise his Amastendira. Hopefully, he didn't invite a cataclysm with this experiment.