Kyle looked around the city some more.
'Buildings,' he thought. 'Normal buildings.'
Sure, the buildings were old, but they didn't seem very different from any other kind of building.
They had roofs and walls.
Most of them were constructed out of old wood, stone, and some metals.
'Wait a second. Wood?' Kyle thought.
Kyle looked around the walls of the cave and saw some chunks of iron and copper.
Metal Elementals were not really interested in such low-level metals since they barely had any Ether.
When Kyle looked at the buildings again, he saw some parts made of iron and steel.
After that, he looked at the surroundings of the cave.
There were some tunnels, but they were all made recently, most likely by Metal Elementals.
'Why the fuck would you use wood in an underground city? You obviously know how to make steel, and there's a bunch of iron. Why go through the trouble of getting wood from the surface?'
At that moment, Kyle had a thought.
'Unless this wasn't always underground.'
'But I'm like two or three miles underground. How long does it take for a city to sink that far?'
'Also, if that's the case, how the fuck is it still in one piece? This shit should be buried, not enclosed.'
Then, Kyle noticed the suspiciously spherical shape of the cave.
After some calculations, he determined that the center of the spherical shape of the cave was in the center of the city.
'Looks like a manmade cave, but then, why use wood? Unless this is a natural cave that formed around a manmade object. It's kinda like pouring molten iron into a mold, except the other way around.'
Kyle looked around the city for a bit.
'That's an inn,' he thought as he saw one of the buildings. 'One more reason why this city was probably above-ground at some point.'
'Let's see, the oldest records I could find in the library were from like a couple of thousand years ago. Apparently, they are some ancient records from a different ruin.'
'Fuck, I knew I should've read that! Instead, I just looked at the date and ignored it.'
'Yeah, well, who cares where this comes from or how old it is? There's only one thing that matters.'
'Money!' Kyle thought with a smirk. 'Better look if there are any ancient artifacts or other valuables!'
Kyle's Ether Sense entered a couple of buildings.
Sadly, the only things he found were piles of dust where beds and other organic furniture had been.
The metal furniture was still there.
Naturally, it had turned a bit rusty, but it was honestly not as bad as one would think.
'Probably because there's barely any Water Ether present.'
After looking through a couple of buildings, Kyle found some old weapons and trinkets.
'Rank D and C Materials. Not very useful.'
'Although that should have still been a bit interesting to Metal Elementals. Why's this stuff still here? I mean, I literally saw a Metal Elemental inside this city during my fight.'
'Wait, I actually saw it in the cave, not in the city. Yes, it was in the cave, but it wasn't exactly inside the city. It was just a bit outside.'
That was when Kyle looked at the eight pedestals around the city.
Five of them had crystals on them, while the other three didn't.
'Is this some kind of Metal Elemental defense?'
'But then, this would mean that this city actually wasn't above ground.'
'Fuck, if I knew how the fancy scientists on Earth manage to date shit millions of years into the past, I could do the same thing here. Maybe that would help.'
Kyle's mind was trying to come up with a theory for the city's origins.
That was when he remembered Theodor's City.
'He rebuilt his city underground, right?'
Then, he remembered a dumb idea from a cartoon he had watched as a kid.
"Why don't we just take the city and move it someplace else?"
'What if they teleported the city to this place? That would explain why the buildings have wood and even an inn while being so deep underground.'
'But how do you move an entire fucking city? You would need something like teleportation.'
'I mean, Space Affinities exist. I've never met someone with one, but I've read reports about them. Could you use some kind of Space Spell to move a city?'
'Transcendents seem to have godlike powers, right? Teleporting a city seems possible if you had a Transcendent with a Space Affinity.'
'But why though? I mean, this is not some kind of huge fortress. These are just regular ass buildings from a regular ass city.'
Kyle was trying to come up with an explanation, but there were too many ifs.
'Eh, who cares?' he thought as he continued traveling through the city.
He looked through more buildings, but he didn't find anything of value.
Eventually, he reached a building near the center of the city.
'Oh? What's this?' he thought as his Ether Sense sent him signals of a dense mass of Metal Ether inside the building.
Kyle quickly walked over and saw a big chest made of Rank A Materials. 'That's fancy!' Kyle thought as he looked at the chest.
This thing was probably about as massive as a Metal Elemental.
Kyle went over to the chest and lifted it.
When he looked inside, he blinked in surprise.
The chest was filled to the brim with thin, inscribed sheets of Rank B Materials.
'Tablets?' Kyle thought. 'Who the fuck writes on tablets? Also, these are quite some expensive tablets.'
Kyle looked at one of the tablets.
It showed pictures of rocks with some symbols beside them.
It didn't take long for Kyle to decipher the purpose of these tablets. Even a regular guy would pretty quickly realize what this was.
'They're teaching me how to write their numbers. One rock is this symbol. Two rocks are this symbol. Three rocks are this symbol, and so on.'
'This means I'm supposed to find this. I mean, not me specifically, but this is for any human who might come across this place in the future.'
Kyle furrowed his brows and sighed in annoyance.
'Then, why the fuck did I try to decipher the origin of this city if everything's just written down here?!'
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