When Gideon and Victoria heard the second possible reason, their eyes trembled with disbelief, but the more they thought about it, the more plausible it sounded.
"I brought you two here to confirm my theory, after all, if it really was from a higher civilization, there's no way that they would leave your world alone considering it's just as habitable as our own. So there might be something here that you have possibly seen in your own world." Baal told them his true reason for bringing them here and they immediately found it reasonable. After all, Earth really was just as habitable if not more.
After that, Baal began to sprint over one of the bridges and the siblings followed him closely.
As they passed over the bridge, Gideon and Victoria noticed how the huge rock platform the city was built on was a perfect circle, other than the cracks that had appeared die to time, the circle had no rough edges and was pretty much perfect.
They soon reached the city and went through the collapsed wall. They were immediately greeted by empty streets and abandoned buildings.
"Follow me." Baal instructed as he went deeper into the city and the siblings immediately obeyed and we're close behind him.
Soon, they reached an open area that resembled a city square, but the ground was riddled with all sorts of strange circular markings.
'Wait, these look a bit familiar.' Gideon furrowed his eyebrows as he squatted down and rubbed his hands against some of the markings to clear the dust so that he could get a better look.
"Do you recognize these?" Victoria squatted next to Gideon and stared intently at the markings, but couldn't recall anything.
"Yeah, I think I've seen these somewhere... Wait!" It suddenly clicked in his mind.
He remembered that at some point when he was younger, while he was checking out things related to ancient earth, he stumbled upon something that kept happening in one part of the earth.
Apparently, the place had a lot of farms and at some point, mysterious weirdly shaped circles would suddenly appear in the farms overnight, and people dubbed them 'Crop Circles'. Although he couldn't recognize the majority of the circles, the few he did recognize were the exact ones he saw.
"Crop circles? Oh yeah, I think I saw something on those some time ago, but I didn't think much of it though." Victoria stated.
"Then that confirms my theory then. It seems like the race was possibly trying to communicate with you guys for some reason." Baal mused.
'Then what were they trying to do? Communicate? If so then why communicate with a world that hasn't even acquired astral energy yet?' A bunch of questions popped into Gideon's mind.
'Also, why would carve a bunch of them into the ground? Are these simply decorative? Wait, the are from a race that could use astral energy way before us, so maybe...' As Gideon had that thought, he poured astral energy into the ground.
Immediately, his eyes widened in shock as he felt something in the ground suck his astral energy greedily like a black hole. And in mere moments, more that half of his energy was consumed.
He quickly stopped supplying energy and stood up, a bit terrified by whatever was down below. But then after a few seconds, some of the circles suddenly lit up with a blue color. It was only a few, and threw were roughly a thousand of them. But it was definitely something.
"Let me try." Baal obviously saw what Gideon did and decided to give it a go, after all, he had a much higher energy pool than him. Victoria just watched everything with fascination.
Baal squatted and put his hands down on the symbols as well.He immediately started pouring his astral energy and felt his eyes widened in shock. It were as if he was putting on a small tap and the water was going into a deep well.
Even after pouring around a quarter of his energy, he was only able to activate three percent of the circles. Fortunately, the circles stayed lit up, so they concluded that whatevs was below the circles was some sort of battery.
"This is very intriguing. Something tells me that these markings are similar to runes, so they must do something when fully charged." Baal analyzed and the siblings subconsciously nodded their heads. Poor Victoria could barely wrap her head around what was happening.
"Actually, there's more of these around. Let's see if they do anything different." Baal told them and their eyes widened. There were more of these?
Baal took them around and it was as he said, there were many more of these. Roughly ten more.
"Wait did we loop around?" Victoria stated causing Baal and Gideon to realize that after looking at all the different crop circles, they arrived at the first area again.
'Hold on. Crop circles in a circular formation.' Gideon started to inspect the outer edges of the area and as he expected, there was a very thin line in the ground.
With a burst of speed, Gideon followed the line and after three minutes, he came back and there was a line on the other side.
"Did you find something?" Baal asked and Gideon nodded.
"Fly up with me." Gideon summoned wings made of poison and Victoria did the same while Baal simply levitated.
After nearly reaching the top of the underground cavern, Gideon suddenly pointed downwards.
"All these different areas, they are the foundation for a massive magic circle." Gideon revealed and Baal and Victoria looked at him in surprise.
But then when they looked downwards as well, they actually noticed that not only where the areas with crop circles lined up in a perfect circle, there was actually a thin and intricate line that connected them. And in between each area, these lines branched out and when the observed the lines further, they saw that the lines actually stretched out through the entire city, forming a massive magic circle.
"But then why create a magic circle that encompasses an entire city? Was it some sort of defense mechanism?" Victoria asked and Gideon shook his head.
"I highly doubt that there was anything that could cause a race that could use astral energy to retreat, this world had no access to it at that time after all." Hearing this, Victoria frowned slightly but couldn't come up with an answer.
"I may actually have an idea as to what it is." Baal suddenly said causing the siblings to look at him.
"It's only a theory, but I believe that this magic circle was used to transport all the members of the civilization away."