Very puzzling indeed.

John pulled and pulled harder but the top of the chest wouldn't move. It was still locked. The only thing he could think of was that while the series of symbols were correctly gathered, they were not in the right order.

John stripped of his armor and sat down, closing his eyes to meditate. He could see the symbols in his mind and focused on how they looked. It suddenly hit him. On 3 of the 7 series he could order them according to the number of angles and lines contained in the runes.

A few minutes of sliding later he heard three loud clicks, it was the right solution...

"John, look this one looks like something growing, if you take this one and then that one, do you see it?" asked Sylvia.

"That's brilliant. You have an eye for this." he replied. In the end only the central ring remained a total mystery. But he knew a common video game trick...

When in doubt move everything around randomly, you might find the solution.

It took him more than one hour to finally hear the beautiful clicking sound of the last lock opening.

"Let's get this thing open." he told Sylvia.

They both grabbed one end of the chest's lid and pulled up. With a creaking sound it finally opened only to reveal...

Another puzzle box!

"What? This makes no sense why put something like this in another box. And look, they chained it but left the keys!" he raged.

The thing inside of the chest was a cube with one foot sides, chained inside of the chest and locked in place with seven padlocks. It seemed like there was another puzzle lock on each side of the cube. The strange thing was that the keys to the padlocks blocking the chains were left there hanging from hooks inside of the lid. It took little time finding the right ones and freeing the cube from the chest.

"John, will you have time to open it?" asked Sylvia. John looked at the time on his phone.

'Fuck. I have less than 2 hours before I need to get out of my kingdom.' he thought.

"I'll just take it and solve it later. That way.... Weird! I can lift it but not put it in my inventory. What the fuck is this thing. We'll have to carry it back. Let's go, no time to lose. The Altar will wait." he replied.

' Fuck, this weigh a ton. I can't carry that all the way back' he thought. He took some rope front a fresh spool to hang it from the haft of his pickaxe over his shoulder. He checked that they had everything with them and started the long walk back.

Soon Sylvia stopped walking. She was spooling back the Arianna thread they had used to mark their path, in her hand was the gnawed end of the orange nylon rope... The other part was nowhere to be seen.

"John! The rope is gone..." whispered Sylvia. John sat the puzzle on the floor and aimed his flashlight farther in the corridor. He saw a large shadow moving away in a corridor he hadn't explored.

The way it moved was different than a beetle and it had left some sticky white substance on the floor. And the place was more dusty than muddy there.

"Something ate the rope. I was sure that putting markings in addition to the rope was a good idea. Even following our tracks we would risk getting lost. Let's continue." he explained.

Things were stranger down the road, a few of the glow sticks had been moved and glued on other walls with the white paste, and some of the markings were scratched like if something (or someone) had tried to erase them.

"Something doesn't want us to find the exit. This place is more dangerous than expected. I wonder what it can be." he told Sylvia, one hand on the hilt of his dagger. (the tunnels were not really wide and his sword might be too cumbersome in this environment.)

Seeing things from another angle he started to notice a few things he missed going down, such as another resource spot in a tunnel he skipped earlier.

"it won't be a huge delay and I can't afford wasting the opportunity, we are not far from home anyway." he told Sylvia. They put both lamps on the ground, lighting both sides of the tunnel and had unrolled some more rope and made new marks to be sure to find back their way.

John tried to do as fast as he could, getting some interesting loot.

36 units of stone
2 units of quartz
2 units of zinc

He knew that he could alloy the zinc with copper to make brass, the quartz would be useful as the units were pretty large and the stone was just what he needed to improve his castle.

No attempts at making them get lost, maybe whatever was lurking bellow was keeping away from the exits, they were only 7 crossings from the entrance.

Once inside the reassuring artificial structure of his castle he began to relax. He made a trip to his control room with mixed results. He used 100 units of stone and 500$ to create a new floor, but the scanner gave him an Unknown item error message for his puzzle box.

He noticed that he could now build an Ascension Lab on his second floor, but it required an alchemy station, enchanting station and a lot of equipment he didn't have yet.

From the outside as he was preparing to drive Sylvia back to her forest he could see that the castle had doubled in height, the various gadgets from the tech lab still on the roof but one floor higher.

He was sweaty and rather than using a spell he planned to take a dip in the Fountain, it was a lot better and would assure that he would be at his maximum vitality for his afternoon.

After a few minutes of amazement at the recent growth and spread of her forest Sylvia came to help him bathe. John had to reluctantly keep things down to a simple blowjob while he remotely fucked her pussy using Move, anything else would last too long and he sure as hell wouldn't be late to his appointment.

He left Sylvia with dozens of packets of various seeds and a few bags of organic fertilizer, she would have a lot of fun while he would be gone. (according to her standards growing plants was almost as fun as sex, almost...)

John put on clean clothes, a nice shirt and nicely pressed jeans. He exited his kingdom once back at the castle and rode his bike to somewhere he could grab a bite to get the energy he would need later this day.