Of course, much like John, Richard wasn’t the one who created the concept of a Mage Guild or Mage Tower. These institutions had existed long before he was born, and many before him had tried to scale them up to the universal level, just as he eventually did.
However, all of them ran into countless roadblocks, from factional conflicts to political struggles and power plays, and even those who managed to achieve a degree of success never reached the scale Richard attained.
But Richard had all the ti in the universe.
He played by the rules when it suited him, and broke them when it didn’t. He could be nice or ruthless as the situation demanded. And assassination attempts from rivals or competitors were aningless since he couldn’t die, no matter what they tried.
Using that to his advantage, he steadily gathered, partnered with, and eventually absorbed countless similar organisations, ranging from interplanetary to intergalactic scale.
Then, leveraging the boost in Authority the Hybrids gained following the Destruction Supre’s Reign, he forcefully installed himself as the supre leader of the main Mages Guild within Zanerth’s Multi-Universal Empire.
John followed a similar route. He didn’t invent the idea of adventurers’ guilds or related institutions. He simply took what was already in place and expanded it, since that was far easier than building an entirely new system from the ground up.
To the average adventurer, the Guild was just a local fixture, no different from the tavern or the potion shop next door. Many low-to-mid-level mbers did not even believe such a central authority existed, or assud it was purely symbolic.
Only the top administrative layers knew the guild was part of a larger universal network run by a central authority, and that all the roads led back to the sa universal desk.
Returning to the matter at hand, Richard contacted a handful of the highest-ranking mages and had them on standby, just in case the situation called for it.
A little-known fact: so of these mages were actually stronger than Richard.
Not just in terms of having a higher Existence Realm, but in terms of sheer, overwhelming raw power.
So why did they still follow his lead? Simple, because Richard was a better Mage!
They may have had more power, but Richard had superior skill. And surprisingly, there were many who chose to defer to those with greater mastery, often with the hope of reaching that level of skill themselves one day.
After he forcefully cut the call on one of such overenthusiastic old-tirs, soone who had lived far longer than Richard felt necessary, Miranda spoke up.
"Where are your siblings anyway?"
Miranda hadn’t initially sensed them when she tried to locate Jamie earlier, and it was only a mont later that she picked up faint traces of their presence, scattered across so remote region of the universe.
But because it was scattered, she couldn’t pinpoint their exact location, hence why she turned to Richard, assuming he would know.
However, the fact that Richard had to hold up a finger and say "One mont" before turning his right palm upward and infusing cosmic energy into the rune inscribed there ant even he was unaware.
For reference, Richard was currently dressed like a man in winter, wearing a double-breasted coat over a shirt with its collar buttons undone, a checked scarf draped over his shoulders, and a flat cap on his jet-black hair, so the similarly coloured gloves didn’t look out of place.
After a while, the rune projected a 3D hologram into the air, revealing a very sleepy, but still beautiful woman with ssy black hair, heterochromatic red and blue eyes, and fangs just barely visible as she yawned.
[Richard...? What the hell...it’s 3 a.m....]
"Olivia, you’re part vampire. Shouldn’t you be more active at 3 a.m.?"
[I’m also part dragon, and dragons like to sleep,] Olivia shot back instantly, yawning again before continuing,
[So? What is it?]
"Where are you and John?"
The response Richard received left him montarily frozen.
[Mum’s final pocket dinsion.]
A second later, Olivia, now sounding more awake, added,
[Co to think of it, you should be here too. John and I have found a ton of stuff, and we just stumbled across sothing that might give us a clue about what the hell happened before Mum vanished.
After all, this place is probably the last spot she stayed in before her sudden disappearance.]
"..."
Richard silently thanked his earlier self for not dissolving the sound isolation barrier.
His eyes narrowed as he asked,
"A hint, you say?"
Olivia nodded while rubbing her eyes.
[Yeahhh...
You do know that Mum’s ’Witch of Chaos’ title wasn’t sothing people gave her, but sothing she acquired because of her connection to the Cosmic Force of Chaos, right?]
"I already know that."
[Well then, for starters, soti before Mum disappeared, ’Chaos’ was most likely trying to consu her mind.]
"...what?"
Richard’s stunned voice echoed into the silence, and even Miranda set down her tablet and looked up at Olivia’s projection.
[Exactly what I said, Richard. To put it bluntly, Mum was going insane. Or rather, Chaos was actively trying to drive her insane.
Literally.]
For a mont, the projection glitched as Olivia moved, but it quickly stabilised, and her voice ca through again.
[Richard, in all the years you knew her, did our mother ever seem like the type to keep a journal or diary?]
"Journal? Mum?"
Richard looked genuinely incredulous, as if placing ’Angela’ and ’Journal’ in the sa sentence was almost absurd to him.
Seeing his expression, Oliva continued.
[All the information Mum ever needed or wanted, she kept in that head of hers. She stole a portion of the Conceptual Authority of ’Knowledge’.
It should be impossible for her to ’forget’ anything.]
Then, holding up a hardcover book without any label, Olivia added,
[But... we found a journal. In Mum’s handwriting.
Mum was trying not to forget things. And the only thing capable of making her forget, even while possessing Conceptual Authority—]
"Would be another Conceptual Authority...or the Cosmic Force that Authority originated from—Chaos."
Richard finished her sentence, already beginning to piece so things together himself.
The collision between the Cosmic Forces of Chaos and Order had birthed the Cosmos, and the Concepts the Eternals and Aggressors governed, those responsible for certain fundantal facets of existence, had been extracted from those Cosmic Forces.
[Anyway, what John and I found was clear evidence that Mum was losing it before she vanished. At so point, she couldn’t even keep up with her experints anymore.]
Olivia said this, then snapped her fingers, layering another twelve encryptions onto the communication channel before continuing.
[And here’s where things start getting strange. Even after she got Jamie out of it, Mum was still running her experints on Hybrids.]
This was sothing Richard and Miranda never would have imagined.
Angela’s Immortality Project, the one that produced Jamie as the ’Perfect’ success.
That success should have been the conclusion of that Chapter. But now, over a billion years later, they were discovering that Angela had still been working on it.
The lab Olivia and John were currently in was hidden within a fold of reality itself, and only after a billion years had the concealnt weakened enough for them to detect it.
Just what else was Angela still after, that she would isolate herself in a lab so ticulously hidden, continuing her work despite her slipping sanity?
She had already turned her children into Immortals, so what more did she want from the experint?
[I found blood samples and other stuff, but they’re sealed. Like, really, really sealed.]
Olivia moved as she spoke, pointing toward a fridge with a transparent door, inside which several test tubes filled with blood were stored.
[Even with all my power, I can’t even crack the outermost layer of that thing.
So all we can do is sit here and stare at these multiple vials of unlabelled blood.]
For reference, every other item in Angela’s lab had a label.
[Got any ideas, Rich?]
Olivia’s question was t with a shake of the head from Richard.
"You’re Mum’s favourite child, Olivia. If even you don’t know, how am I supposed to know?"
After he said this, he thought about the fact that if John and Olivia hadn’t been going around searching for Angela’s items and tracking her unfinished goals, they likely wouldn’t have co across this lab for another few hundred million years.
After all, it had already taken a billion for the concealnt to wear off even just a bit.
That alone showed how strong Angela’s cosmic magic truly was, and made it all the more concerning that she had suddenly vanished one day.
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