Poof!
Theo's portal was nowhere near stable, comfortable or far-reaching. It wouldn't be an overexageration to claim it was eighty percent show and only twenty percent utility.
Even with all of his years-long preparation, Theo could still wield magic only up to its fourth stage. And even with all the tools, formation and anchored magic at his disposal, it was a limit he simply couldn't overcome.
Heck, even now, as he stepped out from the portal and landed safely within his hidden laboratory, his entire body was covered in bright, blue flames of residual mana eating away at his clothes, skin and flesh.
"That was a bit too close to comfort," Theo muttered, flushing the surface of his body with whatever little mana he managed to regenerate before falling weekly down to the lab's floor.
"Haaaa…"
A long sigh escaped Theo's lips as he allowed himself but a moment of rest.
His portal, while modeled to appear like a high-level one capable of casting him off to the other side of the continent actually relied on the ages-old adage - of the shadows being the deepest right below the source of light.
Which is exactly why, shackled by his magical limitations, Theo pretend to escape as far as he could while teleporting directly to the archmage's tower underground, where he adapted selection of abandoned and forgotten workshop into the masterpiece of the magic theory made flesh.
The whole laboratory was set up to be just one, massive formation. Each of the restored room but a module, a kog in magical wondercraft that took Theo six years to lay down.
Up until today, though, there was one element left for the runes inscribed all over the lab's floors, walls and ceiling to come to life. A source of power that could compensate for the shortcomings of the modern magic that was a mere shadow, pragmatic reconstruction of the magic wielded by their ancestors back in the legendary age.
"Okay, then," Theo whistled, rising up from the floor and stumbling forward, to one of the few artifacts that broke out from the otherwise uniformly clean, flat surfaces.
'All the decoy's I've left behind will only buy me so much time.'
Theo approached the center of the formation, a spike with a thick foothold on the floor, growing thiner and thinner all the way the very middle of the room's height. There, a single gap remained, breaking the connection from the tip of the small spire to its mirror reflection growing down from the ceiling and towards the ground.
Below the spire, a single pole grew out from the ground, with a simple stone plate displayed at its top with a total of nine red crystals embeeded in its surface.
And even though Theo just executed the first step of his plan, one of the crystals already went dark.
"He's moving fast, I will give him that," Theo thought, watching as another crystal lost its shine.
The nine labs that Theo constructed and worked at during the seventeen years prior, laying down the foundation for his grand plan. And after they've fulfilled their purpose, Theo happily turned them into nothing more but roadblocks for Cornelius and his desperate attempts to catch and stop Theo before he would do whatever it was that he prepared.
Cornelius was an arrogant bully who happily jumped on the opportunity to steal all of Theo's credit. And while he was naive enough to believe he was the one behind this whole situation… He wasn't all that stupid when the push came to shove.
And after witnessing Theo kidnap him right at the peak of an important diplomatic event only to then steal the tower's authority from his and vanish, he could tell that at the very least, Theo had no plans to suffer the consequences of doing all of that!
The third of the red crystals lost its shine, giving credit to Cornelius determination with how quickly he managed to raid all of those separate places.
'He must be burning mana like crazy,' Theo thought, glancing at the display for just one more second, before turning his eyes towards the mirror spires and, to be exact, the gap between them.
With but a thought, a familiar shine appeared all around Theo's wrist, the tower's authority responding without a hint of a problem.
Theo was the main architect of its circuits, after all. And now, it was finally going to serve its true purpose, not as the archmage's private arsenal but as a key to the biggest storage of mana humanity created since the dawn of the legendary age.
This was the other reason why Theo willingly suffered through the self-inflicted abuse. Only by staying in the shadows could he avoid people wondering about his purpose behind this development, one that appeared to be simply too good to be true.
It was a network consisting of underground mana highways connecting every and each of the mage's towers all over the country to the center-node of the whole network, the archmage's tower.
And now, the immense reserves of mana stored in the mana-tank of every tower in the country was now for Theo to command.
The fourth and fifth crystals on the display went dark simultaneousely. Cornelius and his lapdogs were getting faster with each passing moment.
Little did they know, Theo took his sweet time to calm down, preparing in comfort right in the basement of the archmage's tower, in the very last place they would ever think to look.
After all, what sane criminal would escape to the tower's dungeons, a place designed to hold prisoners locked-up and thus with no easy way to escape?
"Well then," mentally prepared, Theo nodded to himself before shedding all of the useless add-ons to the tower's authority, restoring it to its original purpose - as the gateway between the mana-network and the single formation all of its stored mana was designed to power-up.
A formation inscribed with the first spell that went beyond the mystical ninth realm of magic for the very first time since the dawn of the ancients!
'If I pull it out, I will be the first man to enter the tenth realm of magic,' Theo grinned to his own thoughts right as he pushed his wrist into the gap between the two spires, turning himself into the last part of the circuit necessary to merge his formation with the mana-network of the mage's towers.
Three more crystals on the display went dark, leaving only one lab for Corneloius and his men to go through. But by now, it was too late.
Intense, blue flames - unlike the faint sparks from before - exploded all around Theo.
In this one, single moment, rather than using his mana-gate to control the passing of the world's raw mana, Theo turned his entire body into a circuit.
It didn't matter if doing so was a method used in executions of the most dangerous of mages, deemed as the only sure-fire way to erase every speck of their existence.
By all means, Theo just set himself on a magical fire that would continue to burn through… no, erase the very essence of his existence until there was absolutely nothing left.
For but a single instant, though, his array powered up. And in that one instant, with the explosion of the greatest gathering of mana in human's recorded history, the very laws of the universe had to give in.
And in this precise moment, the complex instructions embeeded into the array through tens of thousands of tiny runes meticulously engraved into every inch of the lab's surface has extracted the very ideo of Theo…
Only to remove him this idea from the flow of time and forcefully inject it back at the time-flow's different point.
Ideally, this was where Theo was supposed to wake up, reborn without the shackles that held him back for his entire life, with just enough time to retract his steps and grow powerful enough to return to this very laborathory and close the loop of the formation, turning it into a fully-fledged tenth-rank spell.
A deed that would make him the first true archmage since the ancient times, one that earned the title in the proper way rather than bestowed with it through the political will of the crown.
An act that would allow him to be fully reborn, restoring himself through this new version of the idea of himself made flesh by the very same rules of the universe that Theo was currently bending!
But rather than waking up, Theo froze in the moment.
The part of the formation responsible for re-awakening his conciousness within the remade idea of himself…
It couldn't activate before the blue flames ate through enough of Theo's flesh to break the circuit open.
'Don't tell me…'
Theo's eyes, frozen in time, couldn't even turn wide-open at the terrifying realization.
It appeared that in his bid to remove the shackles the heavens burdened him with, he…
He failed.
Right as the realization of the consequences of messing with forces that brought down the civilizaiton of the ancients, Theo's perception… twitched.
The brightly lit-up lab vanished, its image cracking apart before fully shattering like a broken, tempered glass, only to reveal a brand new version of a world underneath.
A peaceful vision, filled with nature, calmly growing herbs and a lone figure of a young man in long, extremely unpractical robes carefully levitating but an inch above a small boulder.
A vision that suddenly grew more and more real, all the way to the point where Theo suddenly dropped down, his levitation failing the moment his concentration broke.
And before a single educated though could take place in his head…
"Shit!"
Theo cursed under his mouth, the pain of falling ass-first onto the boulder only reminding him of his current, dire straits.
"Just how the heck do I stop her from marrying that piece of garbage?"
//Chapter is still a subject to stylistic rewrite/edit//