Theo's portal was nowhere near stable, comfortable or far-reaching. It wouldn't be an overexageration to claim it was eight parts show and only two parts actual utility.
Even with all the years he had to prepare, Theo's biological limit didn't change. And regardless of all the tools, formation and anchored magic he prepared, fourth-realm magic was a limit the hard limit of what magic he could safely invoke.
Heck, even now, as Theo stepped out from the portal and landed safely within his hidden laboratory, the dim, blue flames of residual mana coated every inch of the man, burning 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 his knees gave in, sending him down to the lab's floor.
"Haaaa…"
A long sigh escaped Theo's lips as he allowed himself but a short moment of rest.
His portal, while modeled to appear like a high-level one was there mostly for the show, to leave a lasting impression on Cornelius.
Which is exactly why, Theo pretended to escape as far as he could while teleporting to the archmage's tower underground, where he adapted an 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 of painstaking work to lay down.
Up until today, though, there was one element still missing for the runes inscribed all over the lab's to come to life. A source of power that could compensate for the shortcomings of the modern magic that even at its peak, was but a mere shadow of what it once was.
"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 of the lab.
'All the decoy's I've set-up will buy me only so much time.'
Theo approached the center of the formation, a spike with a thick foothold on the floor, growing thinner and thinner towards the point just a bit below the halfway mark from the floor to the lab's ceiling. There, a single gap remained, breaking the connection between the tip of the small spire to its mirrored reflection growing down from the lab's ceiling.
Below the spire, a single tri-pod stood firmly on the surface, holding up a simple stone plate with a total of nine red crystals embeeded in its surface.
And even though Theo had just executed the first step of his plan, one of the crystals has already lost its luster, turning all dim.
"He's moving fast, I will give him that," Theo thought, watching as another crystal lost its shine.
Those decoys were actually a perfectly legitimate magic laboratories that Theo managed 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… When the push came to shove, he could display a frigtheningly cold inteligence, usually hidden beneath the deep mounds of incompetence and laziness.
After witnessing Theo kidnap him right at the peak of an important diplomatic event only to then steal the tower's authority and vanish, even Cornelious could grasp the depth of the shit he stumbled into.
The amount of preparation necessary to pull something like that off... Just that alone was a clear indicator Theo had no plans of suffering the consequences of what he did!
The third red crystal 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 years of self-orchestrated abuse. Only by staying in the shadow of Cornelious could he avoid people wondering about the true goal of the development of the mana-lanes, a project most mages considered too good to be true and then too beneficial not to heavily invest in.
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 located right below the archmage's tower.
And now, the immense reserves of mana stored in the mana-tank of every tower in the country was all for Theo to command.
The fourth and fifth crystals on the display went dark simultaneousely. Cornelius and his lapdogs were moving faster and faster with each passing moment.
Little did they know, Theo took his sweet time to calm down, calmly preparing himself right in the basement of the archmage's tower, in the very last place anyone would expect him to be at.
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-lines network and the massive formation within his lab.
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 needed to close the circuit of his formation.
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 but a part of the circuit. And while that allowed him to push near infinite amount of mana through his mana-gate, the cost of doing so was lethal.
It didn't matter if what Theo was effectively doing was an execution method used to rid the world 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, a fire that would erase the very essence of his existence until there was 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.
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 core idea of Theo's entire self...
Only to remove said 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. A deed that would make him the first true archmage since the fall of the ancients, one that earned the title in the proper way rather than gaining it as a result of the king's political move.
An act that would allow him to be fully reborn, restoring himself through this new manifestation of the idea of himself.
But rather than waking up, Theo froze.
The part of the formation responsible for re-awakening his conciousness...
It couldn't activate before the blue flames burned through enough of Theo's flesh for his body to fail and thus 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 consequences of messing with forces that brought down the civilizaiton of the ancients dawned on him, Theo's perception… twitched.
The brightly lit-up lab vanished, its image cracking into pieces before fully shattering like a broken, tempered glass, only to reveal a brand new version of reality underneath the shattered illusion.
It was a vision of peace, 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 cultivation-induced levitation failing right as his concentration wavered.
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 shit?!"