Beyond the Bloodline-Chapter 351: Cosmic Spotlight

Richard followed Jamie and Sarina out, and as he stepped through the door, he finally voiced the question that had been on his mind for a while.

"Exactly where are you two headed?"

"Sarina wants me to open up some sealed space for her," Jamie replied.

"Oh, okay," Richard said with a nod, then shifted the conversation to the more important matter at hand.

"Anyway, Jamie... um... what the hell happened to you?"

There was no context in the question, but Jamie understood exactly what Richard meant.

"I thought you were never gonna ask. I let a witch take it.

It’s not really a problem since I planned to restructure a few things about my Existence Realms along the way,"

Jamie replied, slipping his hands into his pockets, and hearing that, Richard asked, 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

"This is the... fourth?"

Jamie held up five fingers and corrected him.

"Fifth."

Richard nodded, then continued.

"This is the fifth time. Do you plan this thing periodically?

Like, every two hundred million years, you do something crazy that ends with you losing all your power so you have to rebuild it again?"

At that, Jamie looked offended and shot back,

"Excuse me? I do NOT plan any of this. It just happens."

Richard immediately countered.

"So you didn’t plan to give virtually all your power to a witch?"

"Yeah," Jamie responded. "I planned to go on a date with Mira, but Sarina forgot one of her swords in Neo-Titania, so I had to go handle that. After that, I noticed the witch was around, and I wanted to test something. It didn’t work, and the end result was her taking my power."

"Wait, why am I suddenly involved in this?" Sarina, who was a step behind them, moved between the two and looked at Jamie with a raised brow.

In response, Jamie pulled out a familiar sword radiating powerful cosmic energy from his pocket dimension.

"You’re the one who left Slaifdein lying around and tipped off those vampires who interrupted my date with Mira..."

"Oh... yeah... that..."

Sarina’s eyes flashed with recognition, but before she could step back, Jamie caught her and added,

"You owe us for that... and for making us deal with your rampaging sword."

As Jamie held Sarina in place, Richard, seeing he was about to get side-tracked, quickly nudged the conversation back on track.

"What were you trying to test with the witch?"

"Hmm? Oh... well, it’s a seal for something that, if released, would mess up the balance of chaos and order in the universe.

I’m an Envoy of Balance, so I can’t let that happen."

""Excuse me, what the hell?"" Sarina and Richard both blurted out at the same time.

"Exactly what you heard. You think I’d just hand over all my power to some random witch for no reason?"

When Jamie asked this, Richard and Sarina both went silent, exchanged a glance, then looked back at him.

"Jamie... you know we can’t defend you on that," Richard began.

"I wouldn’t put it past you to do that just for the fun of it," Sarina added.

Jamie’s expression turned offended again as he responded,

"Excuse me, people?!

Sure, I do plenty of things just for the ’fun of it’, but there’s no way I’d ever lose all my power just for fun. Do you have any idea how many people hate my guts and would love nothing more than to beat the crap out of me? Why would I ever give them that chance willingly?!"

"You do have quite a long list of enemies..." Richard muttered.

"And some ridiculously powerful beings on that list too," Sarina added.

At that, Jamie was reminded of a few specific names, and he chuckled while turning his gaze up toward the starless night sky above them.

"There are certain people out there who can absolutely never find out I lost my power, even for a second. If they do, I’ll probably get sealed inside a box and flung to the edge of the Cosmos..."

"And knowing this, you still gave away your power?" Richard asked, staring at Jamie like he had lost his mind.

"Trust me, Richard, when I say that what is being sealed is no less of a threat than that person."

That response piqued both Richard’s and Sarina’s curiosity, and Richard immediately pressed for more details.

"Exactly who is this person you think would toss you to the edge of the Cosmos?"

"Well... it’s not just one. It’s actually two. A set of twins. Julio and Dulio. They’ve tried it before."

The moment those names left Jamie’s lips, both Richard and Sarina froze in place, turning toward him with identical deadpan stares.

Jamie didn’t even need to glance their way to know what they were thinking, so he added quickly,

"Yeah. It’s exactly who you’re thinking of."

Yes, Jamie was very much referring to the twins who governed the Concepts of Light and Life, and Death and Darkness— the Concepts that were the source of those forces and the reason they pervaded all of existence.

"You know Julio hates my guts, right?" Jamie asked.

"Because you keep pissing her off every single time you meet."

Sarina’s immediate retort made Jamie chuckle before replying,

"In my defence, I only pissed her off the first few times. After that, it was just her attacking me one-sidedly."

Richard sighed and shook his head, saying,

"Jamie, I think those first few times were more than enough to escalate her initial dislike of you into full-blown hatred.

Your mere existence is a constant pain in the behind for her, and if I remember correctly, the first time you met her, you hid behind my mother and mocked her repeatedly for not being able to kill you, even while using her Conceptual Authority over Death.

Then the next time, if I’m not mistaken, you challenged her to a fight and used the outcome to launch yourself into cosmic fame.

That alone was a slight to her reputation, since it exposed the existence of someone even the Eternal of Death couldn’t kill to the entire Cosmos, and made us Hybrids the centre of cosmic attention."

Hearing this, Jamie let out a light laugh and said,

"Wait, Richard, relax. You can’t blame me for that first encounter. I was just going about my day, barely surviving after nearly getting killed on Gnocyl Prime by one of the Destruction Supreme’s earliest minions, that anti-hybrid guy.

Then out of nowhere, this unbelievably powerful being from some higher dimension suddenly appeared in front of me, started talking about how my existence was violating some Conceptual System of Death I didn’t even know existed, and turned my body to dust.

When I regenerated right in front of her, she did it again. Twice.

So no, you really can’t blame me for saying a few words in response, however insulting they may have been.

As for the time I challenged her to a fight and all that talk about it launching me into cosmic fame—that wasn’t my intention. The fame was a very convenient by-product, one that ended up helping me later on.

But make no mistake, I didn’t challenge her just to show the cosmos that the Eternal of Death couldn’t kill me. I had entirely different reasons for doing that."

Just as both Jamie and Richard had mentioned, Julio, the Eternal who governed the Concept of Death, was the same Eternal Jamie had challenged for reasons only he, she, and one other person knew, and that single act was what propelled him to cosmic fame.

Before that event, while the Hybrids were already well-known, their recognition was mostly confined to their region of the multiverse. The Cosmos—all of existence—was unimaginably vast, encompassing multiple multiverses and decillions of universes.

At the time, Jamie was only a few million years old, nowhere near old enough to have made a name for himself across that scale of existence.

But by directly challenging a being whose name had been known throughout that cosmic expanse for over a trillion years, he had inadvertently thrust himself into the spotlight of the entire cosmic stage.

That incident became his formal introduction to the cosmic stage and the beginning of the now widely known titles of Immortal Anomaly, Crazy Immortal, and Azure Void Paragon.

It also revealed the existence of the other five Hybrids and brought their creator, Angela, the Witch of Chaos, back into the cosmic spotlight.

Angela’s relationship with Julio was already tenuous, largely due to the fact that Angela had stolen a portion of the Cosmic Conceptual Authority of Akasha, the Eternal who governed the Concepts of Wisdom and Knowledge.

The Concept of Knowledge was what made memory, retention, and understanding possible, and the vast information accessible through it had been partially seized by Angela, who took a fragment of the Authority that governed it.

She used that stolen knowledge to uncover a way to bypass the Cosmic System maintained by the Concepts. The insights she acquired from that heist were what ultimately allowed her to create the Hybrids and to break them free from the influence of the Concept of Death, rendering them virtually unkillable, except through existence erasure-type powers like the Destruction Supreme’s.

Then again, beings with such powers were exceedingly rare, and using them against the Hybrids would require overwhelming superiority in power, since it wasn’t as though the Hybrids would simply stand still and let someone erase them.

Moreover, Jamie in particular was functionally immune to existence erasure due to possessing such power himself—his Void Manipulation.

"Anyway, the only way Julio’s ever going to stop hating my guts is if I suddenly stop being a Hybrid, which is impossible. Not even your mom could do anything about that."

When Jamie said that, Richard simply shrugged and replied, "Fair enough, but your bad relationship with the rest of the Eternals is totally your fault."