Beyond the Bloodline-Chapter 422: The Immortality Project [Bonus]

As Daniella stared at her in silence, lost for words, Angela finally regained some of her composure and quickly tried to change the topic.

"Y-you should rest! Your body isn’t better yet, and your soul too!"

"My soul?" Daniella’s ears perked at the words, and when she channelled magic power through herself, she blinked in confusion.

The immense power she possessed as a member of the Cathedral Ducal family was completely gone, leaving her no stronger than any ordinary Race Empress.

"Aah! The gem...was damaged," Angela said, and hearing this, Daniella immediately recalled what had allowed her to survive the near-fatal blow she’d taken.

The sword that had gone straight for her heart had struck the Mercury gem embedded within her instead, protecting her, but also cracking it and causing the Ordered cosmic energy inside to leak out into her body and soul.

Its physical presence had prevented the sword from killing her, but it had now become a ticking time bomb, as the spilt Ordered energy had infected her existence down to the Existence Graph layer, damaging the blueprint of her soul and lodging itself in the crack.

Angela could heal that Existential Graph damage, but to do so, she’d have to remove the Mercury Gem, which would cause the Ordered Cosmic Energy to spiral out of control in the same microsecond, exploding and destroying Daniella’s soul from within.

That would doom her to an even worse fate than the rest of her family, as while they’d only been denied any chance at reincarnation as their souls were instantly broken down and converted into raw energy, Daniella’s soul would quite literally explode into fragments, and every record of her existence would be erased.

There was a reason why the Ordered Cosmic Energy was sealed within those Mercury Gems in the first place.

Angela couldn’t heal Daniella completely without risking her death.

’But if Daniella couldn’t die in the first place...then there’d be no problem removing that thing...would there?’

It was that thought that sparked Angela’s desire.

’No...not just Daniella.

But Richard...and John...and Olivia...’

Her three children had survived her loss of control, which destroyed Mercury, only because they’d been within her pocket dimension, but they hadn’t come out unscathed.

They’d suffered from cosmic energy poisoning when the ’Crawling Chaos’ invaded and sustained severe injuries.

Losing her family, her husband, and almost her children made Angela come to fear ’Death’.

Not her own ’Death’, which was impossible, but the deaths of those she loved.

’...If there was a way they couldn’t die, even to the power of those accursed Cosmic Forces...just like me!’

That line of thought became the spark that ignited the flame of Angela’s Immortality Project, which would later be known as the Hybrid Project after its successful completion millions of years later.

◇　◇　◇

Angela didn’t want any harm to come to her children in any way, shape, or form.

So, she sealed them within a temporal cocoon, pausing their existences and enclosing them in a dimensional realm that followed her wherever she went.

She created that special realm to be able to protect them even if Chaos tried to tamper with her mind or another Cosmic Horror appeared.

It was extreme, but one had to remember that Angela’s mental state was fraying far beyond just the edges.

The woman wasn’t thinking straight.

She embarked on a quest to find a way to replicate her Deathless Immortality, searching across the Cosmos for countless methods, with the failures of her experiments later becoming known as ’Incomplete Hybrids’.

It took a long time, but she eventually found a clue, and to confirm it, she lured the Eternal of Wisdom and Knowledge into a trap by making him believe a Cosmic Horror had gone berserk, stealing a portion of his Cosmic Conceptual Authority of Knowledge and using it to confirm how she could safely unbind someone from the Concepts of ’Life’ and ’Death’.

But there were still requirements that the physical bodies of her targets needed, such as race factors from those with high compatibility for their innate powers and affinities.

When she was getting close to completing her experiment and had settled on the Vela Galaxy’s Planet Estea, the now more mentally stable Angela unsealed her children.

She soon achieved her first success with Sarina Aster, managing to replicate somewhere within 95–99% of her own mutated cosmic nature.

Angela quickly refined what she’d accomplished with Sarina and replicated it on her children, turning them all into Immortals.

However, she soon discovered that the success she’d achieved with Sarina and her children couldn’t be applied to Daniella, so she returned to the drawing board, adjusting the procedures and altering several steps.

It was around this time that Jamie Westley and Miranda Scott came into her hands, and with their unique traits, she was able to achieve success once more.

She conducted the test with Miranda, and the results provided her with the data she needed to eliminate the remaining errors before proceeding to achieve a perfect 100% replication with Jamie.

Angela didn’t immediately attempt to use it on Daniella, as she wanted to observe for a few years first, just as she had done with Sarina before performing the Conceptual Detachment process on her children.

So she watched Jamie and Miranda as they moved about, and this was why, shortly after Jamie’s battle with the Extinction Legion’s Anti-Hybrid Soldier, SHALE, when Jamie’s attainment of Sub-Cosmic Superiority and the Deity Realm triggered the first error of the Concept of Death and drew the attention of the Eternal that governed it, Angela was present.

She had allowed Julio to attempt to kill Jamie multiple times to confirm that even with Cosmic Conceptual power, her Perfect Success was truly unable to die.

Only after that did she appear to confront the Eternal.

This observation made her realise that cosmic energy was necessary to unlock the true natures of her successes, something impossible for Daniella, who was incapable of attaining Cosmic Superiority due to her damaged Existence Graph.

So she returned to the drawing board and adjusted a few details, but by the time she completed her edits, Daniella was nowhere to be found.

She’d left Zanerth without telling Angela where she was going, and finding her was a herculean task since the Cosmos was vast beyond measure.

Jamie also left the universe not long after, staying away for years to grow stronger beyond the reach of the Zanerth Universe’s powerhouses, who’d been trying to seal him, and during his time away, he encountered Daniella outside Zanerth and returned with her, having achieved Full Cosmic Superiority by then and having his existence transformed once more.

This provided new data for Angela to work with, so she had to adjust the process again to create Daniella-compatible edits.

The place where she made those changes was the Final Lab that her children would eventually discover a billion years later.

And while she worked on those edits, Chaos decided to say ’Hi’.

Mental encroachment...again.

To make things worse, during her brief search for possible places her sister could be, she ended up drawing the attention of some nosy Envoys of Order who noticed her activity on the Cosmic Stage.

When they heard about the famed ’Witch of Chaos’, those Envoys joined forces, along with several Envoys of Order from the Dark Multiverse, and decided they’d do the Cosmos a favour by eliminating the Witch who’d stolen an Eternal’s Conceptual Authority.

Angela, Jamie, and Daniella all suspected that this group had been sent by ORDER ’THEMSELF’ to eliminate the existence within the Cosmos that Order considered too tainted by Chaos—Angela, the favourite of CHAOS—especially since these Envoys had relied so heavily on Order’s power that they’d been partially assimilated by it, their thoughts and actions made far more susceptible to the Cosmic Force’s rigid nature.

It was also precisely because of this that these Envoys of Order posed a real threat to Angela, Chaos’s strongest Envoy.

Their schemes and conspiracies, which led up to the fateful battle, ultimately resulted in their complete and utter erasure from existence and from the memories of all beings except Jamie, Angela, and Daniella, since the three of them shared a connection to a Cosmic Force and had been present when the erasure occurred.

Angela to Chaos, Daniella to Order, and Jamie to Balance.

From the start, Angela had no intention of entertaining their challenge, as she was far too occupied dealing with Chaos’ mental encroachment, which was preventing her from properly working on her sister’s immortality project.

The Cosmic Force’s power was targeting her memories this time, making her forget things, even with the stolen Conceptual Authority of Knowledge she possessed.

So, to make her pay them any attention and lure her away from Zanerth into the trap they’d prepared, those Envoys of Order, the ones Jamie and Daniella later called ’The BIGGEST COSMIC FOOLS’, did the unthinkable.

Day 25, Month 12, Year 498,000 of the 906th Cosmic Cycle.

Richard, John, and Olivia Cathedral were kidnapped.