"Lotta books," Lone noted as soon as he, Soph, Greed, and Wrath, had arrived at the signature of the most powerful source of magic power in the entire tower according to Soph's Mana Sensing skill.

They seemed to be in an office or bedroom of some sort. It was hexagonal in shape and each of the room's six sides was lined with a bookshelf, though one side had a slightly smaller one to make room for a bed that had a person seemingly sleeping on it.

In the centre of the room was a runic pattern with a nice wooden table and chair set just behind it. Oddly enough, there were no doors to the room, so Lone hankered a guess at the runic pattern being a teleportation formation.

"A lot of rare and banned books, to be exact, Young Man," the seemingly asleep person said as he got up out of his bed and wiped his aged eyes.

The man looked to be about as old as Archon Milos but appeared to be about 4-times less healthy. He was an XXX-ranker, though, so he had that going for him.

He reached down to a small drawer underneath his bed and pulled out a set of spherical glasses before he placed them on the bridge of his nose. "Well, to what do I owe the pleasure of Erion's new disciples and two of the Sins offering me a surprise visit?" he asked as he wore a warm smile.

"I think you should introduce yourself first before that, don't you agree? You already know who we are, but you see, we, well we're clueless as to your identity," Lone charmingly said.

"Haha, right you are," the old man replied. "Well, I'd love to get up first and offer you all a cup of tea, but I fear you may attack me on the grounds of me acting suspiciously, so I suppose sitting shall have to suffice. Angelica, a cup of tea please, just for me, thank you."

"Soph and I will have a cup too, if you don't mind," Lone interjected. 'I've no clue why he's being friendly, but the more info we can get out of him, the better.'

Wrath wanted nothing to do with this interaction, so he walked over to a bookshelf and leaned against it with his back as he folded his arms over his chest.

"Oh? not afraid of me trying to poison you and fill your blood with some of my tower's special concoctions?" the wizened mage asked as a blue being that looked like a toddler popped out of the wall and began making three cups of tea.

The creature was clearly a spirit or a sprite of some kind, probably a sprite on account of it seemingly not having sentience; a telltale sign of the difference between the superior spirits and the lessor sprites.

It was certainly not on par with Wrath, but it probably had roughly the same status as the room sprites working in Madame Cortelle's Palace of Rest.

Lone shrugged as he waved his hand, making a chair appear which he promptly occupied before Soph found her place on his lap. "Soph's immune to any and all negative effects while I can just heal them away."

"Is that so? You must be quite the extraordinary healer then, Young Man," the old XXX-ranker praised as his eyes rested on Soph. "And a body free from the fear of adverse effects? How utterly envious. You wouldn't be interested in turning on him, now would you? I can offer you anything you'd imagine if you help me formulate the perfect strains of this facility's developing substances."

Soph immediately shook her head. "Never."

"Haha, I had to try. Assuming it's true that you cannot be affected by negative, well, effects, then, Young Lady, logic stands to reason that you could become the most powerful person on all of Altros," the mage claimed as he took a sip of his tea. "The dangerous drugs and rituals you could perform free of worry... I shudder in glee just at the thought."

Lone, likewise, drank his tea. "This tastes like shit. Swind could make a better brew with his hands tied behind his back."

"I take offence to that. Angelica is a baby Water Sprite, yes, but she tried her best in making that tea, so regardless of how it reacts to your tongue, it is filled with care and is the most delicious thing an aged and dying man like me could ask for," the elderly mage claimed.

Lone shrugged again. "I'm from a place where wars, revolutions, conquests, hell, even assassinations, have all taken place simply over tea."

"Oh, I'm aware of how barbaric Earth is," the mage said sourly.

"Ah, you even know that much?" Lone asked. "You still haven't given us your name yet, by the way."

"I was enjoying our conversation. I'm Maxwell. Just Maxwell. Charmed," he greeted as he peacefully sat there on his bed. "And of course I know that. I've met thousands of heroes, a handful of which were from Earth."

A look of nostalgia overtook his face as he eyes Lone and Soph up and down. "Based on your facial structure, accents, and even taking into account your... shall we call them physical altercations? Regardless of them, I'd pin you as a northern European. Probably from the west. As for the young lady here, the same, but the east. Maybe Asia, as in, the northern bit that no one really calls Asia, haha. She also seems to be from an older lineage. I haven't seen a jawline like that in, oh, roughly a thousand years I'd say."

'Wow. He's incredibly knowledgeable. Soph and I have never revealed where we're specifically from before outside of The Wanderers. Soph is easy since she's got a clearly Slavic surname, but me too? There's no way that was just a blind guess... Has he experimented on heroes before or something? Maybe tortured them for info on another world? I wouldn't be surprised. He seems nice, but he's awfully open about the drugs this tower produces,' Lone thought sceptically.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Care to hanker a guess at which country I'm from? Soph's doesn't exist anymore technically speaking, but you'll impress me if you can guess it," Lone suggested.

"Will impressing you spare my life?" Maxwell asked, shocking Lone a bit. "Haha, I'd peg you as half-Irish half-English. It's very hard to tell on account of you being so well-spoken. The system does a fantastic job of translating local dialect, of which, you seem to be using none."

He stroked his bearded chin for a moment as he looked at Soph before saying, "Hmm... Udmurt, perhaps?"

'His knowledge base is incredible! I kind of want to make a prisoner out of him and keep him as a chatting partner...' Lone thought before he answered, "Wrong on both accounts, but incredibly close. I'm 100% Scottish. Television and the internet moulded my accent and dialect as a child, not my peers. Soph, she's from the Principality of Novgorod. I'd have given you points if you said the Keivan Rus Federation, but you missed it by that much."

'What's 'television' and 'internet'?' Wrath thought as he continued to silently watch.

"Ah, well, you can only learn so much from picking apart a couple thousand minds. You make do with what information those brains happen to possess," Maxwell lamented.

'Yeah, it's a shame, but he has to go. From the sounds of it, he's been kidnapping heroes and mind-raping them somehow to discover information about Earth and probably other planets too," Lone concluded.

'I don't really need too much info on this place since I can use Clicker's power on the drugs and find out what I need to from that. I'm sure there are also documents lying around somewhere. There's no way a tower of this scale can operate without some very important people looking the other way or maybe even funding it,' Lone decided. "So, why the interest in Earth? It's a magic deprived world that's focused on killing itself through its people's own wanton greed."

Maxwell chuckled as he crossed one of his legs over the other the intertwined his fingers around his cup of tea as his elbows rested by his hips. "In all honesty, Young Man, I was planning on going to Earth to live out my last few millennia as its new god since the position recently became rather... vacant. Well, of course, only after The Academy was destroyed."

Lone's eyebrows creased. "Are you pulling my leg or are you just insane?"

"Oh, no, quite the opposite. Erion and I had a rather violent altercation, oh, I can't recall, how long ago was it? Perhaps 500,000-years ago? I fully intended to punish him for what he did, but clearly, the dream of me ever seeing such a thing happen has also been washed down the river and lost forever like a piece of filthy undergarment," the old man sighed before he took a deep breath.

"Such a shame that you had to be here, Young Man. Anyone else I could have killed. You though? I'll only make you stronger if I even so much as try to end your life," Maxwell expressed with a genuinely saddened look on his face.

"I see you've done your homework," Lone replied.

"Oh, yes. Actually, I'm somewhat saddened that I researched you as thoroughly as I did when I discovered that your adventurer group was investigating the recent kidnappings," Maxwell claimed. "Well, and a bit before that, of course, on account of the rumours surrounding you."

Lone raised an eyebrow. "Upset that you didn't focus more on the Sins? It's thanks to Wrath that we were even able to be kidnapped, after all."

"Ah, that too, I suppose," Maxwell wistfully said with a chuckle. "But no, I'm more torn-up over the fact that I had to order a Primal to be destroyed. After all, what with you collecting them, there was very little reason for me to keep it around once I saw your figure change from that of an Amber Foxkin into, well, into the infamous adventurer, Lone Immortus."

"You... destroyed a Primal?" Not only was Lone shocked by this but he didn't believe it for even a second. 'If it was that easy, I'd have destroyed Void before Radiance told me I'd need all nine of them to fight the gods.'

'He killed one of us, did he? Interesting... That explains a lot...' As ever, Darkness was being coy regardless of the situation.

'Doubtful. Even we could not kill each other when we ruled Altros as gods. Only the system had the power to end our existences to fuel itself,' Radiance squeezed out.

She hadn't for even a second believed the extremely old mage's words, and despite still not having recovered like Darkness, she felt the need to speak up before returning to her hibernation.

'...' Sky didn't comment, but Lone could tell that the second-most powerful Primal of the nine was intently listening to the conversation for some reason.

'Ah, so Radiance has recovered enough to speak in my mind again? Not permanently, it seems. Lovely. Well, at least that means I can rely on her power if I really need to. Better to wait for her to fully recover though,' Lone thought.

As much as he liked Radiance the most out of his soul's residents, he still didn't enjoy anyone bar Soph or Sophie speaking directly into his head. Garadia's cute roars were pleasant as well, now that he thought about it.

"Well, not exactly me, so to speak," Maxwell said as he finally finished his tea. "Luckily for myself, an Ancient woke up not long ago. She was very upset at the death of her Ancient brother, Ythmagobla, you see, so if I agreed to be her loyal servant, then she agreed to help me destroy The Academy. It's such a shame that she's a slow mover, otherwise, The Academy wouldn't exist anymore."

Cold sweat dripped down Lone's back. "An Ancient woke up? As in, one was asleep, now it's at full power and on its way to The Academy?"

"Oh, yes, quite astute, Young Man," Maxwell praised. "She's rather enraged. I promised to tell her everything that I knew about Ythmagobla's death if she did as I requested, so she became rather motivated," Maxwell said as he closed his eyes and laughed softly like an old grandpa.

Lone got up and put his hands around the old man's neck. "Where it is? When will it arrive?"

"Why would I ever tell you?" He said before his body burst into green flames and then disappeared entirely.

"Teleportation?" Lone asked in anger.

Soph shook her head. "No, I would have felt the magic moving, but it didn't, it just... uh, disappeared."

"He used spirit magic," Wrath said.

"What? But he isn't a spirit," Lone protested.

"Right, so it wiped out his existence. I have no idea how he learned it, but that's what happens if you try to use spirit magic when you're not a spirit. He didn't want you to kill him nor for Greed to eat him. He really didn't want to personally give you anything, huh?" Wrath asked sarcastically.

Lone frowned. "But I thought it was impossible to learn racial and species-specific skills not belonging to your own race or species."

"It is, but spirits aren't natives of Altros. All spirits born here are descendants of summoned spirits like myself." Wrath wore a complex expression on his face. "It's... it's a bit hard to explain."

Lone sighed then ran his fingers through his hair. "Well, Maxwell made a few key mistakes in his last moments anyway."

Greed coiled up his arm and looked at his face. "Hiss?"

Soph, likewise, tilted her head. "He did?"

"Firstly, he warned us about the Ancient heading for The Academy, secondly, he mentioned his beef with The Academy and Headmaster Erion, and, lastly, what he said about the Primal. I don't believe him, so there might be one here for all we know, and that's good news for me," Lone said before he began running his fingers along every bookshelf in the room, storing each book he touched into his Dimensional Storage.

Soph's head remained tilted as she muttered, "Beef? He mentioned beef?" Her eyebrows scrunched up cutely. "When?"