The Guardian gods Chapter 900

"Impossible," he almost shouted out loud, his eyes widening as he stared down at the glowing object.

No mortal construct in the world of Nana should have been able to withstand the sheer purity of a Paragon’s mana. Even a microscopic wisp of his energy should have instantaneously turned ordinary stone or reinforced alloy to fine dust. Instead, this brick was maintaining its structural integrity effortlessly, even as he actively pumped a drop from his immense pool of mana directly into its core.

Tyrion’s heart quickened. This wasn’t just a building material for a regular fortress. This was something engineered to house and channel god-like forces.

Just as the terrifying realization began to take root, the material seemed to have finally reached its absolute threshold. Tiny, glowing fissures of crackled light began to spiderweb across the surface of the red-hot stone. Tyrion quickly cut off his energy flow, stopping his action instantly.

He stood frozen, his intense gaze shifting from the single brick in his hand to the massive, silent piles stacked neatly around the vault.

He could no longer maintain his cold, detached composure. His mind, sharp and calculating, instantly conjured a terrifying image: a colossal construct built entirely out of this material. Thousands of these bricks piled together, seamlessly bound by articulate, master-level runic workings designed to perfectly distribute and harmonize power through each individual stone. No, it would be even greater than that.

He was absolutely certain that this refinery was not even half of what Tide was planning. These bricks were likely just a single component among many needed for something far grander. And now, he knew with absolute certainty that whatever final masterpiece resulted from this material was exactly what was destined to appear in the rumored auction.

Tyrion looked back down at the damaged brick resting in his palm, preparing to drop the cracked remnant, when his eyes suddenly widened in genuine shock.

The glowing fissures were fading. Before his very eyes, the stone was knitting itself back together, the cracks smoothly closing up until the surface was flawless once more. The material had self-healed.

Even though the deep reddish color was now dimmer, the glow lingered beneath the surface, and the brick looked entirely whole, just as flawless as it had been when he first picked it up.

I must research this, the thought slammed into his mind.

Tyrion with no hesistation waved his hand. The surrounding space fluctuated and an entire massive pile of the ashy bricks vanished into his personal storage of his domain space. Satisfied, he turned to walk away, preparing to slip past the gates as silently as he had arrived, when a sudden palpitation overcame him.

His heart thudded against his ribs as a suffocating, golden weight crashed down upon the facility. He could feel it, the awakening of a divinity about to descend over this very refinery. Shock overtook his features. Tyrion was utterly unsure of what he had done to trigger such an instantaneous, aggressive response from Tide. Had the God of Treasury placed an invisible, divine tether on the materials themselves?

Desperate to avoid an premature confrontation, Tyrion tried to expand his domain space to teleport away. But it was useless, the surrounding space had already been locked entirely by the rapidly descending presence.

With no room for hesitation, Tyrion abandoned subtlety. His figure burst into a blinding, luminous glow as he transformed into a streak of pure energy, shooting straight through the roof and rocketing off into the distance.

But just as he breached the perimeter, a crushing force struck him at the very last second before he could escape. The oppressive, divine pressure warped his spatial pocket, violently disrupting his grip on his stolen goods. With a sharp crackle of energy, the massive pile of bricks he had tucked away was forcibly released from his grasp, tumbling back down toward the facility.

The only piece he managed to desperately keep hold of as he fled into the horizon was the single, slightly glowing brick he had infused with his own power.

In the blink of an eye, he was back in his sanctuary. His landing, however, was entirely short of the grace he had possessed when he left. His figure slammed onto the cold stone floor, laying stiff on the ground and completely unable to move due to the fragment of Tide’s divinity that had managed to strike him at the final second.

He could feel the crushing divinity behind the attack. An immense, invisible weight was currently pressed upon his chest and limbs, pinning him down so severely that even breathing felt like lifting a mountain. It was as if an artificial absolute weight had been forcibly added to his very concept of self.

He couldn’t fathom what specific law was being imposed upon him. Gritting his teeth through the agonizing pressure, he forced his own law, "The law of Luminous Logic" to act upon himself.

He couldn’t understand what law was imposed upon him so gritting his teeth, his own law of "Lumious logic" acted upon himself. He was someone who views light and fire as the medium of information, hence his law dictates that Perception equals control. If it is within the light of the domain, he owns its definition "to see is to know, and to know is to control,"

With his law ignited, he could sense where the source of the law acting on him came from. The brick which he managed to take away from the refinery, his conceptual cast a glow on his body focusing entirely on the stolen brick. His Luminous Logic immediately went to work, translating the crushing, invisible weight into digestible information. Through the light of his law, he saw the glowing, fluid runes of Tide’s law weaving out of the brick and wrapping around his body like golden fetters. It was a divine audit, defining his very body as ’"collateral" until the debt was settled.

The realization hit him with icy clarity: Tide hadn’t failed to reclaim this last piece. The deity had purposefully left it. Through this single, unreturned asset, a conceptual law of Debt was being enforced upon him. To hold the Treasury’s property without permission was to be crushed by the total financial weight of the God who owned it. The water of Tide’s divinity was acting like liquid iron, binding his joints through the mere fact of his possession.

The golden-blue runes of the Debt flared brightly, pulsing with a liquid rhythm that tried to drag his consciousness down into the depths of Tide’s vault. The law was absolute, the debtor is owned by the creditor. But Tide’s law relied on a fundamental premise, which is that the brick still belonged to the Everflowing Treasury.

His Luminous Logic utterly rejected that premise. To see is to know, and to know is to control.

Through the piercing, fiery light of his domain, he analyzed the exact informational structure of the brick. He didn’t try to break the golden fetters by brute force, instead, he decided to balance the ledger on his own terms.

He didn’t destroy try to destroy Tide’s law as it would backfire heavily on him. He settled it instead.

Reaching deep into his own origin, he severed a microscopic fragment of his own law, not even a drop, a mere splash of his fundamental understanding of Luminous Logic. It was an infinitesimal sacrifice to him, but because it carried the objective truth of a cosmic law, its conceptual value was staggering. With a focused breath, he infused this sharp, blinding splinter of insight directly into the stolen brick, defining it as the absolute, non-negotiable payment for the metal.

The shift was instantaneous. The crushing, liquid weight pressing down on his chest suddenly lost its authority. The golden-blue runes wrapping around his soul shattered like brittle glass, dissolving into harmless, warm vapor. A deep, satisfying breath rushed back into his lungs, and he stood up, smooth and unbothered. The brick was officially, completely his.

Far away, within the depths of the Everflowing Treasury, Tide stood in the vault in his realm. Suddenly, the conceptual tether to the mortal world snapped, but it didn’t snap from resistance. It snapped from fulfillment.

Tide opened his massive hand. A sudden, brilliant splash of light materialized above his palm, condensing into a sharp, crystalline shard of pure, radiant energy.

A low, resonant chuckle echoed through the vault. Tide closed his fingers around the glowing shard, sealing it away. He was just doing a bidding for his uncle but he managed to have gained a new understanding of his own divinity.

What he had just gained wasn’t gold or jewels. It was a fragment of a foreign law, an exquisite, localized truth of light and information. It crackled with a precise, fiery intellect, utterly alien to the vault depths of his treasury.

To Tide, a single refined brick was nothing, but a piece of a paragon’s law? That was a premier asset. Somewhere out there, a fifth tier fire mage or an ascended deity of light would pay an unimaginable fortune just to glimpse the insight trapped within this shard.

The transaction was complete, and the Treasury had turned a beautiful profit.