The Guardian gods Chapter 902

Tyrion stayed silent when a thought came to him. The contract bound his lordship rights and his direct political power. It did not, however, bind his eyes. It did not forbid him from utilizing the natural, passive advantages of his territory’s geography, nor did it restrict his Luminous Logic from analyzing public freight.

With a final, lingering glance at the room, his figure blurred and vanished.

A heartbeat later, he materialized at the highest vantage point of the Sunward Shipyard perched invisibly atop the grand lighthouse that overlooked the dark, churning waters of the northern harbor. Below him, the port was alive even in the dead of night. Massive merchant vessels bearing the crest of the Everflowing Treasury glided through the fog, their heavy hulls sitting deep in the water, loaded to the brim with raw materials from every corner of Nana.

Tyrion closed his eyes, and when he opened them, the cold blue of his irises was replaced by a blinding, incandescent gold.

His domain expanded silently, casting an invisible, conceptual net of light over the entire harbor. He didn’t touch the ships, he didn’t alter the space, and he didn’t interfere with the workers. He simply looked.

Through the lens of Luminous Logic, the bustling shipyard transformed into a massive ledger of pure information. Every crate being hoisted by the cranes, every barrel of rare alloy, and every shipment of exotic ores bleeding traces of foreign mana became crystal clear to his perception. He watched as a massive vessel from the southern continents began to dock, its hull coated in a strange, iridescent residue that matched one of the hidden components of the self-healing brick.

A slow grin tugged at the corner of Tyrion’s lips. Tide had built a perfect fortress of contracts and divine traps, but he had left the front door wide open. Every ship arriving at this port carried the exact coordinates of its origin etched into its very journey, written in the language of light and history. All Tyrion had to do was memorize this and then, he would go hunting.

The thought of embarking on a personal journey across Nana, chasing the visual signatures of those exotic ores to the very edges of the world sent a thrill of anticipation through his veins. To hunt the pieces of Tide’s grand puzzle himself was an enticing prospect. But before he vanished beyond the borders of the Sun Kingdom, he needed to secure his rear. He needed to know exactly who else was playing this game.

Checking up on King Edward and the other two Paragons of the kingdom was a tactical necessity, it was an urgent priority. If they were already aware of Tide’s machinations and were secretly carving out their own pieces of the pie, Tyrion could not afford to be the last one to move.

"I need to probe them" he reasoned, but a direct question would be a confession of his own ignorance. He has to make them reveal their hands without showing mine.

The challenge lay in the execution. Edward was a shrewd ruler, and the other two Paragons were centuries-old monsters who didn’t let their thoughts slip easily. If Tyrion approached them directly about the shipyard or the refinery, the contract’s warning might trigger again, or worse, warn Tide that the Sunward’s lord was digging too deep.

He needed an excuse, a diplomatic mask to wear that would bring him into the same room as the kingdom’s powerhouses without raising suspicion.

He could organize a formal gathering under the guise of discussing the kingdom’s collective representation at Tide’s possible auction. He would invite Edward and the Paragons to align their interests, pretending he wanted to ensure the Sun Kingdom stood united. But beneath the pleasantries and the political posturing, the light of his domain would be active. He would watch their reactions, read the micro-fluctuations of their mana, and dissect their replies through the absolute scrutiny of his Luminous Logic.

If Edward so much as twitched at the mention of the "Tower," Tyrion would know. If the other Paragons had secretly invested in the merchant god’s venture, the information written in the ambient light of their reactions would betray them.

But then Tyrion caught himself as he fell further into the thought process.

It was a terrible idea. He was letting his recent success with rewriting the brick’s ownership make him arrogant. To deploy his domain law directly in the presence of King Edward and two other centuries-old Paragons? It was practically begging to be caught. Higher beings of their caliber were hyper-sensitive to the subtle shifting of conceptual laws, the moment the ambient light in the room began translating their actions into pure data, they would notice. It would expose his hand instantly and blow his cover entirely.

There was absolutely no need to make this so complicated.

He didn’t need to an elaborate political trap or deploy high-level conceptual magic just to get a reading on them. A far simpler, more elegant approach would suffice, a routine, personal visit. As a fellow Paragon and a high lord of the realm, it was perfectly natural for him to drop by, exchange pleasantries, and engage in a bit of casual, high-society chatter.

He would have to rely on his raw experience, the centuries he had spent navigating the treacherous waters of court politics, reading mortal greed, and decoding the subtle shifts in his fellow powerful being’s demeanor.

If they were clueless, their indifference would be genuine. If they were secretly keeping him in the dark to maximize their own profits, their carefully constructed answers would betray them to his ears.

Thinking this was much safer, Tyrion stepped off the ledge of the lighthouse. His figure dissolved into a faint, natural shimmer, leaving the busy harbor behind. It was time to pay some old friends a visit.

Over the next several days, Tyrion acted on his plan, paying casual visits to the capital and the private estates of his peers. He shared tea with King Edward under the guise of discussing seasonal maritime taxation, and he engaged the other two Paragons in brief, idle banter about the shifting dynamics of the continent’s power structures.

Through these interactions, Tyrion’s picked up on a reality he hadn’t anticipated. Unlike himself, they weren’t keeping him in the dark to hoard the profit. They were genuinely, deeply skeptical.

Tide’s airtight operational security had left the rulers of the Sun Kingdom largely blind. The complex web of fair contracts and isolated refineries had done its job perfectly. Through casual, probing mentions of the upcoming event, Tyrion realized that only two words had managed to pierce the veil and reach their ears, auction and ascension.

The mention of the auction didn’t surprise him, he himseld had already caught whispers of it but the word "Ascension" caught him completely off guard. A chill went down his spine, masked perfectly beneath his stoic facade. Ascension implied a mortal, a beast, or perhaps a godling climbing the ladder to claim absolute godhood. Was Tide engineering a tool to help elevate a new god?

Whatever the truth, Tyrion realized with clarity that he was standing on the higher ground. He was far more informed than the King and the other Paragons combined. He possessed the visual signature of the raw materials, the knowledge of the self-healing structural bricks, and the terrifying realization of the Tower.

But having the advantage meant he had to act before that advantage eroded. He needed to move quickly, cross the world, and trace the shipments to their source before the rest of the kingdom woke up to the true scale of the storm.

To disappear suddenly would draw immediate suspicion from Edward and the hyper-vigilant Paragons. He needed a flawless alibi.

The very next day, Tyrion made a formal, highly visible announcement through theSunwward estate. He publicly declared that he was entering a period of isolated research, something that wasn’t unusual for a mage of his standing. To the rest of the world, the Lord of Sunward was simply locking himself away in his sanctuary, standard behavior for a Paragon obsessed with the pursuit of higher power.

With his public excuse firmly established, the allibi was set. While the eyes of the kingdom remained fixed on his empty sanctuary, Tyrion slipped past his own borders under a veil of absolute secrecy, flying completely under the radar as he set out toward the edge of the world to hunt Tide’s hidden veins.

Five months had slipped away, and Tyrion found himself deep within the scorching, unforgiving expanses of the southern continent. Yet, despite the passage of time, he hadn’t gotten much further in his search than he had when he first left the borders of the Sun Kingdom.

Two months into his journey, the brutal reality of the situation had set in. He realized with bitter clarity how profoundly he had underestimated just how prepared Tide truly was. Tyrion’s Luminous Logic had successfully allowed him to track the visual signatures of the exotic ores, leading him straight to the hidden veins and deep-earth mines scattered across the continent. But locating them was only half the battle.