The Guardian gods Chapter 903

He was entirely unable to mine a single speck of the material. Every single deposit he discovered had already been legally and conceptually claimed. Massive, heavily fortified outposts stood guard over the excavation sites, entirely populated and defended by Tide’s followers.

Tyrion had made the critical mistake of failing to realize just how deeply entrenched the merchant god’s divine authority was over these lands before he acted. Attempting to covertly siphoning the raw ore, he had accidentally triggered the planetary security of the Everflowing Treasury. The mistake had led to an instantaneous, devastating counter-attack from Tide’s conceptual network. Just like his escape from the refinery, Tyrion had been forced to pay a heavy, price each time just to offset the divine law acting upon him and escape with his life.

But physical injuries and lost mana were nothing compared to the confirmation of his own suspicions.

The brick he had stolen back home was indeed just one piece of a terrifyingly vast puzzle. His theory that the bricks were merely a single component needed to craft something grander was entirely correct. As he traveled from one secured territory to the next, he discovered that each refinery across the southern continent was specialized. They weren’t all making bricks. One facility was dedicated entirely to forging massive, mana-conductive iron structural beams; another was refining fluid, crystalline glass that could store conceptual matrices. The refinery on his own land was simply the designated producer of the self-healing foundation blocks.

The harsh lessons of the past five months had finally forced Tyrion to do something he rarely did, accept a reality he despised. He had to forgo his goal of ever truly getting one over on Tide.

He had been entirely outmaneuvered, outplayed, and outdone by a god of commerce who had turned logistics into an absolute divine law. Tyrion possessed the Luminous Logic to locate the refineries and trace the precise visual signatures of the mines, but actually getting his hands on the raw materials without triggering a cataclysmic divine backlash was impossible.

For a time, he had entertained the desperate notion of striking out into the untamed wild completely on his own, searching for undiscovered, unclaimed veins of the exotic ores. But the sheer scale of the world paralyzed the idea before it could even begin. Where would he start? Theis world was vast, Nana was immense, and he had no idea where else these specific elements might hide. This was a game of global reconnaissance and industrial excavation, something far above the scope of a single, isolated Paragon.

Slowly, reluctantly, his mind turned back to the very thought he had so quickly discarded at the start of this ordeal.

He began to seriously entertain the idea of informing the people on his side.

If he brought this information back to the Sun Kingdom, everything would change. King Edward possessed the staggering, bureaucratic power of a sovereign crown. The kingdom had vast financial reserves, deep-earth scouting divisions, and millions of capable citizens whose specialized talents could navigate the very legal and logistical loopholes Tyrion was currently choking on. Where a single predator failed, an empire’s worth of ants could dismantle a mountain. There had to be someone within the kingdom’s vast networks who could help tackle the exact blockade he was facing.

He was finally beginning to understand even as a Paragon, not all things can be brute-forced. Power was an absolute currency, yes, but it wasn’t the only currency. Clearly, even beings who commanded the very laws of reality had their limits.

If he wanted to gain something at the end of all this, he could no longer play the lone wolf. He needed a kingdom behind him.

He was not all without loss tho, his understanding of Tide had grown, shifting from blind frustration into a slight appreciation for the deity’s nature. He had come to understand the Divinity of the Everflowing Treasury. Through each grueling exchange, Tyrion realized there was absolutely nothing to be gained from a direct, hostile clash with Tide. Every single interaction with the god was framed not as a battle of raw power, but as an absolute transaction of trade, benefit, and loss.

In Tide’s domain, reality itself was a ledger. It was a zero-sum game where one party gained and the other lost. And without a profound, understanding of how those economic laws operated, an outsider’s loss was almost a guarantee. Tyrion had already paid that steep price twice, he had no intention of bankrupting his own soul.

Currently, Tyrion was flying high over an expanse of dense, untamed forest, charting a course toward a newly discovered energy signature. His core goal had fundamentally shifted since he accepted how impossible his original path was. Instead of trying to steal the pieces, he had turned himself into a cartographer of Tide’s hidden empire. He was systematically finding and mapping out every single refinery, mine, and supply route he could locate. By presenting a somewhat complete map of Tide’s decentralized assembly line to King Edward and the other two Paragons, he could perfectly justify his long absence and his silence.

As he rocketed over the endless green canopy, a sharp, momentary glint from the forest floor flashed across his vision.

Because of his speed, it was nothing more than a microscopic, brief fraction of a second. He carried on past it, covering miles in the blink of an eye. Yet, as the landscape blurred beneath him, that singular glint refused to fade.

Tyrion abruptly stopped mid-air.

The sonic boom of his sudden deceleration rippled through the clouds above, his cloak billowing violently around him as he hovered in absolute stillness. His eyes, burning with a faint, calculating gold, turned back toward the patch of wilderness he had just crossed.

For some reason, a strange, phantom sense of loss echoed in his heart, an instinctual pull that contradicted his path of logic. Yielding to the sensation, he pivoted mid-air and flew back, this time dropping his speed significantly as he retraced his path to the exact coordinates of the glint.

From the sky, his golden eyes peered down through the dense canopy. What he saw caused his eyes to widen in genuine surprise. Reacting instantly, his figure shifted, slipping flawlessly into the hidden layer of reality only perceived by other Paragons, higher entities, or gods.

Ensconced in the dimensional fold, his hyper-vigilant senses swept the perimeter. He picked up no hidden watchers, no ambushes, and no divine traps. Satisfied he wasn’t walking into another of Tide’s nets, he turned his full attention back to the peculiar sight below.

"Apelings," he thought to himself, a spark of recognition flaring. "What are they doing all the way on this continent? And they seem to be transporting something."

He drifted silently down from the sky, landing like a ghost right beside the traveling group. The figures continued moving forward, completely oblivious to the being standing in their midst. But as Tyrion stepped closer, narrowing his eyes under the scrutiny of his perception, he realized his initial assessment was entirely incorrect.

A quick, deep scan of the beings before him shattered his first assumption.

These weren’t Apelings at all. There was a superficial physical resemblance, certainly, but everything else was fundamentally wrong. He observed their crude, weathered clothing, the complete and utter lack of any divine aura, and the shockingly primitive design of the wooden carriage they were pulling. Most telling of all was the absolute void of mana within their bodies, they were entirely hollow of the world’s natural energy.

Suddenly, Tyrion stopped dead in his tracks, his thoughts grinding to a jarring halt.

"Lack of mana?"

In a world like Nana, where energy permeated every breath, every stone, and every blade of grass, a total absence of mana wasn’t just rare, it was a conceptual impossibility. It was an anomaly that defied the very physics of reality. Intrigued and deeply unsettled, he reached out his hand, his fingers mere inches from grabbing one of the primitive creatures to dissect its biological and energetic makeup.

But before his hand could make contact, the sharp, distinct sound of a hoof stomping against the earth echoed right beside him.

Tyrion paused, his hand freezing in mid-air. He turned his head slowly to the side.

Standing just a few feet away was a massive, ethereal deer. Its body shimmered with a ghostly, transcendent light, and its eyes, ancient and entirely unbothered by his Paragon presence, were locked directly onto him. Tyrion mentally blinked, wondering for a split second if his months of isolation were finally causing his perception to warp. But as he shifted his stance, taking a cautious half-step backward, the ethereal deer’s head tracked his movement with precision.

It was looking right at him. It could see him, even while he was entirely cloaked within the hidden layer of reality meant only for higher entities.

Then came the sound of more hoofbeats. Tyrion watched in grim fascination as five more deer, identical in their majestic, spectral beauty, seemingly walked right out of thin air, materializing from the fabric of the forest itself. The herd gathered, their glowing eyes fixing on the intruder. Tyrion’s jaw tightened, he was absolutely certain, from the subtle tilt of their heads, that the creatures were sneering at him. It was a look of mockery.