The Guardian gods Chapter 905

But his light found nothing. The tome registered as completely inert, devoid of any active magical matrices or lingering divine manipulation.

His brow creased deeply. He didn’t believe in coincidences, and he certainly didn’t believe a possible artifact could suddenly develop a natural, harmless magnetic attraction to his specific soul.

Deciding to test a theory, Tyrion opened his hand and let the tome fall. It plummeted through the canopy, landing with a soft thud on the damp forest floor.

Slowly, Tyrion rose back into the air, flying backward to put distance between himself and the dropped book. He kept his senses sharp, waiting for that familiar, instinctual tug to pull at his chest, or for some invisible tether to drag him back to the clearing. He flew further and further, weaving through the trees until the clearing was completely out of sight.

Nothing happened. No pull, no sudden headache, no spiritual whispers. The air remained perfectly still.

Halting mid-air, Tyrion hovered in the quiet forest, a deeply thoughtful and highly disturbed look settling on his face.

The experiment had confirmed his worst suspicion. The pull was something permanent or an inherent property of the book. Whoever or whatever had set this play in motion had calculated the exact parameters of the law to last just long enough to catch his eye, trigger his curiosity, and guide the book directly into his hands. The very moment his fingers had closed around the cover, the string had dissolved into nothingness, leaving no trace behind for his Luminous Logic to analyze.

It was a flawless delivery system. And it meant that someone wanted him and only him to have this book.

That was the only logical conclusion, and it immediately erected a grim crossroads before him, approach the obvious trap, or steel his heart and walk away.

With no wasted thought, Tyrion shot into the sky, his silhouette a streak of gold against the clouds as he flew away. He was a creature of intellect, he would not be a puppet danced on a string. Yet, only a short while later, the wind rustled the leaves of the forest floor, and Tyrion stood once more in the quiet clearing, staring down at the discarded tome.

How could he truly leave now?

Whoever had orchestrated this delivery possessed an extraordinary origin. His brief, humiliating encounter with the spirit realm had proved that. The gateway, the Wardenwild’s mocking children, the strange primate-like travelers, whoever had slipped him this book was in some way intimately connected to that plane. To walk away would be to leave a key to the very lock that had just shut in his face.

As he stared at the inert cover, his thoughts spiraled back to a reserved record in the Sun kingdom known only to the absolute higher-ups of the realm, the being called Murmur.

Murmur’s territory was the southern continent. Yet, in the few months Tyrion had spent traversing these lands, tracing Tide’s hidden veins and mapping refineries, he had never once crossed paths with such a being. He had never felt the prickle of a gaze on his neck, nor had he detected a trace of a rival Paragon-level authority watching his movements.

Until now.

Was this Murmur’s hand at play? Had the quiet ruler of the south been watching his futile struggles against Tide’s divine contracts all along? If Murmur was connected to the spirit realm, this tome wasn’t just a random piece of bait, it was an invitation, or perhaps a warning, but for what excatly?

Tyrion stood frozen, his fingers tightly clenched around the cool edges of the tome. Without even realizing it, his subconscious had guided his hand back to the prize. Now, the silent clearing seemed to hold its breath as the ultimate question loomed before him.

To open it, or not?

He already knew his answer, but the certainty of it terrified him.

Tyrion prided himself on his logic, and that logic dictated a truth, whoever had sent this tome understood him perfectly. They didn’t just know his location, they knew his ambition, his pride, his desperation, and his hunger for the power that had been denied to him. They knew that whatever lay written within these pages would hold an irresistible, fatal attraction to him.

And that was what truly frightened him. He wasn’t afraid of a physical trap or a sudden curse, he was afraid of the irreversible shift in his own identity. He was terrified of the gulf that would exist between his current self and the future self who read this book.

"So much could be gained", he thought, his heart hammering against his ribs. "But how much will I have to lose?"

Only months ago, when he had first set out from the Sun Kingdom, Tyrion had felt a surge of grand, almost intoxicating destiny. He had genuinely believed his time had come, that fate was finally casting its favorable gaze upon him, elevating him above the other Paragons. But standing here now, the illusion of his own agency was shattering.

Ever since he harbored that arrogant thought, nothing had truly gone his way. He had been thoroughly outmaneuvered by Tide’s divine laws, forced to pay prices to survive, blocked from the mines, and mocked by the spectral children of the Wardenwild.

And now, that very same path of "destiny" had dragged him straight to this silent clearing, forcing him to question the very foundation of his own free will. He was scared, it was a cold fact that he was beginning to accept.

He had been led here. Step by step, failure by failure, he had been perfectly herded like a beast into a pen, right to this exact moment, holding this exact book.

"Fuck." The word slipped past Tyrion’s lips, entirely unbefitting of a Paragon.

He was slowly being made aware of the sheer depth of the shit he was currently wading through. The illusion of his solitary crusade was completely gone.

"I should never have left my home. I should have contacted Edward the moment I knew of this."

The bitter, regretful thought echoed in the back of his mind, Tyrion with a shuddering breath held the book, his fingers slid beneath the heavy cover. He slowly opened the tome and froze.

The world seemed to lose its sound.

Drip.

A single, cold droplet of water fell from above, landing squarely on his forehead. The sudden, freezing touch snapped Tyrion out of his absolute daze.

He blinked, suddenly realizing his surroundings had completely changed. The heat of the southern continent’s day was gone. He looked up, and the first thing that greeted his eyes was the pitch black canvas of the night sky, illuminated by a slowly increasing downpour of heavy rain. Hours had dissolved in what felt like a single moment.

With a subtle, effortless flex of his will, a golden dome of Luminous Logic flared to life around him. The torrential rain split and poured harmlessly around his personal space, leaving him and the book perfectly dry.

Tyrion slowly looked back down at the open page in his hand.

He could hardly believe what he was seeing. For the first time in centuries, he genuinely believed his eyes were fooling him, playing tricks on a mind pushed to the brink of exhaustion.

Desperate to find a flaw, to find some trick of light or a hidden illusion, he turned the page. And then another.

He spent another hour in that exact spot, completely paralyzed, his eyes scanning the impossible text, the diagrams, and the conceptual truths laid bare before him. One hour bled into two. Two bled into four. He chased the logic down its terrifying, beautiful rabbit hole, entirely consumed.

He remained suspended in that absolute trance until the dark, rain-slicked sky slowly began to bleed into shades of gray and soft orange. The storm broke, and the first golden rays of the morning sun pierced through the wet canopy, striking his face and snapping him violently back to reality.

Tyrion slowly closed the tome, the leather binding meeting with a soft, heavy thud.

"Ridiculous," he breathed.

Tyrion raised his hand, his muscles tensing to hurl the tome deep into the thick, wild undergrowth of the forest. He wanted it gone. He wanted to purge the terrifying temptation from his sight.

But his hand never fell.

The book remained pressed against his palm, almost as if it had fused with his flesh. Yet, as he focused his perception, he confirmed that no external spell, no divine binding, and no spiritual trap was acting upon him. The only force keeping the book in his grip was his own absolute, paralyzing unwillingness to let it go.

He simply couldn’t bring himself to part with it. Not after what he had just read.

For months, he had chased the phantom of Tide’s secret project, theorizing and guessing at the nature of the decentralized assembly line. Now, the absolute truth was staring back at him from the ink of the pages. He finally knew the full, true name of the construct.

A Mage Tower.

If the equations, conceptual diagrams, and ancient history detailed within this tome were correct, Tyrion wasn’t just holding a stolen book. He was holding an artifact of immeasurable, world-altering value.