The Guardian gods Chapter 926

Amidst the silence that followed, the only origin god who still retained her absolute freedom was Keles.

She alone couldn’t be passive, driven by a singular, vital truth, the newly arrived third paragon was holding something that belonged to her by all right, the twin souls of the fallen paragons.

Under the old order, such souls possessed no agency at death. By the immutable laws of the cosmos, their spirits should have automatically drifted back to her realm upon their demise. But the origin gods were learning a new foundational lesson about the shifting tides of the cosmos, changing sides on a cosmic scale rewrites the law as well.

Because the two paragons had defected to the side of the hegemony before their deaths, Keles’s sovereign claim over their souls was no longer absolute. Under the rigid dominion of Order and the Judges, a soul’s destination was a sealed mandate, under the hegemony, however, everything was up for grabs.

Their souls now carried a volatile, dangerous new degree of freedom. They were no longer anchored to their natural resting place, meaning they could be intercepted and claimed by anyone fast enough or powerful enough to reach them first.

This vulnerability was precisely what the third paragon had anticipated.

Before making his move, he too had crossed the line, aligning himself with the hegemony. By joining their ranks, he bypassed the ancient strictures that would have condemned his actions as theft. Armed with this newly acquired immunity, he reached into the aftermath of the battle and seized the soul shards, completely untouchable by the consequences of his actions.

Keles alone retained her freedom as Order itself deemed it entirely right and necessary for her to reclaim what was hers.

Those twin souls still bore the indelible, foundational taint of Nana, a spiritual stain so deep and absolute that no amount of shifting sides or cosmic alignment could ever wash it away. In the eyes of the law, recovering those souls was simply the proper maintenance of the cosmic order.

She wanted to act, to leave her sanctuary and seize what was rightfully hers. But Ikenga pleaded with her to stay, "There will come a time for it all," he urged.

Tonight’s chaotic events had proven that their long-term plans and calculated patience were entirely correct. At the same time, witnessing the spectacle granted them a staggering glimpse into the deep, hidden mysteries of the cosmos, truths they could never have unraveled in a long time had the old order remained undisturbed.

While Ikenga watched with calculating eyes, the battle had a profound, harrowing psychological impact on his siblings, Crepuscular and Jaus. The clash tore away their final illusions, exposing the fundamental flaws of their world and the true nature of the paragons.

A deep, burning contempt took root within the prideful Crepuscular. He watched with utter disgust as these supposedly proud, exalted paragons casually stripped away their dignity, casting aside their status to behave like mere beasts driven entirely by base greed.

For Jaus, the revelation sparked pure, unadulterated anger. He was consumed by rage at how effortlessly the paragons betrayed and abandoned their creator world, Nana, trading away everything for their own selfish ambitions.

Both Crepuscular and Jaus were immeasurably thankful for Ikenga. It was his foresight that had pierced through the illusions of this, leaving them prepared for this and exploit the fractures of the new order.

A sharp, collective anticipation began to take root among them. They eagerly looked forward to the impending auction, visualizing the utter shock and horror that would twist the faces of the arrogant paragons when they finally realized what was waiting for them.

While the rest of the paragons floundered in a haze of terror and shared confusion, one among them stood frozen by a very different kind of dread.

The moment Tide had made his initial announcement, Tyrion had been gripped by a cold, suffocating terror. He had already poured everything into his towering construction, pushing himself to the absolute brink but only managed to get to 70 percent completion. Pressure has a way of either breaking a man or forging him into steel, and refusing to bend, Tyrion had dangerously overdrafted his very essence, throwing every ounce of his being into building his tower.

When Tide unexpectedly extended the auction deadline by two months, Tyrion had been overwhelmed with a rare, soaring joy. It was a lifeline.

Refusing to waste a single second, he had thrown himself back into the grueling work, until the cataclysmic battle between the two paragons erupted across the heavens.

As he watched the two titans tear each other apart in the void, Tyrion saw a terrifying reflection of his own fate.

The frantic violence, the relentless onslaught from all sides, it looked precisely like the future awaiting him. He envisioned himself entirely alone, ambushed and swarmed from every direction by the other greedy paragons desperate to tear the secret from his grip.

That creeping dread mutated into outright terror when Tyrion felt the sudden, synchronized ripple of domain expansions erupting across the cosmos. The other paragons, paralyzed by their own panic, had cast their domains wide.

To Tyrion, however, this desperate defensive measure meant something entirely different. He knew that in their hyper-vigilant state, any unusual movement, flicker of power, or subtle shift in his tower’s construction would be instantly noticed and scrutinized. They would strike out with overwhelming force, terrified that he was about to make a preemptive move against them.

To blend into the chaos and shield his progress, Tyrion had no choice but to expand his own domain. By shrouding his work in layers of metaphysical defense, he created a barrier thick enough that anyone attempting to peer into his tower would have to forcefully break through the very laws governing it, a blatant act of aggression no one dared risk so openly at this moment.

As the weeks bled away, leaving only two weeks left before the auction, the world transformed into a pressure cooker.

Clashes and skirmishes between the paragons became an everyday occurrence, born of suspicion and desperation. Yet, none of these localized battles ever escalated to the catastrophic scale of the first battle.

A cold, pragmatic logic always brought them to a halt, whenever two paragons began to tear into each other, they would suddenly realize they were being circled. Hidden in the shadows were dozens of other paranoid paragons, watching like wolves, waiting for both combatants to weaken so they could swoop in and fish in troubled waters. Unwilling to bleed themselves dry only for a vulture to reap the fruits of their labor, the combatants would abruptly break off their fights, retreating back to their respective domains in bitter stalemate.

While all-out apocalyptic wars had halted, conflict was far from over. Certain paragons found unexpected success when the targets they ambushed proved far weaker than anticipated.

Through these skirmishes, the paragons began to undergo a harsh education in the nature of their status, not all laws were forged for direct combat. Many discovered that certain laws served far better as auxiliary powers. When these auxiliary laws clashed directly with pure combat laws, they usually found themselves completely outmatched, leading to swift and decisive defeats. Though breaking through these strange abilities often cost a heavy toll in mana, many victorious paragons deemed the investment well worth the spoils.

Within a matter of weeks, the death of paragons transformed from an unthinkable catastrophe into a grim, ordinary occurrence.

Strangely, none of this turmoil negatively impacted the stronger human kingdoms. In fact, they stood to gain immensely, as many arrogant paragons willingly offered themselves up to secure protection.

Those who had once strutted with absolute confidence, believing their status and the sheer cost of acting against them would keep them untouchable, lost their arrogance overnight when they realized desperate rivals were more than willing to pay any price to get at them.

This harsh awakening hit hardest among the paragons who had long hidden behind their exalted title despite possessing weaker laws. Stripped of their false security, they didn’t hesitate to sell their own value, fully exposing how their unique, non-combat laws could be leveraged to vastly boost the power of these greater human kingdoms in exchange for survival.

In the world of Nana, mortality became the greatest sin.

The common folk found themselves laid out on a chopping block, utterly abandoned with no higher power to shield or guarantee their safety. Every night, they fell asleep with zero certainty that they would wake to see the dawn, or that their homes would still be standing beneath them.

Yet, out of this profound terror came a massive growth in faith. Mortals began grasping at any straw to survive, turning desperately to the worship of the ascended gods and to their shock, the gods answered.

At first, the sprawling war zones of the paragons respected no boundaries. That was until a careless paragon chose to desecrate a humble home protected by the divine sigils of Maul.