The Guardian gods Chapter 930

King Edward rose slightly from his cloud-seat, cutting through the heavy pressure of the primordial presences with a voice steady despite the tension.

"Is it right to assume that the absence of two origin gods in the past was a result of the process through which this knowledge was acquired?"

Tide turned his massive head, offering Edward an appreciative glance.

"Indeed," Tide rumbled. "Two origin gods, made a journey beyond our world in the past, and that is precisely where all this profound knowledge was found and brought back."

The revelation detonated across the cloud-stands, a turbulent wave of murmurs and gasps erupting from the paragons and kingdom delegates alike. So much monumental history had unfolded right beneath their noses while they remained blissfully ignorant, bound to the smallness of their own struggles.

"Now, I am sure you are all deeply curious about what drove the Origin Gods to leave our home and venture into the great unknown," Tide continued, his voice sweeping over the restless crowd.

At his words, every murmur died instantly. The theater plunged back into a breathless silence as he had guessed right.

"It all goes back to my first question to you all concerning your understanding of our world. I stated earlier that a world needs to grow..."

Tide paused, his towering form leaning forward as his eyes scanned the sea of eager faces.

"But have you ever questioned yourselves on how this growth is actually made possible?"

"Due to the special nature of our world, it has never stopped growing, something I am sure you all must have noticed yourselves," Tide continued, his tone turning clinical and deliberate. "Nana has always expanded, but this natural growth is agonizingly slow, taking epochs to yield results."

He paused, letting the heavy silence stretch across the cloud-theater like a taut wire before he delivered the final, damning truth.

"Time is a luxury we simply cannot afford. Which brings us to the second path of growth, the one most recognized by the cosmos, and utilized by all..."

Tide’s eyes swept across the assembly.

"Invasion."

The word hit the amphitheater like a physical shockwave.

Eyes widened in sheer horror. Across the cloud-stands, paragons and kingdom delegates alike bolted upright from their seats as the brutal, earth-shattering reality of the cosmos dawned on them.

A paralyzing wave of fear surged through the crowd. Are they already under invasion? Is a foreign armada on their way to descend upon Nana?

Instantly, the disciplined theater fractured into chaos. Frantic murmurs, gasps of disbelief, and rising shouts of paranoia drowned out the ambient winds as terror took root in every heart.

CLAP!

A thunderous, reality-shaking clap echoed across the expanse, violently slamming the lid on the rising panic and reducing the theater to a stunned, ringing silence.

Every eye snapped back to the focal point of the platform, where Tide stood shaking his massive head in deep, open disappointment.

"An invasion of a world is not the same as the petty territorial conquests of mortal lands you are all so well acquainted with," Tide rumbled, his voice cutting through the lingering tension "The invasion of a world is no small, effortless feat, nor is it something that can be undertaken on a whim." His massive frame casting a shadow over the cloud-seats.

"To invade a world, you must first possess the knowledge of how to find one in the vastness of the cosmos. In the past, our world was a sitting duck in this universe, utterly blind to the very notion of an invasion."

Tide paused, his gaze hardening as he swept it across the paralyzed assembly.

"We lived completely unaware of the dangers closing in around us, ignorant of the reality that those seeking to strengthen their own worlds might set their sights on ours simply to use us as a stepping stone."

"Do not mistake the rules of the cosmos for a shield," Tide warned, his tone dropping to a grim, absolute seriousness. "Cosmic Order grants no immunity from invasion, even if a world chooses to remain isolated or refuses to partake in conquest. There is no safety net. If another power discovers Nana, they will conquer it."

A tense, suffocating hush gripped the amphitheater. The paragons and kingdom delegates exchanged pale, horrified glances.

"Before, we were merely waiting to be harvested, but that was the past," Tide continued, a sharp, predatory edge entering his voice. "And things are no longer the same. We now hold the knowledge of how to scan the cosmos, how to locate foreign realms, and how to turn from prey into predators."

He smiled, a chilling expression that made the blood run cold in the veins of every mortal and godling present.

"As we speak, that process is already underway. Our world agent is out there in the vastness of the cosmos looking for a world, a world... for our own invasion."

"We must grow and strengthen ourselves, or else when our world is targeted, we will be too weak to ever defend it," Tide declared, his voice cutting through the space as the entire amphitheater plunged into a heavy, frozen silence.

For a long moment, not a soul moved. The sheer gravity of his words hung in the air, slowly sinking into the minds of every paragon and kingdom leader present.

Then, the dam broke.

The theater erupted instantly into a turbulent wave of furious murmurs, bitter accusations, and outright defiance.

"Your Grace, Tide," a prominent paragon called out, standing tall on his cloud-seat with a scowl carved into his features. "We appreciate the knowledge you have shared with us, but excuse us for having doubts. All of this rests entirely on your word, with not a shred of concrete proof to anchor it!"

Before Tide could answer, another voice lashed out from the opposite side of the amphitheater, dripping with skepticism.

"Exactly! What absolute nonsense you speak of regarding an ’invasion’!" another paragon roared. "From everything we know, our world has always been safe and isolated. This terrifying tale you weave sounds suspiciously like a convenient excuse cooked up by the pantheons to drive us forward for their own hidden, selfish goals!"

The defiance quickly snowballed into collective outrage.

"Now you sit high upon your throne while they loom above us, treating the fate of everyone here like pieces on a board!" a third voice shouted, fury painting his face red as others eagerly joined the chorus of dissent. "They are planning to drag us headfirst into an unnecessary, ungrounded war!"

"Just because of their divine status, they have no right to dictate the lives and fates of everyone else!" a figure among the independent paragons snarled, his mana flaring as a massive wave of murmurs and nodding heads echoed his sentiment across the stands. "I clawed my way up through blood and agony to reach the rank of a paragon, and I’ll be damned if my life is thrown away just to feed the ambitions of some distant pantheon!"

Tide said nothing in response to the raging crowd. Instead, he slowly shifted his gaze upward, looking past the independent paragons toward the elevated stands where the high mortal kingdoms and the godlings sat.

The godlings, having long been privy to their origins, felt no shock; they understood the exact reason their race had been birthed, and thus they remained entirely unbothered by his words.

As for the high mortal kingdoms, deep dissatisfaction twisted their features, but they masked it well, biting their tongues and refusing to speak out of turn. They looked to the godlings as their barometer, if these beings raised no objections, the kingdoms knew better than to make fools of themselves by shouting into the open.

"Forty," Tide suddenly spoke out.

His voice was quiet, easily drowned out by the angry chatter below, prompting a wave of confused "Huhs?" from the audience until the theater finally quieted down again.

"Forty," Tide repeated, his heavy gaze sweeping over the silent crowd as they stared at him in utter bewilderment.

"Forty what, Your Grace?" a brave voice called out from the lower stands.

"Forty mage towers," Tide stated, the words dropping like an explosion into the absolute stillness of the hall. "Our current world of Nana only possesses enough raw Origin and structural resources to support the creation and building of forty mage towers. Not a single one more."

"Once this limit is reached, the resources left in our world won’t be enough to craft a single complete mage tower ever again," Tide said, his words landing with a chilling finality.

Across the amphitheater, the angry paragons who had been shouting just moments before abruptly clamped their mouths shut, their defiance vanishing as the harsh reality of survival sank in. They quickly sank back into their cloud-seats.

"Now, I ask you, how many paragons sit before us here today, and how many towers do you see created before you?"

Tide paused, though he did not wait for an answer, letting the rhetorical question hang heavily in the air.