The Guardian gods Chapter 934

Before Tide could draw his next breath to continue, a nervous tension in the hall finally snapped.

"Your Grace," a high-ranking paragon cut in, his voice tight and trembling slightly as he wanted to know what was stolen. "What was it that you lost? What has been stolen from you?"

Tide slowly turned his gaze, locking onto the brave or foolish paragon. He offered a heavy, sorrowful sigh.

"A tome," Tide said, the word falling like a lead weight. "I lost a tome that held the master blueprint needed to build these towers. A sacred volume that detailed the exact runic arts woven into the spires and cataloged every single material required to craft them."

He paused, letting his sharp, piercing eyes sweep slowly across the terrified faces of the paragons and high lords gathered before him.

"That tome has somehow made its way into the hands of someone sitting here amongst you all," Tide stated, his voice turning ice-cold. "It is an open secret to me now, and because its knowledge is compromised, the text no longer holds its exclusive value. That catastrophic breach is what forced this early auction... and the sudden termination of those mining contracts."

The revelation dropped like an explosion into the center of the assembly.

For a breathless second, absolute, stunned silence reigned. Then, the hall erupted.

Panic, suspicion, and sudden, frantic calculations tore through the delegations of the high kingdoms and the godlings alike. Heads snapped left and right as distrust rippled through the rows. Every lord suddenly found themselves staring sideways at their neighbors, wondering if the person seated beside them or across the aisle was harboring the stolen blueprint that had just upended the entire geopolitical landscape of Nana.

The implications were staggering. A tome containing the complete architectural blueprints, runic arts, and material catalogs for a Mage Tower? Possession of such a relic meant someone among them didn’t just have a shortcut to power, they held the keys to creation itself, entirely outside of Tide’s monopoly and the origin gods hands.

Whispers escalated into shouting matches. Accusing glares locked onto rival factions.

"Quiet!"

The command wasn’t a roar, but it carried the weight of a falling mountain, cutting through the rising chaos instantly. Krogan’s eyes flared with a menacing, golden light, and a suffocating wave of divine pressure pinned every breathing entity back into their seats. The hall fell dead silent once more, though the air remained thick with volatile paranoia.

Tide watched the unfolding panic with a mask of quiet, melancholic amusement. He let them sweat, letting the paranoia do its insidious work, before speaking.

"Do not bother tearing each other apart just yet," Tide said smoothly, his voice dripping with false empathy. "The thief knows exactly who they are. But more importantly, due to my own careful foresight, a highly critical element was omitted from Tome."

"Call it luck, or caution," Tide continued, "But the section excluded from the tome dictates the integration of ten vital components, materials that are not born naturally in our world. They cannot be mined from your soil, they cannot be grown, and they cannot be found. They are forged exclusively by the hands of the Origin Gods."

He let a mocking, pitying smile grace his lips as he looked out over the sea of suspicious faces.

"So, while this ambitious thief may hold the blueprint, and they may even get remarkably far in constructing the physical architecture of a Mage Tower, they will eventually hit an insurmountable wall. They will find themselves stuck, sitting inside a hollow, useless monument, completely unable to awaken their creation without those ten keystones."

Tide’s gaze slowly descended to the lower stands. He locked eyes with those paragons to whom he had previously promised a trade in exchange for their law shards.

"As for my proposition of trade with you all," Tide announced, his voice projecting across the vast divide to the lower echelons. "My original intent was to provide you with a copy of that very tome in exchange for your shards. But as that blueprint is now an open secret, it is a lost knowledge to me, and its value is void."

He extended a hand outward, his tone shifting into that of a magnanimous benefactor.

"Therefore, the terms of our trade changes. In place of the lost blueprint, you will be receiving something far more tangible. For your law shards, I will grant you one of these ten vital components."

A heavy realization settled over the room. With a single, masterful stroke, Tide had not only "compensated" the paragons, but he had instantly painted massive targets on their backs. Whoever held the stolen tome would now have no choice but to hunt down the lesser paragons to complete their stolen tower, forcing the very conflict and bloodshed Tide so deeply desired.

Up in the higher balconies, the leaders of the high kingdoms and the godlings finally had a moment to breathe. Now clutching the condensed, miniature spires of their newly acquired Mage Towers and no longer panicked by the immediate threat of being left behind, they were able to calmlytaken in the words being spoken and no longer lead on the nose by Tide.

And as Tide spoke, the pieces settled into place, a collective, chilling clarity washed over them.

The termination of the mining contracts. The casual drop of information regarding the "stolen" tome. The revelation of the ten divine components.

It was all a lie. Or, worse yet, a meticulously engineered trap.

Tide may never have truly lost a tome. He orchestrated the entire narrative. By dangling the illusion of a stolen blueprint, he had sent the desperate, resource starved paragons of the lower stands into a wild-goose chase for a ghost.

Worse still, by promising those same lower paragons one of the "ten vital components" in exchange for their law shards, Tide had just transformed the entire lower tier into walking, talking bullseyes. Whoever actually held the ambition to build a tower would now be forced to hunt down the lower stand holders or tear into each other to acquire what they lacked.

A cold shiver ran down the spines of the high lords as the true, genius of Tide’s trap fully clicked into place. There was a liklely high chance the stolen tome was entirely real, and the chaos it would unleash was precisely the point.

By terminating the mining contracts, Tide had seemingly handed the high kingdoms and many minor lords absolute jurisdiction over their own lands and the valuable materials resting beneath them. But the high lords now realized that "freedom" was a poisoned chalice. Whoever the stolen blueprint now ends up with, will hold knowledge of the exact composition of those materials. With a strict limit of only forty towers capable of ever existing in this world, those resources were fiercely finite, meaning no one would ever willingly share or trade them.

The moment the lower paragons and rival factions realised what sat beneath their soil, total, unbridled warfare became inevitable. Every territory holding a scrap of component material would find itself under siege from desperate paragons and rival lords alike.

And even if someone managed to scrape together every physical resource using the stolen blueprint, they still faced the challenge of the ten vital components forged exclusively by the Origin Gods.

Those components that could not be mined, stolen, or forged by mortal hands. They could only ever be acquired directly from Tide. And now they were aware of what trading Tide would lead to . To get the components, they would have to bow, negotiate, and ultimately sign his binding contracts anyway.

The stolen blueprint didn’t grant freedom, it only offered a more agonizing, circuitous route right back into Tide’s ledger. A well engineered, inescapable, self-sustaining ecosystem of perpetual war, ensuring that whether they bought a tower today or fought for the scraps tomorrow, every single soul in the world would end up at his doorstep bound by the contract.

Worse still was the biting, bitter realization that even though they saw the cage clearly, they had no choice but walk in and rattle the bars. They all knew they had to play within this maliciously designed trap. Even with the high kingdoms and godlings now clutching two towers each, two was never enough in the current world of Nana . They knew they would need more, far more if they wanted to secure hegemony for their lineages and protect their flanks in the coming storm.

Amidst the silent panic gripping the high balconies, Zephyr sat motionless. Knowing his grandfather well, understanding the chilling, calculating depths of the old man’s mind he slowly looked past Tide’s imposing figure, his eyes drifting upward to the high, warping veil where the silent presence of the Origin Gods lingered.

This grand play, this intricate web of debt, scarcity, and manufactured greed, felt intimately, terrifyingly familiar. It bore the unmistakable fingerprints of his grandfather.

And as the weight of that realization settled over him, Zephyr understood that in the coming years, this world was destined to plunge headfirst into a total, unyielding war among humanity. It would be a catastrophic culling designed to determine the sole spokesperson of each continent, a ruthless crucible that would concentrate absolute power, eliminate the weak, and force the rapid development of the world through rivers of blood.