The Guardian gods Chapter 944

He compressed that stolen slice of sky into a localized pressure-cooker of pure torment. He then stripped away the horizon, he stripped away the ultimate psychological mercy, the concept of "elsewhere." In a normal world, when suffering becomes unbearable, a soul can look toward the horizon and dream of escape, or look down to find the solid ground of earth. But within the suffocating space he crafted, the sky was everywhere and nowhere at once. It was a prison, robbing the paragons of distance and locking them in a static, inescapable altitude where the atmosphere itself became the unyielding walls of a cage.

Realizing his raw solar fire was too efficient, turning flesh to nothing far too quickly Crepuscular adjusted it’s output. He reined it in, using only a fraction of the sun’s blistering warmth, just enough to continuously cook them without ever granting the sweet mercy of annihilation. He instituted the concept of a "noon that never passes." Just as a merciless midday heat wilts a delicate plant without killing it outright, he held them in a perpetual, agonizing pain where their flesh constantly degraded at the exact, agonizing rate it was forced to repair.

To deny them even a modicum of comfort, he stripped away the fresh wind, leaving behind a stagnant, dead zone of superheated air. The paragons found themselves entirely unable to catch a breath, because every lungful of air they dragged in was already hot enough to scald their tissue from the inside out.

Suspended in crushing upper-atmospheric pressure without the comforting cushion of the lower world, their blood began to boil just beneath their skin. Yet, the brutal air pressure kept them pinned firmly in place, entirely unable to expand, explode, or find any form of release from the relentless cycle.

With her own work on the surface concluded, Keles quietly withdrew from the chaos, returning to the tranquil sanctuary where Mahu stood vigil carrying her son. There, the young Ikelos slept soundly, blissfully detached from the horrors unfolding outside.

"Thank you, sister," Keles whispered softly, a profound wave of gratitude washing over her. She was deeply thankful that Mahu had been thoughtful enough to shield her son, keeping the innocent child from ever witnessing or hearing the atrocities echoing up from Nana.

Yet, despite the quiet of their sanctuary, the rest of the world found no peace.

The initial, eerie silence of Nana was shattered entirely, replaced by a relentless, unending symphony of screams, screams of raw pain, suffocating fear, and agonizing suffering. For the surviving paragons forced to remain as helpless spectators, it was a waking nightmare. They were compelled to watch every brutal second, unable to tear their eyes away or block their ears from the horrific chorus echoing around them.

To the terrified onlookers, Ikenga, Crepuscular, and Jaus appeared nothing short of monstrously cruel. They moved with the chilling detachment of children who had discovered a terrifying new set of toys. And just as children were never gentle with their playthings, inevitably breaking them too fast, these three older gods were taking elaborate, excruciating precautions. They ensured their toys wouldn’t break easily, deliberately pacing themselves to savor every agonizing moment.

This orchestration of pain and suffering dragged on for three excruciating days, seventy-two hours that were burned unforgettably into the minds of everyone who witnessed it, scarring their memories for the rest of their long lives.

The message could not have been clearer. It was a brutal display, a vivid preview of the inescapable fate awaiting any being who dared to overstep their bounds and test the patience of the Origin Gods.

It was meant to remind them of the true owners of this world. The prolonged silence of the Origin Gods had never meant ignorance or apathy, it simply meant they had not yet found a reason to interfere.

The most agonizing lesson these surviving paragons learned was the fundamental nature of their world. Nana, in its entirety, was a domain. It was a vast world owned outright by the Origin Gods, and humanity along with the godlings were merely creatures permitted to be born and grow within its borders.

Normally, so long as they stayed in line and played by the established cosmic rules, the Origin Gods could not or would not exercise their absolute authority over them. But the moment those rules were broken, the full weight of that divine authority came crashing down without restraint.

This was why everything around them had suddenly felt alive, as if the Origin Gods were omnipresent. It was the terrifying sensation of trespassing upon a private realm and suddenly finding oneself entirely at the mercy of the master of the realm.

It explained why their individual domain spaces had been instantly denied, and why they could no longer project their customized realities over the world as they once did so easily.

Stripped of their domains, only their basic astral forms and laws remained accessible to them. Yet even those were ruthlessly suppressed, unable to exert their true power under the watchful, suffocating gaze of the Origin Gods. The hard, agonizing truth was burned into their very souls, one must never, under any circumstances, engage an Origin God on their home turf.

The world fell silent once again, but Nana was forever altered from what it had been three days prior. The entire globe now resembled a grotesque graveyard of giants.

The landscape was littered with the massive, unmoving corpses of paragons who had met their end in their astral forms while desperately trying to put up a fight or claw their way to another breath of life. Some bodies still twitched with a faint, fading vestige of consciousness, but their ultimate demise was entirely inevitable.

Amidst the wreckage, Ikenga glanced across the sea toward the southern continent. There, he locked eyes with Murmur, who stared back at him with a sharp, calculating glint in his eyes. The two entities shared a long, weighted look before Ikenga finally turned his gaze away, a clear trace of disappointment written across his features.

He could not help but internally lament the missed opportunity. This purge could have served as the perfect cover to deal with a lingering, troublesome problem, but the rigid cosmic rules strictly forbade it.

After all, Murmur was aligned with the Hegemony faction, but mere faction affiliation did not warrant divine intervention or punishment. Murmur had played the game carefully, executing his maneuvers with enough cunning to avoid crossing the fatal line and giving them a legitimate reason to strike him down.

Ikenga shifted his attention away from the southern continent and back to the sprawling carnage beneath him. An idea took root in his mind, a desire to immortalize this bloody day in the annals of Nana. He wanted this to serve as an eternal monument, a grim epoch that the surviving paragons would point to when warning all those who came after them.

"This is the result of going against the origin gods and their interests," he envisioned them saying. "This is a reminder that there are beings who are more than willing to decide your fate the moment a single wrong step is taken."

One of Nature’s most terrifying structural powers is geological permanence, the ability to turn the fleeting, the mobile, and the living into unmoving rock, stone, and earth.

As that thought solidified, Ikenga enacted this concept upon the fallen giants. Instantly, their ethereal energy and ascended flesh calcified into iron-hard stone, granite, and jagged slate. Their colossal bodies permanently fused into the earth’s crust, thrusting upward toward the sky to form towering, oppressive mountain ranges. For the few whose consciousness still lingered within the ruins of their minds, the horror was pushed further as they were completely paralyzed, unable to twitch a single muscle, yet somewhat awake and trapped inside tons of dead weight as their lives slowly withered away.

It was a breathtaking yet profoundly disturbing transformation. Across Nana, the giant corpses were systematically overwritten into large peaks.

To the mortals waking up the next morning, the geography of the world had irrevocably shifted overnight. Where gentle rolling plains and open horizons had once stood, colossal, jagged mountains now violently pierced the clouds.

And for any brave soul who dared to scale those newly formed cliffs and look closely at the stone face, a haunting truth awaited them, shrouded just enough to remain a mystery. The sharp ridges would unmistakably resemble the petrified contours of a giant jawline, the yawning, echoing caves served as the hollow, unblinking eyes of stone and the sprawling boulder fields at the base were nothing less than twisted, frozen fingers.

The mountains will stand as monumental caricatures of the fallen paragons themselves, immortalized in eternal, stony silence for generations of mortals to gawk at, forever left to wonder what had happened to the paragons who vanished overnight.

Just as silently as they had descended, the Origin Gods withdrew, slipping back into the deep fabric of their realm from where they came. In their wake, every law fracture, conceptual tear, and reality scar left behind by the warring paragons was swept clean and mended by their passing, easing the heavy burdens of the world spirits who governed Nana’s delicate balance.