Chapter 936
Instantly, every eye in the room pivoted. Hundreds of predatory, calculating gazes locked onto the ten unfortunate souls. Sweat immediately beaded on their brows, hot and heavy, as they felt the collective weight of a room full of apex predators sizing them up.
The ten paragons shot furious, murderous glares up at Tide, silently cursing him for the blatant, unapologetic trap he had just sprung around their necks.
Tide merely offered an innocent, mocking shrug.
"If it were up to me, I would have preferred these trades to be conducted in quiet, discreet privacy," Tide spoke, his tone dripping with exaggerated sincerity. "But frankly, I don’t care for the thought of you lot hovering outside my domain boundaries for months, camping on my doorsteps, ever-watchful and paranoid."
He leaned back in his throne, spreading his hands.
"So, it has to be settled right here, right now, today, so you can all carry on with your respective businesses." He spoke with the casual air of a benevolent merchant, acting entirely oblivious to what was to come when the doors are closed.
Hearing his words, the ten paragons swallowed hard, their throats dry as dust. A moment ago, securing these components was all they had ever wanted, the ultimate prize they had gambled their shards for. But now, with those ten humming rings hovering right before them in a room full of wolves, they found themselves frozen, seized by a paralyzing hesitation.
The moment they accepted those rings, survival ceased to be a certainty and devolved into a desperate, razor-thin gamble. They were clutching the most coveted prizes in the world, putting a permanent, glowing target on their backs for every ambitious lord and desperate paragon in Nana.
It boiled down to a brutal, agonizing question, did one’s life matter more than an near impossible, generational path to absolute power?
The opportunity of a lifetime was dangling right in front of them. All they had to do was reach out, grasp it, and bet everything on their ability to survive the coming storm.
One by one, the tension broke. With trembling, resolute hands, all ten paragons reached out and snatched the floating rings from the air. In instant exchange, the law shards they had clutched so tightly in their fists slipped from their fingers, flashing with golden light as they flew upward, landing neatly in Tide’s open palms.
As the metal touched their skin, the rings felt less like prizes and more like fragments of a scorching star. They burned with a fierce heat, like a weight pressing down like a mountain. Yet, despite that, every single one of them clenched their fists tight around the metal. Ignoring the pressure, they lifted their chins, turning their heads to glare fiercely back at the hungry, predatory eyes staring them down from across the hall.
"The contracts are bound, the trades are set, and the paths are chosen," Tide announced, his voice carrying an effortless, melodic finality that echoed off the space of clouds. "Our business here is concluded. You may take your towers, your new burdens, and your futures. Leave my domain."
With a sweep of his hand, the architecture of the realm began to shift. The glittering, ethereal clouds of the auction house dissolved into shimmering mists of starlight and cascading light. The spatial tethers holding the delegates in place snapped, and a series of brilliant, disorienting portals tore open across the floor, beckoning the paragons and high lords back to their respective mortal lands.
Murmurs rippled through the crowd as the high kingdoms hoisted their newly acquired, miniature spires, their expressions a tense mix of triumphant and deep-seated paranoia. They turned toward the portals in tight, heavily guarded clusters, instantly closing ranks. Every faction leader was already calculating how to protect their borders, how to hoard their resources, and most importantly, how to secure the ultimate prize.
As the delegations began filing rapidly through the shimmering thresholds, desperate to put distance between themselves and the merchant god, Tide remained seated upon his high dais. His expression was serene, completely devoid of the melancholic act he had put on moments prior. He watched the human lords, the godlings, and the lone paragons scatter like ants fleeing a kicked anthill, knowing full well the devastating wildfire he had just helped unleash upon the world.
Beside him, Krogan’s golden eyes flickered with a quiet, unreadable satisfaction as the last of the mortals vanished through the fading portals, leaving the divine realm entirely empty, silent, and primed for the chaos to come.
Stepping through the threshold and back out into the mortal world, the air felt thick enough to choke on. Conflict was a rare and foreign concept in the peaceful, structured epochs of Nana, most of the godlings, and paragons standing here had ascended to their current heights through diplomacy, administrative genius, and bloodless maneuvering. They had sparred for honor or practiced forms in safe courtyards, but they had never fought to the death. They had never known the raw, primal terror of having their own existence placed on the chopping block.
Until now.
In a single day, Tide had rewritten the fundamental laws of their reality. Everyone understood a grim, terrifying truth, life itself had become a currency. It was a raw commodity that could be spent, traded, or violently ripped away to buy a path to power.
As the delegations from the high kingdoms and the godlings materialized outside the shimmering boundaries of Tide’s domain, their bodies instantly went rigid.
At the center of their respective formations, each faction paragons stood shoulder-to-shoulder, trying desperately to keep their composure while the heavy weight of their treasure weighs upon them. Encircling them was a sea of hundreds of desperate paragons.
The hundreds of stares locked onto them were no longer respectful or polite. They were heavy, hollow, and dripping with pure greed, the look of predators who had just caught the scent of blood in the water, calculating the exact angles for a kill. The unspoken tension stretched to a snapping point. No one wanted to throw the first punch, but everyone knew that the moment a single foot stepped out of line, the slaughter would begin.
A figure suddenly materialized directly between Edward and his guards. There was no spatial distortion, no magical buildup or warning fluctuation, one moment empty air occupied the space, and the next, an assassin was there, a dark dagger gripped in hand, lunging forward to drive it straight into the skull of the paragon guarding the king.
The blade punched through with no effort. But the instant it crossed the barrier, there was no spray of blood, no tearing of flesh, and no sensation of a mortal body being pierced.
Instead, the supposed victim erupted into a blinding flash of golden light.
Realizing in a fraction of a second that he had struck an illusion, the assassin tried to twist away, attempting to melt back into the shadows. But he was already too late. A hand clamped down on him like a vice. Before his figure could disappear, a violent, invisible heat flooded his body, causing his skin to blister and char as if he were being slowly cooked from the inside out.
The assassin opened his mouth to scream, but before the sound could leave his throat, a sweeping arc of absolute force sliced through the air. His head was cleanly severed, life extinguished in an instant before the limp, smoking corpse dropped heavily from the sky.
Edward stared down at the falling body, a pang of loss hitting his chest "A potential law shard"
The dead assassin had undoubtedly carried a shard of his own. But the realization immediately turned bitter. To legally claim a fallen foe’s law shard, he would have to formally realign himself, slipping past the consequences of his actions by joining the Hegemons.
Edward remembered the terms of the contract he had just signed with Tide. Straying from the path, pivoting loyalties, or engaging in short-sighted opportunism would only trigger the devastating penalties written into his expansion debt. In the long term, breaking stride to loot a single corpse would destroy everything he had just built.
Stepping back, Edward pulled his guards into a tighter, disciplined formation, his eyes hardening as he ignored the gleaming falling prize. The trap had been sprung, the first blood had been spilled, and the war for Nana had officially begun.
Taking advantage of the chaotic scramble sparked by the high kingdoms’ brutal display, the ten ring-holders immediately moved to vanish. Desperately throwing up cloaking arts and matching their strides with the streaming mob, they tried to slip away into the periphery.
Their window of stealth, however, was agonizingly short. The moment the high kingdoms and godlings proved to be impregnable monoliths, the entire group of paragons whipped around in unison. Clearly their disguise was not as effective as they had thought, multiple eyes had always been on them and when the higher kingdom had proven to be much it was time for them to be reaped.