Chapter 939
To the bloodied, panicking denizens of Nana, the heavens were simply a theater of war. Any unnatural celestial phenomena, warping skies, and reality-bending shocks were casually blamed on the catastrophic clashes of the Paragons. Not a single mortal soul realized the truth, the Origin Gods as so many years in a long time have touched down upon the mortal soil.
By immutable cosmic law, Origin Gods were eternal anchors. Their rightful place was bound to the higher planes, strictly forbidden from treading the fragile earth below. The reasoning was simple as the sheer, unbridled gravity of an Origin’s divine presence threatened to warp, fracture, and ultimately collapse the delicate architecture of the lower world simply by existing within it.
Yet, cosmic laws are rarely absolute, they are systems, and systems possess loopholes.
When the Paragons tore across the planet’s hemispheres in their frenzied, desperate hunt for the rings dragging world-sized domains through Nana’s crust and slaughtering millions in their wake, they triggered an existential failure of the natural order.
The world was in danger. Therefore, by the ancient, foundational mandates of the cosmos, the guardians were permitted to return home.
Crepuscular, the Sun and Sky God, materialized first upon a shattered ridge in the western reaches. His skin shimmered with the bright white glow, and his eyes were hollow vaults of blinding white light.
His figure ascended into the upper atmosphere. Below him in the clouds lay the sprawling civilization of the harplings, a vast, intricate network of cliffside architecture, soaring spires, and suspended bridges woven from cloud-silk and mountain timber. It was a magnificent empire built on generations of ingenuity
Far to the south, deep within the tangled roots of the Forest of Mist, the heavy silence was broken by the sound of shifting soil. Keles stepped forward, shedding the amorphous gloom of her ethereal realm to anchor herself in mortal reality. As she crossed the threshold into the physical plane, a change gripped her form. Her height shortened as her skin dimmed in paleness, her canine teeth lengthened. Her appearance that of a vampire.
For years, Keles had watched this very civilization unfold through her realm. She had listened to her son and daughter whisper of its bustling markets, its towering libraries, and the haunting melodies sung by its people under the eclipse.
Now, standing at the edge of the mist-shrouded tree line, the rich, intoxicating scent of woodsmoke, roasted grains, and warm mortal blood flooded her senses. A subtle smile touched her lips. No longer a distant deity gazing from the dark, she was finally here to walk among them, eager to taste the vibrant culture her divine lineage had brought into being.
Jaus, manifested a mile away over a freshly carved ocean trench, a scar left by a domain implosion. He tilted his head back, inhaling the heavy, ozone-rich air with a deep, shuddering sigh of pure, intoxicating liberation.
Jaus shifted his gaze away from the smoking chasm, his view changed with a thought as he hovered above the open ocean. Yet, the pristine blue of the open water was marred by a sickly dark colour, a scar of corruption left behind by his counterpart.
A sharp flex of his divine will could have eradicated the blight instantly, snipping away those metaphysical tumors but as his awareness plunged beneath the waves, he paused.
There, clinging to the edge of the tainted trench, stood a marvel of marine engineering, a sprawling station crafted by the merfolk. He has seen it before from his realm but he held a different appreciation for it when it was so up close.
They had fortified the perimeter, establishing a watchful bastion to safeguard the surrounding waters. They kept the spreading rot contained, monitoring its pulse, and ensured that the blight brought no harm to the greater ocean.
Deeper still, he observed the mutated lifeforms. Some were twisted beyond recognition, hopelessly lost to corruption. But others touched by the blessings of the sea had survived the transformation, forging a fragile, symbiotic equilibrium. To deny them the corrupted essence now would not cleanse them, it would spell the immediate extinction of their lineage.
A complex emotion flickered across Jaus’s features, pride for the resilience of the mortal and aquatic will. Shifting his form, his divine essence collapsed inward, rippling and expanding until he displaced the air with the mass of a colossal leviathan. With a resonant, bone-shaking whale cry that echoed through both physical water and the ethereal plane, he plummeted downward, plunging into the dark, churning depths to swim among his children.
Far to the east, upon the continent of golden savannas and mist-wreathed jungles, the atmosphere shimmered and parted to welcome Ikenga. But unlike his kin, who arrived alone, Ikenga came with someone.
In his massive hand, he held a young boy no older than five. The child, Ikelos, possessed wide, luminous eyes brimming with an insatiable, innocent curiosity, eagerly taking in the vibrant flora and alien wildlife of the eastern realm. Perched precariously atop the boy’s head was a tiny tortoise, no larger than an apple, craning its wrinkled neck with an identical expression of wide-eyed novelty.
Ikenga lowered his gaze to look down at his son, a heavy mixture of fondness and quiet dread settling in his chest. In his planning, he hadn’t accounted for how the violent ripples of his actions would bleed into the boy’s reality.
A long, weary sigh escaped Ikenga’s lips as his mind flashed back to Keles. He could still vividly feel the blistering, ice-cold malice Keles had hurled at him, her eyes sharp with fury when she beheld how the turmoil that had reached their child.
As Ikenga stood amidst the vibrant foliage of the eastern continent, his thumb gently brushed against the crown of Ikelos’s head, right beside the tiny, unblinking tortoise.
Ikelos was a natural-born god, a god of stagnation. He had grown to the delight of Ikenga and Keles at the slow pace of a mortal child. But it seems that constancy had been tethered to a static world, a world with slow grinding gears until Ikenga’s and Tide’s action set things in motion.
The slow turning gear quickened. Conflict had shattered the old peace, breeding rapid progress and effectively strangling stagnation in its cradle. But that very turbulence had served as rich, intoxicating fuel for the young god. Every fallen paragon, every violent clash of ideals and territories, had accelerated Ikelos’s maturation, violently thrusting him from helpless infancy into his current form.
Even now, that explosive growth was beginning to slow, from a frantic sprint to a now measured growth. The paragons of the world were no longer hurling themselves blindly into slaughter, they were learning, strategizing, and fighting with more efficiency. Survival rates were climbing as adaptation took root.
A slow, appreciative smile touched Ikenga’s lips. It was nothing short of breathtaking to witness. These paragons had once hesitated to invoke their laws, crippled by rigid mana restrictions and the terror of depletion. Now, through the brutal crucible of combat, their law comprehension had deepened. They had learned to bend the rules of reality, the sheer conceptual output of their laws no longer chained to the strict volume of mana required to fuel them. Insight had begun to conquer raw resource consumption.
Yet, despite their brilliant leaps in conceptual mastery, the harsh, physical constraint of mana remained a persistent shackle. It was a race against exhaustion, especially now that their adversaries, equally relentless, equally unyielding were growing right alongside them.
It was a cruel reality, even as one’s conceptual understanding deepened, turning raw intent into power, the sheer physics of destruction still demanded a toll. Mastery allowed a paragon to extract more efficiency from their law, but to obliterate an adversary, they demanded more mana. Insight could stretch a drop of power into a stream, but it could not conjure an ocean from nothing.
This reality further pushed many paragons into taking in mana from their surrounding to replenish themselves, no longer with mind to care about the thread strengthening between them and Ikelos. Ikenga could guess their thought "As long as a tower was acquired, they can slowly back to world to unravel the thickened thread"
Ikenga watched with appreciation as a distant skirmish played out across the savanna. He could say with absolute confidence that these blood-forged paragons, steeled in the furnace of relentless conflict, had far surpassed the pampered scions of the high kingdoms and the sheltered godlings. Those upper tiers have not had their laws tested, never once forced to bend under the pressure of desperation.
Now their survival was entirely tethered to their acquired mage towers, which pumped a continuous reserve of mana and amplified their laws far beyond its limits. Strip away the towers, and their defeat was a certainty against these blood-forged paragons.
Yet, those kingdoms and godlings held a vital purpose, they were meant to serve as the vanguards against whatever loomed beyond the horizon. Left as they were, they would shatter at the first true impact of a conflict. That was going to change soon after himself and his siblings cleared the ground for them.