The Guardian gods

Chapter 872

Erik, in a joyous mood, nodded enthusiastically. "Indeed, son. There will still be areas designated for practical infrastructure like schools, armories, smitheries, and the like. But an extravagant palace like this? It has no place in our new kingdom."

Eldrin looked down at his own luxurious silk robes, a perfect fit for a prince, and then remembered his bare-footed father in Viridrigon’s sanctuary. He recalled how his father had willingly embraced the wild, while he himself was unable to bridge the gap between royalty and nature.

He quietly walked past his father, a brewing thought consuming his mind. He couldn’t help but wonder how many waking souls in their kingdom thought exactly like he did, people who might not take kindly to his father’s radical plan of tearing down their civilization for a forest.

Meanwhile, far away in her own realm, Siren lay stretched across a bed of pink clouds, a smile spreading across her face. At the exact moment of the half-elves birth, as an Arch Curse in charge of lust and envy, she sensed a profound shift. It was a magnificent evolution in quality, and it was entirely tied to her domain.

Mortals in the world of Nana would always be plagued by curses, and mindless cursed beings would continue to be born from the shadows of humanity. Yet, with the birth of the half-elves, everything shifted. For the first time, there was an entire racial group capable of actively controlling and wielding the power of their cursed status instead of being consumed by it.

This unprecedented control triggered a powerful feedback loop directly to Siren. Unlike the birth of standard, mindless cursed entities which brought her no real benefit other than reinforcing her authority over them, this evolution was entirely different. She was no god, nor did she possess any true divine spark. Yet, because of her primal source and the nature of her creator, this sudden influx of refined, structured energy made her feel like something very close to a deity.

The energy rolling back to her wasn’t the usual chaotic, frantic static of dying minds or rabid monsters. It was smooth, concentrated, and laced with a intoxicatingly refined flavor of allure and yearning. Because the half-elves retained their intellect and possessed enhanced beauty, every breath they took, every pulse of their new hypnotic aura, fed her domain with an unprecedented purity.

Siren closed her eyes, basking in the sudden warmth spreading through her essence. She stretched like a cat on her cloudy bed, realizing that while she didn’t sit on a divine throne, the birth of this new race had just given her something much sweeter, a living breathing fountain of power that belonged exclusively to her.

Meanwhile, in the northern continent, down in the kingdom of Björn, the atmosphere was a stark contrast to the rest of the world. While other nations were paralyzed with tension due to the volatile mood shifts of their respective paragons, a fervent, electric energy hung over the people of Björn. It made the entire population restless.

An action fueled entirely by Björn. As a deity whose divinity tilted heavily toward warfare, Björn possessed an intuitive, instinctual sense of opportunity. He knew exactly when a situation could be bent to his benefit, and he sensed that the current moment was ripe for the taking.

He had been among those who quietly observed the clash between the two paragons, and he was well aware of the grim realization they had ultimately come to. Furthermore, because he was a fragment born of Murmur, he retained deep, inherited memories of the Mage Towers, possessing the exact knowledge required to build them from the ground up.

But unlike Osita, who had patiently spent years tracking down the necessary components even going so far as to synthesize rare, missing materials not found in this world to craft his tower. Björn lacked the patience for such a tedious endeavor. He simply couldn’t be bothered to share the blueprints or the burden of building a tower with his people.

Instead, where others saw a puzzle to solve, Björn saw an immediate, golden opportunity. He was a warrior, and his people were born for battle. From his perspective, there was no better time to strike than now, while their enemies were distracted, unsettled, and far from their best state.

From his point of view, a Mage Tower might be a prize of utmost importance to the Paragons of both factions, but it wouldn’t offer any immediate salvation to his people when all was considered. When it came down to a raw, one on one clash of blades and blood, Björn would always bet on the martial might of his own people.

This unshakeable confidence stemmed from his unique gift, a blessing from the abyss that made his people exponentially stronger the longer a battle dragged on, at the terrifying cost of slowly losing their minds to a feral frenzy. It was a gift that applied to everyone, and his Paragons were no exception to this rule.

To a nation of true warriors, a Mage Tower was nothing more than a glorified battery. It served only to sustain their conceptual laws a bit longer, rather than offering any real tactical depth or keeping them from burning out.

Because of this raw, chaotic nature, raw intelligence was rarely a quality his people prioritized. While mages did exist within his kingdom, they were strictly battle-oriented, specialists in destruction rather than the full-fledged, scholarly magi found in other lands.

It was only through Yuki’s intervention that intelligence had begun to be seen as something of value in the kingdom. Björn understood the merit of her perspective to some extent, but his core philosophy remained unyielding, when it came to the brutal reality of war, intellect was a hindrance. In the heat of battle, one was supposed to completely submit to their primal instincts and let their body move.

Hence, for Björn, the war had to take place right now, while the playing field was still level. If he allowed the coming war to shift into a game of intellect, planning, and magical infrastructure, his people would inevitably lose. They were apex predators, not scholars. Waiting until the enemy managed to construct their Mage Towers was a death sentence, it would turn future conflicts into highly calculated, prolonged sieges of attrition, the exact kind of war his people were bound to lose as their minds burned away in the frenzy.

Strike hard, strike fast, and force the enemy into a chaotic meat grinder before they could build their safe havens. That was the only path to victory.

Björn’s eyes burned with a fierce, divine intent as he looked out over his restless kingdom. The command would be given, the war drums would sound, and the silver kingdom had to fall.

His decree for an all-out war had been relayed and was instantly understood by his people. Finn, who always acted on his words with absolutely no second thought, raised a hand in immediate approval, his eyes already gleaming with the familiar, bloodthirsty anticipation of the coming slaughter.

But he was the only one.

Yuki and the other Paragons stood their ground, refusing to move under the pretense that without a Mage Tower of their own, it would be a reckless campaign, a mutual massacre where both sides would lose far more than they could ever hope to gain.

If not for the absolute preciousness of his physical vessel in the mortal world, Björn would have descended right then and there to tear their shameful heads from their shoulders for such cowardice.

Yuki was his woman, but it was moments like this that made him genuinely question his affection for her. In the span of just a few decades, she had taken his fierce, untamed warriors and turned them into cautious, calculating scholars.

Initially, he had been perfectly fine with her adjustments. After all, her reforms had given him a grand, stable kingdom that commanded respect across Nana, and the structured civility had even helped anchor his own mind against the eroding, chaotic feedback of his own divinity.

But things had swung too far. There was no longer a balance between savagery and scholarship, a crucial equilibrium he desperately needed, and the exact factor that made his divinity truly powerful. Standing as he did now, he should have been one of the strongest gods in the entire world, but he wasn’t. The raw, primal edge that fueled his power had been dulled.

Björn understood that during times of peace, Yuki’s meticulous way was undeniably the best, even if the faith energy born from a civilized people’s worship wasn’t as potent or intoxicating. But when the drums of war sounded, his way, the way of blood, instinct, and raw violence was the only one that they should all rally behind.

It was a fundamental truth he had deeply hoped Yuki would understand and stand by him on, but it seemed that was nothing more than a wishful, naive thought. What made him even more furious, however, was the sudden, bitter realization that while his people still worshiped him, they feared and respected Yuki’s intellect more than they did his wrath.