Chapter 948

Chapter 948: 948

Deep down, beneath layers of hidden secrets, deceit, and paranoia, a desperate part of him had genuinely believed he would be rewarded. He had craved validation; he wanted to feel important, deeply valued, and essential to the grand design.

With how harshly fate had been treating him lately, the tower distribution felt like a public execution of his self-worth. It was the ultimate confirmation that he was viewed as a dispensable nobody, a mere footnote destined to be forgotten. That bitter sting was magnified a hundredfold as he watched the political landscape shift around him, helpless as the number of paragons allying themselves with the Sun Kingdom steadily grew, leaving Tyrion further and further behind in the dust.

The breaking point of Tyrion’s mind began the day the Origin Gods unleashed their wrath. Every shriek of agony and torture hadn’t just echoed across the world, it had burned itself directly into his soul, leaving behind permanent psychic scars.

In the harrowing vulnerability of those moments, Tyrion saw only a horrifying reflection of himself. The absolute, pathetic helplessness of those mighty paragons mirrored his own internal terror, the crushing realization that he was nothing more than a toy being manipulated by Tide and a hidden hand.

His paranoid mind spun that suspicion into a waking nightmare, as he began to entertain the thought that the hidden hand pulling his strings was one of the Origin Gods.

The mere thought of falling under the absolute mercy of those tyrants shattered the last vestiges of his resilience. That dread was cemented into permanent trauma when one of the falling paragons crashed directly beside his home. Tyrion had been forced to watch the dying paragon through his window, witnessing the raw, primal terror in eyes that seemed to look right through him, silently screaming for help.

Yet, Tyrion had frozen. He could do nothing as his fellow paragon was violently transfigured into a sprawling mountain range, the newly formed stone eyes permanently locked onto his exact location.

That single, unyielding gaze became his eternal prison.

Every time he blinked, the horrific transformation replayed behind his eyelids. Every time he closed his eyes, the dying roars and echoes of torture ripped through his silence.

All this led to his current, ruined appearance. Cowering in his sanctuary, plunged into darkness, Tyrion sat balled up on the floor, desperately trying to hide from the phantom eyes he could still feel burning into his back.

While locked in his paranoid terror, Tyrion remained painfully aware that the world outside did not wait for him. As a paragon, his connection to the ambient flow of information could never truly be severed, allowing him to passively observe the shifting tides of Nana even from the suffocating darkness of his sanctuary.

He had ignored the panic of the high kingdoms, stayed blind to the military movements of the Northern continent, and completely boycotted the paranoid gatherings where the surviving paragons drafted their new rules. Nothing in the waking world had possessed enough gravity to pierce his shell of trauma.

Until the rumors surrounding King Nwadiebube reached his ears.

It was not the whispering of a new path to godhood that caught his attention. As a paragon, he had already attained the pinnacle of power, divine ascension held no allure for him.

Instead, what arrested his gaze was the clear signature of the conspiracy itself.

Having lived his life as a pawn, jerked around by Tide and manipulated by a hidden hand he suspected to be an Origin God, Tyrion possessed a tragic expertise in how puppeteers operated. Hence where others saw a rising king stumbling into the spotlight, Tyrion instantly recognized a stage managed illusion.

He saw right through the manufactured hysteria. The sudden, unnatural spotlight on Nwadiebube was not a genuine coincidence, but a deliberate, calculated distraction. Someone was using the king of Omadi as a scapegoat to draw the collective gaze of the world, keeping all eyes locked on the front of the stage while the real game was being played entirely in the deep, invisible shadows.

As if validating his intuition, the panic dissolved almost as quickly as it had arisen. The high kingdoms and desperate fifth-tiers suddenly backed off, each quietly securing their piece of the puzzle. It was a masterclass in manipulation, the grand theater concluded, the puppets neatly rearranged on the board, and the shadowy puppeteer remaining completely invisible.

Watching this seamless execution sparked a sudden clarity in Tyrion’s fractured mind. His hollow gaze shifted from the window toward the cursed artifact resting in the dark corner of his sanctuary, the tome.

The very book that had birthed his deepest traumas, poisoning his ambitions and dragging him into this web of suffering.

"Why didn’t he just share this secret with everyone?"

The question hung heavy in the damp air. The fundamental concept of mage tower was no longer a locked secret, the entire world was now whispering about it. Yet, the true, unadulterated knowledge locked within the pages of his tome remained exclusive, sitting safely beyond the reach of the masses, knowledge he had already completely drained, extracting every ounce of power it could offer.

Greed had always been his anchor. He had never been able to let the book go, blinded by a grand, arrogant vision of using its contents as ultimate leverage. He had hoarded it, dreaming of the day he would weaponize its secrets to tower over his fellow paragons and finally claim the dominance he craved.

Now, with his mind broken, his status shattered, and his paranoia eating him alive, that hoarded leverage looked less like a weapon and more like a noose.

A psychological anchor dragging him deeper into madness. Yet, amid the swirling paranoia, a calculated spark of lucidity cut through the dark.

He stared out at his half-finished tower, a monument to a stalled ambition. Left to its current trajectory, the structure would remain an eternal ruin. The recent ripples of ascension had stirred the geopolitical waters, but the high kingdoms had quickly patched the leaks, and the world was sliding dangerously back toward a suffocating, orderly peace.

Peace was his enemy. A tranquil Nana meant no chaos, no shifting landmasses, and no opportunity to complete his masterpiece. He needed a raging storm, and the secret to ascension was barely a drizzle.

To shatter the fragile peace, he needed to unleash the true, forbidden knowledge contained within these cursed pages, the secrets of mage tower construction. Releasing architectural blueprints that would fundamentally destabilize the high kingdoms, forcing them into a desperate, frantic arms race.

More importantly, he needed to break the spotlight currently locked on Tide.

Every move near the merchant god was scrutinized by the paranoid gaze of the world, making any direct interaction or hidden maneuver impossible. To slip these eyes and gain a meeting with Tide, the global eye had to be pulled away. He needed to ignite a world panic to draw eyes away from Tide and his action.

The ancient tome materialized heavily in his palm, and with a lazy flick of his hand, a vast cache of rare materials tore through dimensional folds, tumbling out to orbit his battered form like a constellation of debris.

His eyes ignited with a dim golden glow. The floating materials dissolved into molten threads of conceptual energy, rapidly weaving themselves together to fashion dozens of immaculate duplicate tomes. Simultaneously, lines of living, writhing text bled directly from the pages of the original book, transforming into golden streams of light that violently stamped themselves onto the newly forged volumes.

A sharp, unhinged cackle ripped from Tyrion’s throat, his laughter quickly devolving into the bubbling sound of a mind slowly snapping the rest of its tethers.

His gaze drifted out toward the looming mountain range, the tragic monument of his fallen peer, shaped like an accusing pair of stone eyes. For a fraction of a second, he saw his own pathetic reflection in that silent, staring facade. But he scoffed, his shoulders jerking violently as a manic defiance overrode his terror.

He refused to be just another forgotten landmark carved into the dirt. He would not be cast aside by Tide, ignored by the Sun Kingdom, or swallowed by the whims of the Origin Gods. He was going to carve his name so deeply into the foundation of Nana that history could never wash him away.

As the final streams of golden text finished stamping themselves into the last volume, dozens of forbidden tomes hovered in the dark room, pulsing with dangerous, latent power.

Tyrion slowly forced himself to his feet. His posture was no longer that of the proud, immaculate paragon he once was, he stood hunched and withered, his eyes wide, bloodshot, and swimming with a miss of fear and ecstatic, destructive anticipation.

It was his turn to play as the puppeteer and have everyone dancing in the palm of his hand. The question now was how to make sure these tomes made it way to the hands which it mattered to.

As he moved, Tyrion suddenly stopped. His eyes widening in horror as he stared at his own hand. "No, no, no!!" He muttered to himself as he held his head in clear panic.