The Guardian gods

Chapter 880

The Murmur of his past was a man who demanded absolute, trembling subjugation. He was a creature who actively wanted to be feared, and he would always take the necessary, violent steps to ensure that fear was planted deep into a person’s bones.

Years ago, even if Murmur claimed he had no interest in the throne, he would never have allowed Chen to sit above him. His father would have been the one lounging on the obsidian seat, while Chen himself would have been brought to his knees on the cold floor, his head bowed in absolute submission.

Yet now, Murmur just sat there, enduring a blade to his throat and a disrespectful dismissal from his son without so much as lifting a finger. The previous tyrant was acting like a patient spectator, and that realization sent a completely different kind of chill down Chen’s spine.

He had accepted the inevitable consequence of his outburst and was fully prepared for the violent correction to fall upon him. But it didn’t.

Part of Chen desperately wanted to believe that his newfound status as a Paragon was the anchor causing this shift. He wanted to think that his immense power, his control over an entire empire, and the grand law he now commanded had finally forced his father to view him as an equal or at least as someone too dangerous to carelessly strike.

But he knew the man. He knew the bottomless depths of the arrogance and strength commanded by Murmur. Deep down, Chen knew that simply being a Paragon wasn’t nearly enough to warrant this kind of radical, docile change in a tyrant.

It was profoundly strange. Chen was the one sitting high upon the throne. He was the one who seemed to command the tone in the room, threatening to call the guards and exposing a scandal. Yet, he never truly felt in control. Not for a single second.

His father. a being who historically sought to violently grasp all power, all secrets, and all leverage in his hands was now acting completely off-hand. He was practically handing autonomy and control back to Chen on a silver platter. But this passivity was precisely what made the situation a hundred times more terrifying and unbelievable than an outright attack. If Murmur wasn’t trying to rule through fear anymore, what horrifying game was he playing? What did he know that Chen didn’t?

The uncertainty was suffocating. It was exactly why Chen wanted to make his stance clear right now. He needed to build an unbreachable wall between them. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with the man, nothing to do with his unprompted charity, and nothing to do with whatever apocalyptic designs he had cooked up for Yuki and the rest of the world.

Murmur glanced at his son one last time, his dark eyes carrying an unreadable expression. He said nothing more. Without a sound, his figure simply dissolved, vanishing into the thin air so seamlessly that it made one question if he had ever truly been standing there at all.

The moment the suffocating pressure left the room, the dam broke. Chen collapsed slightly forward on his throne, breathing heavily as if he had just run a marathon. He gripped his chest, his fingers digging into the fabric over his pounding heart.

As he gasped for air, the memory of a tall, imposing figure flashed vividly in the back of his mind. He remembered the cryptic words that figure had once spoken to him, words Chen had brushed aside as meaningless gibberish at the time. But now, in the wake of Murmur’s bizarre, passive return, he could no longer help but entertain the random words spoke to him by the figure.

Meanwhile, deep beneath the bedrock of the imperial palace, a world completely hidden from the light of day thrived in the dark.

An immense, sprawling underground metropolis stretched out across the subterranean caverns. Living, working, and multiplying within this hidden city were countless alchemical creatures, monstrous, perfected biological weapons birthed from Murmur’s twisted genius. They were created to serve his grand purpose, functioning as his silent eyes and ears across the continent, ready to exert his absolute will and influence upon the world when the time was right.

Suddenly, as if sharing a single soul, every single creature in the metropolis froze mid-motion.

Thousands of glowing eyes snapped toward a single direction, the inner sanctum, the home of their maker. A collective, instinctual shiver ran through them. They all felt it. The bond had reawakened.

The Father of Monsters was back.

His presence was no longer a faint, distorted whisper echoing from some faraway, unknown place. He was here, physically and undeniably. The sheer weight of his aura flooded the subterranean metropolis, filling every cavern, tunnel, and grand hall with a heavy, suffocating gravity that belonged solely to their creator.

One by one, like a wave of falling dominoes, thousands of alchemical beings dropped to their knees. The rustle of scales, the click of armor, and the heavy thud of shifting limbs resonated through the dark as they bowed their heads toward the central spire.

Sitting upon his hidden underground throne, resting his chin casually on the back of his hand, Murmur looked utterly lost in thought.

The reason he had finally chosen to return after all this time was simple, he had successfully finished laying every necessary foundation for his future path. But most importantly, the chessboard had changed. Osita was now a lost presence in this world.

It wasn’t that Murmur had feared Osita’s raw power, rather, he had feared the man Osita had become. Clashing with the current Osita would never have yielded a favorable outcome. It would have been a waste of resources, a pyrrhic victory at best. The current Osita had many things to lose, and he would have gladly gone so far as to drag them both down into the abyss of death just to secure Murmur’s destruction.

Now, with that volatile obstacle removed from the equation, the path ahead was clear. The world was ripe for the next phase of his design.

Another crucial reason why he had chosen this exact moment to emerge from the shadows was the scent of the hunt. He was closing in on it. He was closer than he had ever been to finally unearthing this world’s greatest anomaly.

Two distinct figures briefly flashed across his mind. But the absolute second their features began to form, Murmur’s ironclad willpower conceptually slashed them away into nothingness. He could not afford to dwell on them. Both of those figures were no longer the weak, Origin Gods of the past. They had evolved, growing into entities so perceptive that the elaborate shielding he had woven over this underground metropolis might no longer keep them blind to his thoughts.

Even allowing their names to resonate within his conscious mind was a dangerous gamble, one he actively suppressed, wiping the linguistic traces from his active memory to ensure neither entity would detect a ripple of awareness.

Keles and Ikenga.

The only reason those two specific gods commanded his obsessive interest was because Murmur had spent the years of their absence quietly observing the world. He had watched the world play out while they were gone. He had carefully cataloged how the world was led under the stewardship of the remaining Origin Gods, scrutinizing every shift in power, every divine decree, and every action those lingering deities had taken. By studying the void Keles and Ikenga had left behind and the ripples their return would inevitably cause Murmur was piecing together the true, hidden mechanics of this world’s design.

And now, with the both of them back, he had watched closely as the world reshaped from their return. He could, of course, have taken the easy route and attributed this massive shift to whatever gains both gods had achieved during their journey to the Abyss.

But Murmur was no longer a lazy thinker. He knew it wasn’t that simple. It wasn’t just about the gains they had acquired, it was about the terrifyingly precise usage of those gains, and the meticulously controlled after-effects that rippled out afterward.

With the birth of Paragons, the world hadn’t evolved the way Murmur had originally calculated.

He had expected so much more after the birth of the Paragons. By his logic, the world should have dissolved into a massive, self-expanding web of conflict by now. The catalyst for this war was glaringly obvious, a ticking time bomb waiting to explode the moment the mortals realized a fundamental truth, "not all Paragons are equal"

Some Paragons possessed conceptual laws that granted them the destructive power to shatter a world. Others, however, were saddled with conceptual laws that held no offensive firepower, laws that served purely as support, utility, or minor manipulation. In the true hierarchy of power, a gap existed between them as wide as the ocean.

Yet, absurdly, the Paragons of this world were currently operating under the delusion of equality. They were cooperating, maintaining borders, and treating each other as peers of the same rank. To a man like Murmur, who understood that true power, who only knows subjugation or elimination, this artificial peace was a profound anomaly. Someone, or something, was suppressing the natural instinct of these paragons to tear each other apart for dominance.