I am Thalos, Odin's older brother

Chapter 505 505: Thalos from Earth

What is a god-king?

What is a God-Emperor?

Is the single-character difference merely because an emperor can command kings, wields greater power, holds broader worlds, and controls more elements?

Yes—and no!

Yes, because those are hard metrics. Without the resources, a so-called God-Emperor is just a self-styled gimmick.

And no, because an emperor has deeper benchmarks.

For example—the making of laws.

Some god-kings, even if they stockpile divine power all their lives and seize vast territories, still can't be called God-Emperors.

Thalos believes the chief reason is that they wield divine power by instinct, rather than defining laws themselves and using those laws to bind—and even break—every existence whose camp and will oppose theirs.

Take the former Sumerian god-king Enlil: even with his "achievements" of destroying humanity in his realm three times, Thalos doesn't think he ever had a shot at becoming a God-Emperor.

What Zeus was doing likewise fell under the eyes of the goddesses in Asgard's Golden Palace.

Most felt nothing—especially the goddesses of love and beauty from different worlds—seeing those mortal phantoms as a silly act.

Only Athena turned pale.

Just as Thalos suspected, Zeus was crafty.

Those figures didn't just look harmless; they spoke in regional dialects from all over Greece, thick local accents. Even if deities could understand them with the "universal language" art, Zeus's malice lay in stuffing those mortals with scores of sophists—a highly disruptive factor.

Such as Eubulides, famous for logical paradoxes, and Protagoras with his "win you pay by contract, lose you pay by judgment" dilemma.

If ordinary deities listened to those sophists, they'd sneer at the word games and miss Zeus's real kill-shot.

Mixed into the head-spinning sophistry were murmurs like, "If a single grain of rice makes no sound when it hits the ground, then a sack of rice dropped from the sky makes no sound," and "Heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones; falling speed is proportional to weight."

Frankly, those whisper-like lines were all too easy to overlook.

Without enough physics, there was no way to refute those errors on the spot.

Thalos dares say, 99.99% of god-kings in this chaotic cosmos would get snagged.

Being unlettered is terrifying.

And the price of getting snagged was—law inversion.

Zeus was very, very clever.

He knew full well that with the Greek world smaller than Ginnungagap, no matter how he marshaled elements he couldn't beat Thalos. So he used the \\[All Things] office to draw conjectures about laws—and paradoxes—from a host of sharp Greek sages.

Archimedes, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates…

Those mortal prodigies grasped laws that even Zeus—the titan-blooded God-Emperor—hadn't. If they could have drawn god-force, each would have been at least proper-god tier.

Alas, Zeus, whose \\[Authority] office was anchored in bloodline, would never deify them.

That didn't stop him from using them to set a trap for Thalos.

If Thalos didn't immediately answer those interference items seeping into Ginnungagap's laws via \\[Space], they would rewrite Ginnungagap's laws.

If Thalos weren't a traveler, if he didn't know the story of Galileo's falling-body experiment and thus ignored Aristotle's fallacy, the result would have been a skewed gravity in Ginnungagap.

Picture it: if Thalos, as a "water god," hurled a raging sea at Zeus only to find the water surged up and flew skyward the moment it appeared—what would that look like?

Or imagine scalding magma sweeping over him, only to find it down at a dozen degrees Fahrenheit—no different from a mud bath?

The most direct result of law-chaos would be a total scramble of elemental attacks and damage.

Muddy the water and throw the fight into disorder—that was Zeus's grand conspiracy.

Luckily…

"Zeus, here's a little secret: I'm Thalos! Thalos from Earth!"

"Hm?" Thalos's words were so out of left field that Zeus froze.

Huh? Wasn't Thalos Borson the God-Emperor from Ginnungagap?

As Zeus stared, Thalos kept hurling World-Swords at the Greek elements Zeus was piping across space, while his divine mind fired off replies at speed.

To the rice-grain sophistry,

Thalos answered: "A grain's sound is tiny, not inaudible. Human hearing spans from low to high frequencies across…"

To the gravity fallacy,

He answered: "Gravitational acceleration is…"

Every inference and physical law about the world that Zeus had scraped from those Greek sages via \\[All Things]—Thalos answered, one by one.

Not only more precisely than those Greeks, but building further on their theories—so much so that the Zeus who'd "copied problems to stump his foe" felt a sudden enlightenment, a stirring of "Ah! So that's how world laws work!"

If this weren't a God-Emperor duel to decide rank and life and death, Zeus would have had the urge to ask Thalos how to establish and amend world laws.

Too bad—it was far too late.

Zeus was brilliant—and not brilliant enough.

If he hadn't been used to leaning on his titan-born gifts, if he hadn't spent his days philandering instead of working, he might have absorbed more knowledge and grasped laws more deeply.

For a true sage, even a spark of insight can spur the mind to perfect a whole system.

Clearly, Zeus wasn't that supremely clever sort.

His God-Emperor arrogance made him miss the chance to seize the true meaning of world laws.

His habitual thinking wouldn't change, dooming him to miss the last chance to win.

Unable to modify Ginnungagap's laws, he was back on the old road of elemental attrition.

The Greek world was already smaller than Ginnungagap; even with \\[Space], even borrowing the famed Leviathan from Poseidon to thrust its fearsome, iron-hard claws and tendrils across the void, hoping to slap them right into Thalos's face—how could Thalos ever allow it?

One second, a Leviathan tentacle bridged thousands of miles of space and popped up two hundred yards before Thalos.

The next, Leviathan shrieked—because its tendril hadn't poked Thalos's divine shield at all, but straight into Muspelheim's ever-living volcano, turning into grilled octopus tentacle.

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