Chapter 890: 890
Lunara’s only true regret in all of this was her brother, Wulv, and his chilling detachment. Every single letter they had exchanged since her marriage had been utterly hollow, nothing productive, no warmth, and no familial guidance. Wulv had truly washed his hands of her, leaving her entirely to her own devices to sink or swim in the political currents of the south.
For her entire life, she had craved this exact independence. She had wanted nothing more than to step out from beneath his massive, suffocating shadow and prove she could be her own person. But now that independence was being handed to her on a silver platter, it didn’t feel like a victory. It felt like isolation. She realized, with a heavy heart, that no matter how self-sufficient she wanted to be, his brotherly support was something she would always need and appreciate.
Reality was dealing her a harsh lesson, not every idealized thought or noble intention works out the way one envisions it. She had arrived in the Silver Kingdom with grand, sweeping plans for her people and her future, but she hadn’t even been able to scratch the surface of those ambitions. Instead, before the war could even truly begin, she found herself trapped in a suffocating, silent struggle with her own husband’s brother.
While the grand powers of Nana were locked in their silent political dances and escalating border conflicts, Ember was operating on a completely different scale. He had spent months quietly slipping through the cracks of the world, gathering the rare, foundational materials he required and now, his monumental task was finally complete.
He had even managed to attend Lunara’s high-profile wedding, stayed long enough to leave her a gift before vanishing back into the shadows.
His incredible speed and efficiency across the continents were thanks to one massive stroke of luck, his discovery of the Spirit Realm.
The Spirit Realm existed as a shifting, ethereal mirror to Nana, where the conventional laws of distance and time bent under the weight of it’s existence. Ember couldn’t navigate its pathways on his own, nor did he have permanent access to it. Instead, he relied on a deep bond he had forged with the native resident of that realm.
This spirit friend acted as Ember’s personal waypoint. Whenever Ember finished a harvest on one side of Nana, his guide would manifest, pull him into the safety of the Spirit Realm, and tear open a precise, localized pathway directly to his next global destination. That was how he had managed to scour continent after continent in record time, completely bypassing the blockades and sight of paragons.
Now, the long search is over. Ember stepped through the opened portal and returned to his temporary residence hidden deep within the mist-shrouded expanse of the Spirit Realm.
Arranged neatly before him on a massive stone dais were the ten major components needed to craft a legendary tower. Each component thrummed with a terrifying, latent power, vibrating in strong resonance with one another.
Clearly, his grandfather and the other origin gods were working incredibly hard on their end, keeping every single promise of their deal while the mortal world slid toward chaos. Under normal circumstances, an artisan of Ember’s caliber would have immediately returned to the familiar fires of his own grand forge to begin a creation of this magnitude.
But this time, he had a deeply personal, special reason to stay right here in the Spirit Realm.
Scattered throughout this plane were residents who looked, breathed, and vibrated with a spiritual frequency that pulled violently at Ember’s memories. They reminded him starkly of a distant past, a time before kingdoms, power system, and wars, when the world was vast and simple, and it was just him and his father.
In truth, these resisdents were once his direct relatives. They shared the exact same roots. It was just that Ember and his father had outgrown them. His father direct lineage had evolved at a terrifying, explosive pace, breaking through ancestral limits while the rest of their kin couldn’t keep up.
Ember vividly remembered the day his father had come to him to deliver the news to him. His father had informed him that a new home had finally been secured for those left behind, a sanctuary tucked away from the harsh laws of the physical universe.
The Spirit Realm was that very sanctuary. It was a place purposefully chosen so that their left-behind kin would have a safe environment to endure a completely different kind of change and hopefully evolve.
These were the primates. It was from this very ancestral line that his grandfather, Ikenga, had chosen his grandmother, the one who gave birth to his father. And it was from this same root that his father had later found his own mother, the woman who birthed Ember himself.
But the primates dwelling within the Spirit Realm today were fundamentally different from the creatures of his memories.
Ember could hardly believe his eyes. Looking at them now, they were so radically transformed that he would have never recognized them if not for Brix and Aqua. The two elemental spirits had patiently laid out the entire historical gap, drawing the full picture for him piece by piece until the truth finally clicked.
According to Brix and Aqua, a deep, generational sorrow had gripped the primates after Ikem’s lineage grew. In that distant past, they had wept with regret for not evolving fast enough to keep pace with the apelings, the hyper-evolved offshoot that had risen directly from them to become kingdm builders.
The weight of being left behind was so heavy that they had collectively cried out, begging for the attention of his grandfather Ikenga. Against all odds, their raw, desperate prayers actually reached him.
They had begged for a genuine opportunity to change. An opportunity to push past their stagnation, to evolve, and to finally become like the apelings. They wanted the chance to build their own functioning society, to establish their own laws, and to forge a thriving kingdom of their own and leave their mark in this world.
Their prayers were answered, but such a profound shift always demands a price. In exchange for the opportunity to evolve, they completely lost their innate, natural ability to sense or channel raw mana. They were rendered entirely hollow to the energy of the world.
Furthermore, because they so desperately desired to mirror the apelings, Ikenga tied their ascension to a poetic ritual. He decreed that their moment of true evolution would only occur if they managed to find their way into his realm and locate the Cursed Tree.
This Cursed Tree bored a kind of fruit, each one birthed exclusively from the death of a cursed member of the apeling clan. Encapsulated within a single fruit was the entire lifetime of memories, triumphs, and agonizing experiences of the dead apeling.
For genuine intelligence and evolution to awaken within a primate, they had to pluck and consume one of these fruits and they had to survive it.
The process was an absolute mental battlefield. The sheer influx of a dead apeling’s entire life would immediately attempt to erode and overwrite the primate’s primitive mind. Only if the primate possessed a soul resilient enough to anchor its own identity, refusing to be consumed by the ghost of the dead, would they emerge victorious. Only then would they acquire the gift to truly evolve, inheriting the vast intelligence, language, and ancestral experiences locked inside the fruit to form the bedrock of their new lives.
This was a hidden history, a race entirely unknown to the wider world of Nana. Yet, over the centuries, a steady trickle of these determined primates had successfully navigated the path to Ikenga’s realm. They braved the Cursed Tree, consumed the fruits of the dead, survived the mental erosion, and evolved.
But as they stepped into their hard-won intelligence, they slammed directly into a devastating stumbling block, the true weight of the price they had paid.
Being completely denied the gift of mana in a world that literally breathes, exudes, and operates on mana was a foundational tragedy that few other races could ever comprehend.
In the ancient past, before their desperate prayer, the primates belonged to the proud lineage of the magical beast race. This meant that, like all magical beasts, they were born inherently blessed with mana. It was woven into their very muscle and bone, granting them a vast array of unique elemental gifts and supernatural abilities. Ember’s own mother, for instance, had been a majestic primate female capable of effortlessly manipulating flames.
But by accepting Grandfather Ikenga’s gift of evolution, that connection to mana was cleanly severed.
They had traded their raw, primal magic for an apeling’s intellect. In doing so, they lost all access to their innate elemental gifts. Worse still, they stripped themselves of the immensely long, centuries-spanning lifespans that naturally came with being a high-tier magical beast. They had gained the capacity to build a kingdom, but they had to do it within the fragile, fleeting window of a mortal lifespan, surrounded by a world of magic they could see but never touch.
