Chapter 891: 891
This staggering sacrifice didn’t cause them to resent Ikenga. On the contrary, it made their reverence for him grow infinitely deeper. In just a few short decades after accepting his terms, these newly enlightened primates achieved the impossible, they built a fully functioning, sophisticated society and a thriving community right in the heart of the Spirit Realm.
For a beautiful, brief moment, they were finally living the exact lives they had spent millennia envying from afar. They built, they reasoned, and they organized just like the apelings.
But their joy was tragically short-lived.
While they possessed a plethora of memories, techniques, and advanced blueprints hardwired directly into their brains from the cursed fruits, they ran into a cruel paradox. They couldn’t use almost any of it. The memories flickering in their minds showed them a civilization where the apelings used mana for everything, from fueling grand engines and casting defensive wards to the simplest acts of daily survival.
Mana was the absolute constant in the everyday life of an apeling. It was so deeply integrated into their existence that the apeling clans had even figured out a perfect, cyclical way to give back to nature, ensuring that the ambient energy of the world was constantly replenished and could never be lost.
Now, the primates sat inside a treasure trove of inherited genius, possessing the complete knowledge of how to build a miraculous civilization, but completely lacking the spiritual fuel to turn the key.
To the current generation of primates, none of this inherited genius could be translated into actual practice. Because of this, their initial societal growth had been lightning-fast, exploding from primitive clusters into structured communities in a matter of years but the moment they tried to build beyond the basics, they hit a concrete wall.
They were forced to grope their way forward through the dark, dismantling the very knowledge wired into their brains. They had to strip away every layer of magical theory and try to rebuild a society using only the raw, physical materials available to them in the Spirit Realm.
It was a maddening, existential struggle. The concept of mana itself made absolutely no sense to their current biology. It was deeply weird and frustrating to them how a concept, blueprint, or medical technique that was so elegantly and easily explained through the manipulation of mana suddenly became a nonsensical, paradoxical mess the moment they tried to apply that exact same knowledge without it.
A simple blueprint for a heated structure, which an apeling could activate with a single rune tracing, required the primates to completely reinvent thermodynamics, combustion, and metallurgy from scratch just to achieve the same result.
Through this grueling, trial-by-fire existence, a profound revelation and a deep understanding finally dawned upon the primate scholars. They began to truly grasp what a civilization actually means for a living race.
They looked across the boundaries of the realms and studied the trajectory of other species. Take humans, for example. The human civilization didn’t just appear, it came as a direct result of humans systematically changing their surroundings to adapt to them. From the wild animals they domesticated to the untamed plants and raw seeds they cultivated, everything was reshaped through careful, generational manipulation until the world itself became a tool suited for human survival.
The memories in their brains confirmed that the apelings had started out the exact same way. At the very beginning, the apelings were just like the humans, stubbornly making and changing their immediate surroundings to force the environment to adapt to their needs.
But the apelings didn’t stop there. They grew so immensely powerful, so deeply attuned to the natural order, that the relationship inverted. They reached a tier of civilization where they began to consciously adapt themselves to the surroundings, going so far as to actively support, heal, and create for the nature around them. They engineered a beautiful, symbiotic loop where the race fed the world, and the world fed the race, both sides constantly pushing each other’s evolutionary growth to heights unimaginable to mortal men. This realization brought a bitter truth to light, these two crucial stages of civilization forcing the environment to adapt, or growing to symbiotically adapt to the environment were entirely out of their reach. The primates lacked both.
First and foremost, they were not natural, primordial residents of the Spirit Realm, they were migrants granted sanctuary. Because of this, they inherently lacked the fundamental, ethereal qualities that allowed true spirit creatures to naturally manipulate the fabric of this plane.
But the most devastating paradox lay in their biology. The Spirit Realm was an environment of pure, hyper-concentrated magic. Yet, by accepting Ikenga’s gift, the primates had been hardwired with an absolute, innate inability to sense or interact with mana. They didn’t just lack it, their bodies completely ignored its very existence.
In a physical world, a non-magical creature can still manipulate physical matter like stone and wood. But in the Spirit Realm, the environment is mostly energy. Because the primates were completely numb to mana, there was no evolutionary mechanism available to them where they could gradually adapt to the nature of the Spirit Realm over time. The environment couldn’t reshape them, and they couldn’t bond with it.
It was practically impossible for them to exert any meaningful physical or metaphysical influence over the Spirit Realm, or to truly master the immediate surroundings of their own territory. Every structure they built, every farm they attempted to cultivate, was a grueling battle against a realm that operated on a frequency they were fundamentally locked out of.
This suffocating stagnation gripped the primates until the sudden appearance of Ember, a master craftsman who was currently walking the path to becoming a literal God of Forgery.
To most smith in the world of Nana, a lack of mana was like a dead end. But to Ember, who is on his way to master the conceptual laws of forgery and creation, there was no limitation between creating with mana or in the absolute absence of it. In Ember’s eyes, mana wasn’t a mandatory requirement to make something function, it was simply an existing, external property that a smith could choose to harness to push their creation into the next level of the metaphysical. If you stripped mana away, the fundamental laws of structure, form, and purpose still remained.
The current state of the primates deeply intrigued him. When Ember first arrived in the Spirit Realm in his self finding journey, he chose to stay directly within their struggling communities. Watching these highly intelligent minds stumble and fail at the most basic physical tasks due to their mana-blindness stirred something inside him. He couldn’t just stand by and watch his ancestral kin suffer, so he quietly stepped in and began pointing a way out for them.
This hands-on guidance was how their strong relationship was built. Ember deliberately kept his true identity a secret, never mentioning that they shared the same bloodline or that he was the grandson of the very god they revered. Instead, he approached them purely as a traveling artisan, utterly fascinated by the unique challenge they presented "How do you create a thriving society when you are completely locked out of the world’s primary energy source?"
It was a riddle that pushed Ember’s own boundaries. He became so intensely invested in the problem that during his very first week in the Spirit Realm, he threw himself into a completely new forging process. By combining raw, physical elements with structural mechanics that didn’t rely on a single drop of magical fuel, he successfully crafted a miraculous mortal device.
This device required zero mana to operate, yet it allowed the completely numb and blind primates to clearly visualize the ambient mana drifting through the air around them. For the first time in centuries, the primates could look through Ember’s creation and actually see the flowing currents of the world they had been exiled from, a breakthrough that completely altered the trajectory of their civilization.
Sadly, Ember couldn’t stay forever to act as their permanent guide. He had his own path to chase, a relentless ascent toward godhood and he was so close he could reach out to it. But by giving them that initial sensing device, he had provided a spark. He gave them a tool to start somewhere, a way to map out the invisible walls of their world so they could finally begin engineering around them.
With that foundation laid, Ember shifted his focus entirely back to his true objective, building a grand mage tower.
Crafting a structure of this scale was a monumental process that went far beyond simple forgery. It was an act that bordered heavily on divinity itself, requiring a smith to anchor conceptual laws into physical architecture.
This monumental task tied directly back to his original, deeply personal reason for choosing the Spirit Realm as his forge. When Ember had first prepared to begin construction, the current leader of the primates, a venerable scholar carrying the weight of his fragile, mortal people had approached him. Recognizing the depth in Ember’s craft, the leader didn’t beg for more. Instead, he dropped to his knees and begged for a much simpler, more profound mercy, to let his people be a part of the forgery.
