Chapter 892: 892
The leader pleaded for the primates to act as Ember’s assistants, to carry the metals, stoke the mundane fires, and simply watch the creation of the tower unfold. Even if their mana-blind minds couldn’t fully comprehend the metaphysical laws Ember was weaving, they desperately wanted to bear witness to the birth of a miracle, hoping to catch even a fraction of a lesson that could help their race move forward.
Seeing his own ancestral kin display such an unyielding, desperate hunger to learn and evolve, despite all the odds stacked against them moved Ember to his very core. The sheer spirit of the primates broke through his usual stoic craftsman demeanor. Stirred by a profound sense of pride and pity for his lineage, Ember made his choice. He stayed, opening his forge to the blind primates and allowing them to become the hands that would help build his masterpiece.
After Ember granted them permission to join his forge, that initial wave of euphoric gratitude vanished almost instantly, replaced by a harsh, suffocating reality.
Ember had no intention of being a traditional teacher. The moment he stepped up to his anvil, his focus shattered away from the world around him and locked entirely onto his craft. He fell into a deep, consuming trance of creation, his eyes reflecting nothing but the raw, conceptual laws he was weaving. To him, the primates simply existed in the periphery of his vision. He paid them no more attention than the stones beneath his feet.
For the first few weeks, the primate scholars stood respectfully along the edges of the cavernous chamber, desperately trying to learn. But they couldn’t grasp a single thing. When Ember raised his hammer, he wasn’t just striking metal, he was manipulating invisible ley lines of mana, bending metaphysical laws, and channeling raw spiritual frequencies. To the mana-blind primates, it just looked like a silent man swinging a hammer over air that occasionally rippled.
Worse than the confusion was the physical toll. The ambient heat radiating from Ember’s forge was oppressive. It scorched their skin, parched their throats, and filled the cavern with a heavy, suffocating pressure that forced them to constantly step back just to breathe. For an entire month, they stood there in agonizing silence, watching him work in a language they couldn’t speak, achieving absolutely nothing.
Then, everything clicked.
It happened during a brief moment when Ember stepped away from his main anvil to retrieve a cooling agent. One of the younger primate scholars, thoroughly exhausted and frustrated by the blinding glare of the forge, noticed the crude mortal device Ember had crafted during his first week. Impelled by a desperate curiosity, the scholar picked up the heavy brass-and-iron casing, held the glass lens to his eye, and looked toward the forge.
It opened up a whole new world.
Through the lens, the empty air around Ember’s anvil wasn’t empty at all. It was a roaring, tempestuous storm of colors. The scholar gasped, nearly dropping the device. He saw massive, swirling vortexes of ambient mana being forcefully dragged into the metal with every strike of Ember’s hammer. The lens transformed Ember’s abstract magic into something observable, measurable, and real.
The very next day, the primates vanished from Ember’s forge. They didn’t return for weeks.
They retreated into the depths of their own settlement, completely obsessed. They began to systematically dissect and reverse-engineer the internal components of the mortal craft Ember had left behind, mapping out its geometry and the exact curvature of its glass lenses. Once they understood how the device functioned, a small expedition of scholars set out on a grueling journey through the uncharted regions of the Spirit Realm. Their goal was simple, find the exact same metals, ores, and crystal veins Ember had used to build the object so they could replicate it.
But their journey bore no fruit. No matter how deep they dug or how far they traveled across the misty steppes of the realm, they couldn’t find a single trace of the materials.
What they didn’t realize was that the materials Ember used weren’t native to the Spirit Realm at all. They were rare, exotic ores he had carried with him in his personal storage from his journeys across the continents of Nana.
Realizing they had hit an absolute dead end on their own, the primate scholars swallowed their pride. Driven by a burning, unyielding hunger for this new understanding, they seeked Ember out once again. They approached the edge of his radiating forge, bowed low, and through their leader, asked a single, desperate question "How had he come about those materials, and how could a race without magic ever hope to find or forge them?"
Ember’s lips curved into a rare, genuine smile. Seeing them return with soot on their faces and a burning question in their eyes pleased him deeply, they were finally asking the right questions. They were no longer looking at the world as a magical background they were excluded from, but as a depository of raw, physical elements waiting to be harvested.
When they asked where the materials could be found, Ember looked down at them and asked a heavy, life-altering question "Are you ready to leave the safety of the Spirit Realm and explore the outside world?"
That question sent a shock through the primate community. For centuries, they had stayed tucked away in this ethereal sanctuary, terrified of a physical world that ran on a power they couldn’t touch. It took a whole week of intense, agonizing discussion among the elders, scholars, and youth to finally come to a consensus. The fear of the unknown was suffocating, but their hunger for evolution and progress was stronger. They agreed to leave.
Once the choice was made, Ember didn’t send them out blind. He reached into his robes and pulled out a map of his own making, though calling it a map was an understatement. It was a miniature artifact spirit, a living piece of forge-craft that thrummed with a soft, guiding light.
"Ember’s Cartographic Artifact Spirit" A dynamic, living archive that charts every mine, vein, and exotic material deposit Ember explored across the continents of Nana. More than a guide to locations, it projects insights directly into the mind, explaining exactly what each material is, its physical tolerances, and what it can be mechanically used for.
The primates were profoundly grateful, weeping at the magnitude of the gift. But knowing from Ember that the physical realm of Nana was currently locked in brutal wars and filled with dangerous beasts, they knew they couldn’t just walk out unprotected. They needed a vanguard.
To secure their journey, the primate leaders seeked out their oldest and most trusted allies in the Spirit Realm "The Children of Wardenwild"
These majestic deer spirits were rare, liminal beings capable of fluidly treading the boundaries between the Spirit Realm, the physical world, and the Underworld as they guided dead souls to their final rest. Because of their unique biology, they were completely unaffected by mortal blockades or physical terrain. If the primates were to explore the outside world, these deer spirits were the ultimate guardians.
It was a beautiful twist of fate, the very native resident who had befriended Ember and acted as his personal global waypoint across Nana was one of these prominent Wardenwild spirits.
Over the long, quiet centuries in the Spirit Realm, a deep and beautiful bond had formed between the primates and the deer spirits. Because the Children of Wardenwild traveled across all three realms of existence, they always returned with the grandest, most captivating stories of the cosmos. They loved nothing more than sharing these elaborate tales, and the primates would sit for hours under the silver mist, gazing up at the glowing starlight of their antlers with absolute awe and admiration.
Now, bound by centuries of shared stories and mutual respect, the primates won’t be stepping into the terrifying physical world alone. With Ember’s living map in their hands and the majestic deer spirits guarding their flanks, the very first industrial expeditionary force was ready to breach the veil of the Spirit Realm.
The journey to the mortal plane was a sobering baptism for this first generation of primate explorers.
The physical world of Nana was not an empty playground. Almost every fertile valley, mountain range, and sprawling coastline they needed to traverse was already claimed, either ruled by powerful human kingdoms, settled by dominant factions, or heavily populated by magical races. Because the primates were determined to keep their existence an absolute secret from the world, walking down established trade roads or entering mortal cities was out of the question. They had to avoid attention at all costs.
This meant their path of travel was restricted entirely to the unexplored spaces on the map, the uninhabited, undeveloped, and forgotten corners of the world.
By treading through these wild zones, the primates exposed themselves to a lot of dangers. They had to forge paths through suffocating swamps with carnivorous, toxic flora and navigate treacherous mountain passes populated by territorial magical beasts. For a race completely numb to mana, these environments were a living nightmare. They couldn’t sense a magical beast stalking them through the brush, nor could they detect the active mana-poisoning radiating from a beautiful, deceptive plant until it was too late.
