Chapter 894: 894
With a heavy, somber heart, the community called a grand council. The five scarred survivors of the first expedition were brought to the center of the settlement and asked to lay everything bare.
The elders demanded a meticulous breakdown of their journey. The five were asked to trace their exact routes on charcoal maps, describe every single geographic hazard they encountered, detail the behaviors of the intelligent beasts that had hunted them, and explain precisely what split-second decisions allowed them to escape with their lives.
They analyzed the behavior of the deer spirits, realizing that while the Children of Wardenwild wouldn’t fight, their pathing always followed the safest metaphysical ley lines. If the next batch of explorers could learn to read the subtle shifts in the deer spirits movements before an ambush occurred, they could pre-emptively retreat.
Any scrap of knowledge, no matter how trivial, was now a matter of life and death. The primates were no longer willing to blindly rushing into the dark, they were compiling the world’s first survival manual for non-magical beings, preparing the next batch of pioneers to march back into the brutal physical realm of Nana.
The five survivors spared no details, holding nothing back. As they spoke to the council, they highlighted a massive bottleneck that had plagued their first trip, their equipment and their own physical biology.
"Even when we found a rich vein of exotic iron, our tools were completely outdated," one survivor explained, holding up a chipped, blunted pickaxe. "We spent days chipping away at stone that should have taken hours. And frankly, we lacked the raw physical strength required to mine these deep-earth minerals efficiently without magic to soften the rock."
Furthermore, they pointed out the sheer logistics of transport. The first expedition had relied on primitive leather sacks and what little they could carry on their backs. The scholars back home had burned through those hard-won materials in a matter of weeks. If they wanted to build an actual civilization, they couldn’t rely on pockets full of rocks, they needed heavy-duty crates, secure bags, and rugged carriages capable of transporting tons of raw ore across unforgiving terrain.
This stark reality forced a massive cultural shift. Up until this point, every primate aspired to be a scholar, chasing pure wisdom and intellect. But the council realized their society, in its current fragile state, simply could not afford the luxury of having everyone chase knowledge.
To survive, they needed to fracture their workforce into distinct, specialized societal branches. The Scouts responsible for pathfinding & Reconnaissance, responsible for marching ahead of the main expeditionary force. Learn to read the subtle body language of the Children of Wardenwild to detect danger early and map out uninhabited terrain and safe extraction zones.
The Warriors responsible for defense & Escort, who will act as a physical shield for the miners and scholars with focus entirely on tactical coordination, physical endurance, and martial teamwork.
The Miners & Logisticians who will be responsible for resource extraction & transport, accompanied by newly developed heavy-duty transport carriages and durable storage systems. Innovate high-leverage mechanical tools like cranks, levers, and wedges to compensate for their lack of supernatural strength.
The council was brutally realistic about the Warriors limitations. They openly acknowledged that defeating magical creatures was an absolute impossibility at their current age of development. They had no illusions of grand heroism, their warriors should not be trained to slay dragons or hunt magical beasts. Their job was strictly to buy time, to hold a defensive line, create distractions, and absorb the impact of a strike just long enough for the scouts and logisticians to retreat back into the safety of the misty spirit veil.
Deep down in the silent depths of the Underworld, within the obsidian halls of her palace, Keles sat in quiet majesty. Her focus remained entirely dedicated to the functioning of her realm and the delicate sprouts of a new civilization beginning to take root within the realm of the dead.
Nearby, Ikenga was lounging completely sideways on a grand dais, exuding his usual casual, larger-than-life presence. Right beside him, his young son Ikelos was mimicry personified, laying sideways in the exact same position, his small face scrunched up in identical focus. Projected into the air before the father and son was a shimmering mirror, displaying the ongoing scenes of the Spirit Realm in vivid detail.
Watching the primates frantically map out blueprints, organize their new societal branches, and strap brass goggles to their faces brought a wide, proud smile to Ikenga’s face. For him, this sight was a relief. Finally, the very last gift from his journey with Keles had found a place where it truly belonged.
Originally, Ikenga had held a very different vision for their evolutionary path. He had wanted Oracle, the keeper of vast knowledge to be the one doing exactly what Ember was doing right now. He had hoped Oracle would act as their shepherd, sparking their intellect and guiding their technological ascent.
But Oracle, despite all these passing years, had shown absolutely no genuine interest in them. He had fulfilled his baseline duty, he had guided the primate lineage across the colossal branches of the Cursed Tree, Osisi, and led them directly to the destined fruit of knowledge that granted them their sapience. But once that was done, he stepped back.
Initially, Oracle had possessed a small flicker of interest in the primates potential. But the moment he realized their cognitive limitations, that the primates were entirely unable to give birth to truly new knowledge apart from the specific insights they had gained from consuming the fruit, he lost all interest in them. To Oracle’s hyper-intellectual, absolute mind, a race that could only replicate and never truly innovate on a grand scale was a dead end, unworthy of his tutelage. He had abandoned them to their fate.
But looking at the projection now, Ikenga’s smile only widened. Oracle had been wrong. The primates didn’t need a being of pure knowledge, they just needed a gritty god of creation. They needed Ember. By denying them magic, the world had forced them to innovate through sheer, desperate necessity and Ember’s forge was giving them the exact spark they needed step on their path.
Ikenga had always been a god who refused to force his children down paths they had no heart for. When Oracle turned his back on the primates, Ikenga made no comment and offered no reprimand. But that silent acceptance came with a condition, Ikenga deliberately withheld sharing the vast wealth of mechanical and technological knowledge he personally held in reserve. If his Oracle wouldn’t shepherd them, the knowledge would remain locked away until the world provided a true catalyst.
Now, Ember had stumbled upon this very path entirely on his own, and he was already playing his part flawlessly.
Ikenga chuckled, watching the shimmering projection. He was deeply amused by the pure, unadulterated passion driving the young smith. Ember was completely oblivious to the things he had set in motion, the boy had no idea that by simply indulging his love for craftsmanship, he was systematically gathering a fanatical, deeply grateful base of believers who would ultimately anchor and fuel his ascension to godhood.
This realization stirred a deep curiosity within Ikenga, the god of the curse. Because Ikenga was the direct source of the primates mana-blindness, a fascinating theological question presented itself to him. He wanted to see if the suppression caused by his curse would deny or alter the birth of faith energy when these creatures attempted to worship another deity.
Currently, Ikenga was the solitary god being revered by the primate civilization. Since the very moment intellect sparked within their minds, they had produced a stable, unwavering stream of faith energy for him. But Ikenga knew that might simply be a byproduct of his curse being woven into their very being, an involuntary tether of reverence to their predecessor.
Ember’s potential ascension was the perfect control variable for his new thought out experiment.
If Ember reached divinity, and these mana-dead primates successfully generated and transmitted pure faith energy to him. It would give Ikenga invaluable insight into how his own curse divinity interacted with the soul, and more importantly, shed light on the elusive nature of faith energy itself. After all, faith was a force existing completely outside the boundaries of mana, a loophole that Ikenga’s curse had never specifically targeted.
Ember’s steady, unyielding work at the forge was a spectacle Ikenga looked forward to with immense anticipation. The moment Ember ascended as a God of Forgery, the sudden emergence of mage towers would throw the entire mortal world into absolute disarray. And that chaos? It was exactly what Ikenga was waiting for, a perfect storm that would create ripe opportunities for him and his divine siblings to finally stretch their limbs.
As for the primates, their time would come. They still had a long, grueling road ahead of them before they could match the grand civilizations of Nana. But Ikenga already had his sights and plans for them. The locked-away archive of mechanical technology he possessed wasn’t going to be handed to the primates directly, instead, he was going to give it to Ember the exact moment the smith achieved ascension. Let the new god of creation deliver the fire of industry to his most faithful believers.
