He turned his gaze back to Ember, his eyes reflecting the world they stood on. "This moon is my artifact. The nature I helped birth became my ultimate battery, ensuring I always had the pool of energy I needed when waging war against the mages."

He paused, letting the weight of the lesson sink into the boy’s mind, making him truly understand, a physical, crafted artifact means nothing to an Origin God, for they themselves are the ultimate source of creation.

This revelation shattered Ember’s old perspective. The sheer scale of the concept left the boy completely paralyzed in thought. For days, he stood frozen, trapped in deep contemplation, until he finally snapped out of his trance. When his eyes focused once more, he saw Ikenga quietly studying the architecture of the Mage Tower. Now that Ember truly understood what a divine artifact could be, he realized what the tower represented and he immediately asked to be a part of the study.

However, time was against them. Due to the absolute laws of Ikenga’s domain, Ember could not remain here indefinitely. If he stayed too long, the domain would begin to assimilate his essence, recognizing him as a permanent fixture of its reality, which would make it nearly impossible for him to ever leave. Thus, they both knew his stay would be brief before he would have to return to the safety of the spirit realm.

Ember’s ultimate ambition was to become the "God of Forging." Seeing the boy’s profound interest and unique perspective, Ikenga envisioned a new path for his own plans. It was precisely for this reason that he granted his grandson permission to study the tower alongside him.

The decision was already paying off. As they worked, a faint, undeniable trace of true divinity began to leak from the boy’s aura. Ember no longer needed to search blindly, he only needed to keep walking this exact path to finally achieve his ascension.

While Ikenga initially found the alien structure difficult to comprehend, the boy was actually faring much better than him. Ember possessed a natural intuition for the physical layout, yet there was still a fundamental layer of the tower, an esoteric depth that he could not grasp. It was a threshold that only Ikenga could cross.

"Let’s begin," Ikenga said.

As the words left his mouth, two additional golden arms erupted from his back, shifting him into a form ready for complex labor. At the exact same moment, a surge of hyper-awareness and absolute insight flooded his mind as he triggered Oracle’s gift.

With the gift active, the hidden schematics of the tower laid themselves bare. Yet, understanding the architecture was only half the battle, actually replicating it was another matter entirely. The materials originally used to construct these ancient spires were completely alien, forged from substances never before seen in this world.

It made perfect sense. The unknown Mage Civilization had built these structures using resources native to their own reality. For Ikenga and Ember to achieve the same feat, they couldn’t simply copy the recipe. They would have to scour their own world to find local materials that, while fundamentally different in composition, shared the exact, strict magical and physical properties required to anchor a Mage Tower.

In one of Ikenga’s golden hands rested a shifting, glowing globe of the entire world of Nana. In another hand, he manifested a flawless replica of the alien material taken from the Mage Tower.

With his omniscience, every hidden corner and deep secret of Nana was instantly reflected upon the surface of the miniature globe. As his hyper-awareness dissected and analyzed the alien replica down to its base components, his divinity over nature stirred. He reached out to the world itself, and the world began to send feedback directly to him, whispering secrets of where a viable substitute with the exact same elemental properties could be found within their own realm. Each potential local match was instantly cross-examined and broken down to ensure it possessed the necessary magical signatures. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

Meanwhile, Ember stood at the side, a massive map of the world laid out before him. The moment Ikenga’s mind located a resource, the miniature globe in his golden hand would shift, rotating rapidly to project the exact geographical coordinates of the deposit. Ember’s job was to instantly mark these locations down.

The process was quick. It took every ounce of focus and energy Ember possessed just to keep up with his grandfather and that was with Ikenga actively pausing his mind and slowing his pace so the boy wouldn’t be overwhelmed.

Ikenga and Ember were far from the only ones poured into this monumental task. Across the realm, all the Origin Gods were fundamentally linked, their consciousnesses intertwined as they performed different rapid analysis within their own domains.

Despite scanning every corner of Nana, they had realized that while their world possessed suitable matches for the standard components, there were certain highly specialized, exotic materials that simply did not exist within their world.

Faced with this roadblock, Ikenga proposed a bold alternative, if the world could not provide the materials, they would have to create it themselves.

His siblings, liking the idea, immediately voiced their support for the plan. What followed was a breathtaking spectacle of raw creation. Across the expanse of Nana’s domain, all five Origin Gods began colliding pure elements directly into one another.

As the fundamental forces clashed and ruptured, the gods watched the violent interactions with absolute focus, subtly steering the chaotic energy to bind, compress, and stabilize into the exact materials they required. It was an incredibly exhausting and delicate task, pushing them to their absolute limits, as fabricating entirely new matter from scratch lay completely outside the comfort zone of their specific divinities.

It was a rare event for them, as they rarely had a reason to interact so directly with base mana and the raw, natural elements in this manner. Yet, despite the immense strain, a profound sense of satisfaction filled them as in this crucible of forced creation, each Origin God was learning and evolving, expanding their own understanding of their individual divinities.

It was almost unbelievable to them that a mortal construct like a Mage Tower could teach them anything at all. For years, there were very few things that could actually challenge or push the Origin Gods to expand their horizons.

This realization struck them with a profound sense of awe for the Mage Civilization that had birthed these magnificent structures. Looking at the sheer mathematical and magical sophistication of the spires, the gods could see clearly how far their own world’s civilization lagged behind.

Rather than discouraging them, this humility ignited a fierce, burning eagerness for the wider cosmos and whatever lay waiting in the stars. Somewhere out there, hidden in the dark fabric of the universe, there had to be other civilizations capable of pushing them to their absolute limits and the thought of it thrilled them.

Down on the moon’s surface, the blistering pace of both Ember and Ikenga finally began to slow. The quick blurring of their movements ground to a halt as their monumental task neared its end. Every single naturally occurring material on Nana had been successfully located, cross-referenced, and meticulously mapped out. Except for the specialized components that the five siblings still needed to forge from raw elements, this foundational phase of the project was finally complete.

When it came to the literal heartbeat of the Mage Towers, the pulsating core that gave them life. Ikenga and his siblings had hit a wall on that. They discovered that this core was something even they, with all their collective divinity, could not create from scratch. The true source of a tower’s heartbeat originated from an entity with the same primordial status as the Abyss itself "The Elemental Plane"

This ancient plane had been mentioned to them only once before by their mother. It was a foundational realm of creation so volatile and fundamental that even their status as Origin Gods guaranteed them absolutely no easy acces to it.

Yet, against all these odds, the Mage Civilization had somehow found a way to bridge the gap, establishing a direct conduit to that realm to siphon the cores needed for their towers. As Ikenga used his hyper-awareness to peer deeper into the structure, dissecting the ancient runes and the scribblings carved into the tower’s foundation, he noticed it wasn’t as simple as it seems.

The mages hadn’t made a peaceful pact, nor had they been granted entry. They had violently forced their contact with the Elemental Plane, tearing open a gateway through sheer, audacious arcane will.

Mana, as Ikenga was beginning to truly comprehend, was not a primary force of nature, but rather the residual trace left behind when the four fundamental elements naturally coexisted and interacted with one another.

It was incredibly similar to the process he and his siblings were currently attempting by forcing the elements to collide, with one critical flaw, no actual mana was being born from their action.