"I now officially abdicate the throne to my son, the Crown Prince," Nwadiebeube declared, turning his golden gaze toward the shadows where his children stood. "He will step into the light as the new leader of this kingdom, guiding our people toward an era of unprecedented prosperity, even as I set out on the sacred path to ensure the swift arrival of our salvation."

A blinding, golden halo materialized behind his head, casting an ethereal, almost suffocating radiance across the ruined hall. He was leaving them with one final testament. His words were a roaring decree to his people, but they were also a defiant challenge aimed directly at another great being, the hidden entity whose unseen eyes were locked entirely upon him.

"The great gods look down upon us from their distant heights and wish to scatter us to the winds," Nwadiebeube’s voice boomed, carrying a weight that felt heavy enough to crush the earth. "They want to tear what is rightfully ours from our very hands. But the God of the Absolute Standard has answered my deepest plea. He has placed a sacred, unyielding hunger within my soul, a physical weight that refuses to let go.

"I look upon this city, upon these vast fields, upon every single one of your mortal lives, and I say this to you now. You belong to the Standard. You belong to me. And what belongs to the Lion can never be stolen. The false gods claim this path is a curse. They call it a dark, suffocating weight. But I tell you, it is the absolute lock upon our gates! I will hold onto this kingdom with a grip so dense, so terrifyingly tight, that the world itself cannot pry you away from my shadow!"

As the final, thunderous word left his lips, the massive glowing projections abruptly vanished, cutting out all at once. The skies cleared, leaving the entire kingdom plunged into a profound, stunned silence at the gravity of what they had just witnessed.

Deep within the expanses of his realm, Ikenga fell into a sudden, roaring fit of laughter. The sheer, unadulterated joy vibrating from his form was so potent that every resident across his divine domain felt it ripple through their very essence. Yet within that echoing laughter was an mocking laughter.

The moment Nwadiebeube had uttered his final, defiant words to the mortal realm, Ikenga had felt a sudden shift.

Deep within the king’s soul, the specific curse Ikenga had woven there began to stir. It was a curse designed to punish the king for his stealing, a blight meant to relentlessly fan the flames of the king’s deepest insecurities, amplifying his terror of loss and forcing Nwadiebeube into a state of extreme, paranoid possessiveness over everything he claimed to own. It was supposed to lead to him, to a localized madness that would rot his rule from the inside out.

Yet, the moment the golden king began to speak, Ikenga’s amusement turned into deep fascination. Through the tether of his divinity, Ikenga witnessed Nwadiebeube brave act, the mortal was actively attempting to overwrite the structure of the curse, twisting its very nature to serve his own path toward ascension.

The curse of absolute greed was to be the king’s insurmountable obstacle, a heavy chain dragging him away from divine status. But in that final, critical moment, Nwadiebeube had brilliantly spun the narrative. By declaring himself a devoted guardian willing to hold his people with a "grip so dense," he was recontextualizing his forced, cursed obsession.

He was rewriting his own madness. In the eyes of his people and the laws of his coming divinity, his grotesque greed would no longer look like a curse. It would look like the ultimate, self-sacrificing protection of a god.

The sheer audacity of the king’s countermove filled Ikenga with great amusement. Aside from the entities like the Arch Curses, few truly understood the dual nature of curses. From a superficial perspective, a curse seemed purely destructiveru, a ruining affliction. But if a soul possessed the sheer willpower to steer it correctly, as the golden king had just done, a curse could become one’s own power.

Yet, slowly, the wide smile faded from Ikenga’s divine face.

Amused as he was, he knew the reality of the situation. He knew the unimaginable agony and psychological torture Nwadiebeube was currently enduring. A curse born from Ikenga’s own essence was a volatile thing, it was never meant to be overwritten, and it did not yield without a fight.

Losing his Queen had been the absolute breaking point for the mortal king. During that sudden moment of crushing vulnerability, the curse of paranoid obsession had surged, nearly consuming him entirely. Nwadiebeube had stood on the very precipice of losing his humanity, inches away from degenerating into a mindless, cursed abomination driven only by loss.

But a fierce, unyielding core within the king had refused to break, his towering ambition. It was the part of him that dreamed of expanding his kingdom into a continent-spanning empire, the part that dared to reach for absolute godhood.

That boundless ambition stood like a fortress against the tide of madness, anchoring his mind even as the terror of losing what belonged to him tore at his psyche. Because of that grand vision, he had managed to preserve his sanity.

But survival demanded a devastating price. With every passing second, Nwadiebeube’s soul was trapped in a state of eternal torment, a burning agonizing pressure screaming at him to hunt down, rip back, and reclaim the piece of himself that had been stolen.

Amusing as the mortal king’s struggles were, Ikenga had far serious matters to attend to. He had a new piece to introduce to the board, an act once executed, would plunge the mortal world into an even deeper, more catastrophic conflict.

From the massive branch where he rested, the scenery fractured and shifted. It was as if a Chapter of the world had been flipped in an instant. One moment he was lying peacefully in the boughs of the great tree, with Boros sleeping soundly nearby; the next, he stood upon the surface of the new moon within his domain.

Towering over the lunar landscape was a massive structure, the mage tower he had won as a prize from his battle with the goblin mage Vellok.

During his journey with Keles, they had managed to secure four distinct treasures from that fallen civilization. The key to the cosmos, the emperor’s mage tower, the knowledge of how Paragons are truly birthed, and lastly, the blueprint to the advanced technological systems of the goblin world.

Among these great gifts, only two had actively been introduced to alter the course of this world. Now, the time had finally come for the tower to serve its purpose.

Ikenga stared up at the monolith, a smile touching his lips. Initially, he had been tempted to share the secrets of this tower with the Oracle. But that was before he truly understood the nature of his newborn son.

Giving such a weapon to the Oracle would have been a waste of a good catalyst. Now this tower belonged somewhere it could breed a beautiful, unmitigated chaos.

Once he grasped his son’s true nature, Ikenga had refrained from handing over the prize, keeping it locked away within his personal vault. He knew the world was not yet ripe for its awakening.

But now, the board had changed. The inevitable, grinding clash between Osita and Princess Nwadimma provided the perfect stage for the concept of the Mage Tower to make its debut.

During his time disrupting the goblin world, what had truly fascinated Ikenga about their spellcasters was their absolute reliance on these structures. A Mage Tower was far more than a mere building of stone and mortar, it was a cosmic artifact. It functioned simultaneously as a sanctuary, an advanced research facility, and a massive, localized battery for a mage’s essence. Most importantly, it was the definitive catalyst that enabled the goblin mages to project the absolute, unfiltered power of their Conceptual Laws into reality.

It was a terrifyingly efficient system and one that Ikenga himself had found deeply troubling dealing with them.

Engaging in a prolonged conflict in a foreign universe, entirely cut off from the direct tether of his own divine realm, was a losing battle. Without a localized anchor of power, even a god could be drained. The goblins had solved that vulnerability with their towers, and now, Ikenga was ready to see how this world would unravel once they possessed the same edge.

It was no surprise to Ikenga that Osita already knew about the mechanics of a Mage Tower. The former king knew and managed to craft and build one for himself in secret. That hidden anchor was the exact reason he had been able to effortlessly overpower Princess Nwadimma during their recent clash, even as the battle concluded, Osita’s reserve was still strong and quickly recovering, while the princess was entirely incapacitated, her reserves completely drained of mana.