(6x13) The Children of Antiquity: Part 2, Episode 1
After the school of mages is established and largely self-sufficient in Tatia's hands, Keius turns his attention back to other matters that once preoccupied his mind, questions to which he has still never found answers after having been distracted with this whole "savior of the galaxy" / "messiah of the goddess" business, namely: what if any role is it that these nanites he has discovered, symbiotic on a cellular level to all life from Ehrba, have in the thus-far-unique development of sapient life on Ehrba?
To investigate this question, he returns, together with many of his old colleagues who once worked by his side, to the planet Asira where this all began, there to resume the research he was conducting before he was so rudely murdered by the rebel forces of the galactic civil war. Going beyond the mere study of the various nearly-sapient native life forms, Keius programs some nanites to make intelligent, goal-directed modifications to the genetic code of those, to see if the nanites are capable of creating sapience on demand, and thus if the Ehrban's own sapience might be an intentional creation of the Minded-Worlds.
After surprisingly little experimentation, Keius and his team are able to engineer not only one, but four different sapient species out of the various candidate species of Asira that they had already been studying. While the rest of the team are tasked with studying the extent of the sapience of those species, Keius is emboldened to try an even greater experiment: to see if the nanites can be programmed to take raw organic materials and build entirely new sapient life completely de novo, not based on any other pre-existing life form.