This work presents a structural reinterpretation of prime numbers based on a simple but fundamental shift in perspective: multiplication is not treated as a generative operation, but as a process of coverage acting on an additively growing number space. Building on previous work introducing prime numbers as structural consequences of a globally dependent number space, this paper provides the first explicit mechanistic formulation of this idea. Each prime contributes to the progressive coverage of the number space, but only with respect to the remaining uncovered subset. A key result is that any finite multiplicative coverage leaves a strictly positive residual structure, expressed as a product over all contributing primes. This residual structure cannot be eliminated by any finite extension of the process, making the emergence of new primes unavoidable. In this view, prime numbers are not defined by divisibility, but arise as necessary fixed points of an irreducibly incomplete multiplicative structure. Their infinitude follows directly from the impossibility of exhausting an additively generated space through finite multiplicative coverage. This paper is not concerned with faster prime computation, but with explaining why prime numbers must exist at all.
Karl Jochen Heinz (2026) studied this question.