The Birth of Ea

"Alright. Let's get started."

As if answering my words, the Book of Summoning fluttered open and began flipping through its pages. Beside it, the Book of Combination appeared of its own accord and settled into a waiting stance.

Flutter!

At the sudden arrival of the Book of Combination, the Book of Summoning started thrashing its pages with a hissing rustle, bristling like a cat with its fur on end.

I snatched the frantically flapping thing out of the air and turned it to the page I wanted. For a moment the paper went stiff, as if in protest—then it yielded at once and turned the rest of the way on its own.

"You need to learn to let things slide a little."

It wasn't as if the other book had done it on purpose, and for what was coming, cooperation between the two of them was non-negotiable. Linked through the Link, the Book of Summoning understood without another word. It grumbled, then displayed the list of available summons.

I'd already decided what I was taking, so there was no need for a long list. I confirmed only the entry I wanted and selected it.

Shrrrk!

Fish.

At a glance it looked so pathetic you had to wonder whether it could even function as a proper summon. From that category, I designated the expanded concept of Sea Beast.

Written as "beast of the sea," read as sea beast. But you had to be careful with the idea. If "sea beast" made you picture sharks, whales, and octopuses, you were already way off.

By this world's standards, sea beast was a blanket term for every monster that lived in the water. Magical power—that thoroughly insane force—had taken root even in wild animals. There was a reason words like spirit beast and divine beast existed. Just as we leveled up and acquired skills, they raised their stats and evolved the same way, and those special terms had settled into the language because of it.

Which meant this world's oceans were a minefield without visible mines—a lawless zone of a danger level beyond anything ordinary. Creatures steeped in mana had evolved to ignore the difference between fresh water and salt water entirely. That was why a pirarucu, a freshwater fish that by all rights should have been quietly living out its days in the Amazon, had not only taken to the sea but grown so massive people called it the second coming of Leviathan.

It had even picked up anaconda DNA from somewhere, evolving into something closer to a serpent than its original fish form. In Japan there was a legend that a carp that ascended became a dragon, so some ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠experts argued that influence was at work—while others got stuck on more fundamental questions like whether a pirarucu even counted as a carp. Papers had been written. I set all of that aside for now.

The point I wanted to make was this.

There was nothing more foolish than dragging the narrow thinking of a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠past life into a place overflowing with fantasy mechanics. It was the same as shrinking the possibilities that mana—that insane consumable—brought with it. Was that really helpful?

This was a different track from what I'd done with Shirogane Rui, reinterpreting magic through scientific reasoning. Here, you had to twist the foundation itself.

So what I was about to do was, in a sense, closer to creation than summoning.

The way I used to mash monsters together at random in comics and games until something I liked came out—I was going to summon the way you sketch the most ideal result you can imagine. Of course, something that could casually kill a god was obviously off the table, so I was approaching it with a little realism. Talking about realism in a fantasy world was funny enough on its own, but this was my reality now. I could sneer at it all I wanted; it wouldn't change a thing.

"Base form: crocodile."

Among all the things that flew and crawled, my reason for choosing a crocodile was simple. Its hunting method was the best fit for ambush.

My summons were all flashy by default—not the glittering kind of flashy, but the kind that drew the eye just by existing. The most understated of them had been Hive, and even that one had evolved through Conquest into something that stood out in a completely different way.

In that sense, not a single one of my summons was truly built for stealth and assassination.

The one I was making this time would fill that gap, and it was also heavily experimental. Until now, my summons had always felt like loading a base from a preset. Growth and successive evolutions changed them, but you could never quite erase the original feel. What I was doing now was fully custom from the ground up—designed and built by me from the start.

I'd thought that was impossible before. Using the Book of Combination this time had made it clear it wasn't entirely out of reach. Maybe my sub-class shifting to Investigator had been for this all along.

It was a first attempt, so there would be holes. Patching those was exactly what the Book of Summoning and the newly acquired Book of Investigation were for.

"Book of Investigation."

At my call, mana rose from my chest and a notebook roughly the size of a long wallet appeared. Bound in a dull yellow-brown cover like a detective's case journal, it opened at once and began taking notes on its own.

"Goblin."

Shhk, shhhk!

The notebook flipped rapidly, drinking in my mana. Once it passed a certain threshold, a page tore free and flew toward the frozen goblins around us. The torn scrap, looking like a shard of light, touched a goblin's body and vanished as if melting into snow. Moments later those same fragments returned as letters of light and sank back into the notebook.

As if its work were done, the notebook drifted up to my face. I caught it and checked the contents.

What was written there went far deeper than the goblin entry stored in the Book of Summoning. Precise numerical values, dietary habits, how they sourced the weapons they favored—everything I hadn't known about goblins was laid out in full.

I searched for the single passage I needed most. Reading my intent, the Book of Investigation immediately reorganized the text and displayed what I wanted.

Bingo.

Exactly the answer I'd expected.

Mana stones harvested from goblin-type creatures had long been the primary reagent for refining recovery consumables. That was why. As the Book of Investigation defined it, if you traced a goblin's lineage far enough back, you arrived near the earth spirits. The power they naturally carried was close to a spirit's—an aura of nature—which made their stones usable as potion materials.

Spirit stones were too expensive and too precious to burn as potion ingredients, so people had gone looking for a substitute. Goblin mana stones had turned out to be the perfect fit.

There was a reason a dried-up dungeon like the Goblin's Lair existed inside an academy that gathered only the elite. That place was money. Money. It was a kind of relief measure the academy offered so that students with no skill and no backing—but with grit—could still scrape by on their own. At the same time it restocked the infirmary's medicines, and it let the academy spot talent stubborn enough to endure any conditions through sheer spite and will. Two birds with one stone, from their perspective.

Of course, that also meant the competition for it was insane. Easy, simple, and the clear rewards paid real coin—ideal for pocket money. Without the kind of loophole I'd used, walking in during class hours, you'd normally be stuck staring down a packed schedule just to get a slot.

Back to the point. What I wanted was the mana the goblins carried.

The way shadow and fire sat in my own mana, they had earth mana. A meager fraction—less than a tenth—but it was definitely there. I intended to extract it cleanly.

A crocodile could only hunt with true stealth underwater, from beneath the surface. On land, a crocodile was nothing more and nothing less than a thick-skinned lizard with a crushing bite. So I'd wondered whether I could produce the same effect on solid ground as on the water's surface, and I'd found my answer in earth mana.

Sea beasts carried water mana by default. What happened if you added its opposite—earth? Anything that couldn't harmonize would collapse. However weak the earth force was, water still soaked into soil. The freedom and endless circulation unique to water would be cut off, and the result would naturally harden toward suppression.

If the water ratio was high, the magic manifested as obscuring vision or breaking balance. If the earth ratio was high, it sealed movement or blocked a flow and forced it in one direction. Opposing mana types repelled each other by nature, so anything caught between them suffered—both the caster who deployed the formula and the target who received it. The key was imbalance.

But when I'd crafted the Flame of Tranquility, I'd learned that even complete opposites could be separated by concept and grafted together properly to create something new. I was going to use that again. Take the distinctive freedom of water mana and pin it with the firmness of earth mana. Not grinding them against each other until they crushed, but letting each complete the other—like filling an earthen mold with water. In this case it was closer to overlaying an existing principle and implementing it as a skill, but the idea held.

The image was diving. Treat the ground as water, and construct one of the body's functions from the combined mana of water and earth so it could submerge.

Clunk!

The Book of Combination, already open, set down a set of scales. They tipped at once—to the black side, of course. As a summon, the process started by portioning out my soul, kneading it, and recombining it, so the price was already considered paid. That meant I had to add conditions to weigh down the other side and bring it level. It was the reverse of my usual approach, but I didn't mind. This was experience too.

I reworked the form from the initial preset. An ordinary crocodile looked too sluggish. That bulk was part of what gave it power, but the current shape was too inefficient. So I decided to borrow from elsewhere.

If mana connected directly to the soul, the durability of the body that would hold it mattered just as much. Something that could endure opposing mana fused in one place—and better yet, help them mix. I didn't have to look far. I ordered Hive to spit it onto the scale pan.

Thud-thud. Creak.

Something like a lump of stone settled into place, and that alone tilted the balance a little. Quality goods, then. Of course they were. Those were Kallion's scales—a proper mix of what he'd had before becoming a dragon and what he'd grown after. There was no better vessel. Young dragon, full dragon, crocodile—they were all reptiles anyway.

The moment I'd added enough, the illustration floating in the Book of Summoning warped. What took shape kept the original strengths intact while carrying that distinctly fantasy sensibility. Somewhere between fish and reptile, the unknown creature's form looked, no matter how you sliced it, a great deal like a dinosaur.

"...Hmm."

Honestly, it wasn't bad as it was.

I'd chosen a crocodile in the first place because I didn't want a thief-style assassin who poked and prodded through repeated ambushes. I wanted the weight of a sniper—one strike from stealth that, barring a miracle, couldn't be turned around. Looking at how my current summons combined, half-measures wouldn't cut it. With ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Subjugator covering the stats, I might as well cram everything related to assassination and tracking into the creature's native functions.

Above all, a crocodile's greatest strength was its jaw. The muscle layered in several strata to disperse force applied against it while generating even greater power—an almost ergonomic design. To that I added a touch of the structure from the great white, the shark with the strongest bite. Mixing at random could leave you worse off than not mixing at all; finding the right structure was my job.

That would make the body heavy and the movement sluggish, so I added flexibility to the muscle itself. When it tensed, blood would rush through like inflating a balloon, swelling the muscle in a burst of reinforcement—that should close the gap between movement and attack.

The teeth I reshaped into something closer to a harpoon: once it bit down, there would be no getting free. A crocodile's hunting style wasn't only crushing with jaw strength; it was also famous for clamping on and rolling to exhaust and drown its prey. The creature I was building would swim through the ground as if it were water, so if I kept the crocodile's method, drowning would become suffocation instead.

The tail needed reinforcement too, so that massive body could move fast. Without breaking the existing form, I redesigned the internal structure so it could thrash not only side to side but up and down like a dolphin. Or maybe turn the tail itself into something like an elephant's trunk—a third hand. Done right, it could even hang inverted from a ceiling.

The scales I shifted closer to a shark's, cutting drag as much as possible for stealth and speed.

What else?

"For now, a snake's pit organs and a shark's ampullae of Lorenzini come to mind."

They sensed temperature and electrical current, respectively. The pit organs were closer to receiving temperature as a visual input than simply detecting heat, but still. The intelligence of hunting creatures was extraordinary to begin with—they lured prey, herded it, closed in by degrees. Beyond that, it needed to erase its presence. Even moving hidden in the earth, a conspicuous color would give it away at once.

So I made it able to change color entirely. Into the skin and scales themselves I embedded chromatophores like those of cephalopods—octopuses and their kin. Because I'd already built blood-flow control to adjust muscle density, this applied relatively easily; chromatophores changed color by regulating muscle fibers in the first place. I also referenced a chameleon's structural coloration, the way skin shifted with light interference. That would widen the spectrum of colors it could use for camouflage.

There was no need for only one pair of eyes, either. I kept the main reptilian pupils in the proper place and added various others around them—not all open at once, but able to open one by one as needed. Some rotated a full three hundred sixty degrees like a chameleon's; others were the elongated, camera-like ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠pupils of an octopus. Each had clear strengths and weaknesses, so I designed them to be used as the situation demanded.

The rest was fine-tuning.

The more I looked, the more staggering it became. Even I had to admit this was no longer something you could call a crocodile. It was something that merely wore a crocodile as a shell. Only a creature meant to hold both the freedom of water and the firmness of earth could support a combination this absurd.

Was that why calling it a chimera felt wrong? At least those things looked like they'd been mixed. This was simply a different order of life entirely—a "finished product" built by cramming in every advantage available. Under normal circumstances, nothing like this would appear in nature. Living things evolved according to need. A creature made for a purpose, like this one, couldn't be called a living thing at all. So what did you call it? Nothing suitable came to mind.

I decided to just call it a Sea Beast.

The base still sat in the Sea Beast category, and everything mixed into it was tied to the ocean and to water. Who knew? Dig through the deep sea long enough and you might find things like this. More than that, if you didn't call that a monster, I wasn't sure what you were supposed to call one.

A monster, by nature, carried something that inspired fear. It might be simple revulsion at a grotesque form, or the primal dread of encountering the unknown. But so what? Summons didn't all have to be cute or cool. A monster was enough as a monster. No matter how indescribably hideous it was, if it could properly fulfill the role it was given, that was enough.

What I wanted from it was fear.

Not just a symbol—something whose mere existence made you feel you could be hunted at any moment. A deterrent. If Kallion was the open, martial kind of overwhelming force, this one would be the unknown pressure festering beneath it.

"...That about covers it?"

I checked again and again for anything missing, then finally took a Bloodstone from Hive. It occurred to me late, but the most important thing for this creature was blood. The organs were bound tightly to it, and to coordinate them it needed control over the flow. Using the stone as-is would turn the result into a vampire no matter the species, so I planned a little refinement.

My old self couldn't have managed it. The current me was different. I put Reaper to full use and pulled from the Bloodstone only the concept related to blood—specifically, the power to manipulate it—and cut that free.

Snap!

What my shadow sheared off at the corner was less crimson than the original, a crystal of beautiful light red.

Ting~ Clunk!

Adding it to the scales tipped them hard once more. The balance was finally starting to look right. Personally I still felt it was short, but you couldn't fill your stomach on the first bite, so I left it there. Even if I forced a finished product now, evolution would change it anyway. Roughing it out was better for the long term.

I pushed mana into the Book of Summoning floating in the air. It moved at once to the scales, and at the same time I felt a strange sensation, as if my body were lifting free of the ground.

So this is what it feels like.

Cutting out a soul and kneading it. Even being generous, it wasn't a pleasant sensation. Before, it had felt like surrendering my body to a skill. Now I had to handle it myself, which made it worse. Still—what choice was there? It was work that needed doing.

I used my shadow to sever my arm. No blood burst free. I'd only portioned out the soul. But the indescribable pain in that instant was a jolt beyond any words. A current that seemed to paralyze my whole body raced up my spine and slammed into my skull; I clenched my teeth and forced it down. The combined skills must have raised their overall effects as well.

I'd talked in circles, but the point was this.

"Kh—...filthy...hurts...kh, son of a biiiiitch!!!"

My breathing turned ragged on its own. My consciousness didn't go out. If anything it grew sharper, clearer, driving my senses harder. Enduring the pain, I kneaded the soul. The scales erupted in light, and every material poured into the soul and took shape. Building the form was simple—I'd already made it.

"Combine."

Mana rose and reached the Book of Combination. In an instant it converted everything I'd set out—including the goblins around us—into the price. Watching it all collapse into a handful of dust and soak away was a spectacle in its own right.

The direction of the energy created that way fell entirely to the Book of Summoning.

Exactly half. Half of the kneaded soul returned to my arm; the other half finished preparing to take form. Sensation slowly crept back into the limp, dangling arm. For the moment it still felt like something patched together with rags. The way a cramp in your hand or arm could make your own touch feel like someone else's—that was exactly how it felt to have another soul I'd made mixed halfway into mine. Mine, and somehow not mine.

But only for a moment. Only the last step remained. The instant it fully settled, the creature would move as a new limb of mine.

Shrrrk!

The Book of Summoning appended a commentary thick with its own bias. As the image grew more concrete, I wrote the name that came to me in blood.

Ea.

The moment the name was entered, mana began to pour into the book.

"Names are like that. Deal with it."

Thok.

I flicked the corner of the Book of Summoning as it grumbled and still accepted the decision, then kept feeding it mana. I'd taken the name straight from myth; pretty or not wasn't the point. I'd given it so the thing would get stupidly strong. Originally I'd meant to use the original form, Enki, but the book kept going on about cute, cute, cute, so I'd twisted it into something with a slightly rounder sound.

Shut up. I clamped the buzzing thing in my hand and shoved the rest of my mana in all at once.

Something was making noise. I ignored it. If it were going to break from this much, it would have broken long ago. All that drama, and it still greedily swallowed every drop of mana—that was proof enough.

The prompt appeared as if it had been waiting. So it had been sipping the mana on purpose. It could do the job fine—it just got scared first and slowed everything down.

I nodded and fed mana into my fingers. What I held in mind was the image the Book of Summoning had shown me earlier, exactly as it was.

Thump!

My heart lurched hard, and the soul before me began to take form. The first summon I had intervened in and built from the start—a commemorative first.

"Ea."

Snap!

I called the name and flicked my fingers at the same time. The shadow beneath me swelled dark and wide, then contracted again.

...

Silence.

The form I'd hoped for was nowhere to be seen. I didn't panic. The summoning had succeeded. That much was certain. Even now, the creature's emotions were coming through the Link clear as day.

"...Ea?"

Splash.

Only when I called again did it finally make its presence known. Or in this case, maybe its monstrous presence? That feeling of the watcher tensing up—this was what people meant by it.

Without the slightest magical reaction, a ripple stirred beneath the ground and wavered. I watched with patience, and as if that had given it courage, a distinctly reptilian pupil peeked out and looked up at me.

"Kuuuk..."

It made a strange cry, like wet boots creaking. On reflex I reached out and stroked the snout that had broken the surface. The texture was rough and smooth at once, nothing like Kallion's—and somehow damp, even with no water present.

Was that because the ground acted like water for it? Or was it just born with naturally moist skin? A product of unscientific principles sat right in front of me, and curiosity shoved its way in whether I wanted it or not.

For now, I could say I'd gotten the result I'd wanted. Ripples like a waterway even reached the ground where I stood, but the earth didn't feel any softer. And yet Ea was unmistakably submerged in the surface as if it were water.

It was a little smaller than I'd originally wanted, but for a base individual with no evolutions applied, it was still fairly massive. Big enough, maybe, to swallow a pre-evolution Growl in one bite.

I moved to open Ea's status window at once.

Splash.

If Ea hadn't hidden the moment I tried to focus on it, I wouldn't have had to bother opening my own status and digging through the summons tab. The reason was simple. I'd been staring too hard.

...Apparently the newly summoned creature was, just as the Book of Summoning had said beforehand, extraordinarily shy.

The apology and embarrassment pouring through the Link were so thick that I closed my eyes.