Yaju resignedly answered back. “No, Fujiwara-sama. There aren’t any other tribes than the five here in the river area and next to the sea. When I had only been here a couple years, I took a journey to see what was out there and I was surprised at how little there is. I didn’t have a map and didn’t know how to fly like you so I had to run but I run fast and don’t get tired. Everywhere I ran was either the river, forest, desert, sea, or the coast. There were forests growing right at the edges of the coast and the water isn’t salted the way it was described in an old underman tome I read once about the travels of one explorer in my old world. No matter where I looked though, there were no other people than the forest people. I think you called them elves or something? I was really hoping to find a clan of undermen back then.”
Kaori could almost feel the pain and longing in his voice and decided to comfort him a bit. “I don’t know how this world came to be the way it is but I was given the ability to change it as I see fit. I don’t know why you weren’t given that… you weren’t given a book like this?”
Upon summoning her book, Yaju looked at her book and though hard before shaking his head. “I don’t remember getting any book from anyone. That beastperson god Descartes came here a couple of times to tell me I wasn’t doing things right and that I would be replaced if I didn’t change things but he never gave me the time to ask how and he never gave me a book. At least, I don’t think he ever did.”
Kaori though about it for a second and decided to try something. “Yaju, look at my book and think about having one like it of your own. Imagine having it in your hand and then command the book you imagined to appear there. I doubt it will but just as a test, give it a try.”
While she held her book up, Yaju studied it carefully. After a couple seconds he closed his eyes and held out his hand. A second later a book that looked very much like her own appeared in his hand, much to his and her own surprise! “You did it! You do have one. May I see it for a second?”
Still stunned by the sudden development, Yaju mutely handed the thick volume to her. Kaori opened the front cover that had a different symbol held in a large gem in its center. There were a lot of words written there and it looked a lot like the introductory page of her own but the language it was written in was nothing she had ever seen before. All the letters looked like small explosions or something similar. Yaju inhaled sharply when he saw it but after only a moment, all the letters writhed on the page and suddenly they were Kana.
The change happened so quick that Kaori almost missed it. After the change, Kaori saw the words written across the top of the page and her heart sunk. They read “Volume obsolete, Power retracted. You are no longer the main god and can no longer access the abilities of this manual. For a second after she saw him summon the manual, Kaori had hoped that both her and Yaju would be able to use the manuals to speed up the process somehow but it turns out that his manual became obsolete when she arrived.
Suddenly, she had a lot more sympathy for him. it wasn’t his fault after all. Kaori could never stand a boss that expected their employees to do a task with no proper training at all on the task they wanted done. She had worked extra hard in the past to make sure she never asked those working under her to do things they didn’t know how to do. Several times she had been on the receiving end of that treatment and because of that she made sure not to do it to others.
She resolved to treat Yaju with a little more courtesy since she now knew the reason he failed so badly. She silently handed the book back to him. when he took the manual from her hand, she saw the text on the page revert back to the odd marks from before. “So, is that the language of the, let’s see, Undermen, was it? I wonder, do you know why it looks like that? My own language is derived thousands of years ago, from pictures of various things and I just wondered if yours was similar somehow?”
Yaju looked at the text on the page and Einoro peeked over his shoulder looking between his book and Kaori’s. “The underman script is derived from marks made in stone by the blade of picks and shovels. If you have just a bit of practice with the pick, you can leave messages for other people to read marked on the wall. Originally, the underman words were just a few simple signs like watch out, danger, metal, and various directions but over time it became more and more complex until it became the text we use today. I think that took thousands of years like your own did but I don’t know that much about it. I have written messages on the walls of new tunnels though and it’s very easy to use like that.”
Kaori pondered the possibilities of underman history for a second before shaking her head. With her job being what it was, she was going to have to be careful not to let her Otaku side get in the way. It would be too easy for her to go on a tangent and loose track of the tings she was working on. “I have some good news for you, Yaju. There will be undermen from now on. I will be buying a tribe of undermen for the planet. I also plan to buy all the other peoples that I can.”
As she said that she flipped her book open to the section with the species available for purchase. This section contained a lot of information about each of the different species but there were only eight available. She began reading carefully in the introductory section of the chapter. It didn’t take her very long to find her answer to that question. In that section it explained that the great old ones had created eight prime archetypes of life. No god knew which of the great old ones were responsible for which archetypes because the old ones never said.
The prime archetypes were all intelligent and had individual souls that could be reused in future generations and could even grow and split to make these intelligent species evolve and grow. Their abilities would be able to grow and they would be able to learn to do new things. There were other creatures made by the great old ones but they were made with lesser souls that couldn’t evolve or learn much. Then the great old ones left and the new gods began to try imitating what they had done.
The reason that more types of intelligent life existed than the eight prime archetypes is because some of the new gods figured out a way to mix them with the various other creatures and with each other. The pairing of these dissimilar species created new species that were still intelligent and could still grow. The manual stated that with experience, a god would be able to mix species of their own. It was here that Kaori discovered an option to purchase the expanded species portion of the chapter. She decided to come back to that and kept reading.
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Then one of the new gods discovered that by combining a lot of the lesser creatures together that they could make creatures that were semi-intelligent. These were the first monsters and they were usually violent and irrational, owing to the nature of their amalgamated souls. These souls held the ability to grow but just barely. They could however, split and reproduce the same as an archetype soul.
Finally, one of the new gods tried to combine multiple archetypes into an amalgamated creature. The only success was the creature known as the dragon. From this one success, several variants were produced and this creature did show more capability than the archetypes they were derived from but as with all the other amalgamated souls, they were unstable and irrational, prone to violence and fits. In a creature of great power, instability is not a good thing and dragons tend to be solitary for this reason. They also contain part of the soul of every archetype and thus are able to create lesser species by mating with any other species. In order to keep them from going out of control and destroying everything, all but the first dragons were given a permanent curse upon creation that would make them sleep for long periods of time.
After reading this section of the manual, Kaori was in full Otaku mode. She was imagining all kinds of scenarios and forming all kinds of weird plans. Einoro was simply nodding with a look of understanding as she read over Kaori’s shoulder. Yaju seemed to have flipped to the same section in his own book at some point and was reading very intently from it. A look of bewilderment was on his face.
With the introduction to species over, Kaori understood a lot more about the way things worked in the universe as a whole. This was information she could use in her new job to great effect. She didn’t hesitate anymore and bought the expansion to the species section. It was a lot more than her remaining worship points but it gave her access to all the intelligent species.
After making the purchase, she got a notification in the top corner of the page that the new section was added. She quickly flipped to it and found a huge list of new intelligent species. There she discovered a new type of mixing that wasn’t listed in the introduction. Apparently, species could be mixed with elements and it would produce new species as well. The most notable examples were listings of swimming creatures mixed with the water element and flying creatures from the air element.
She realized that the elements spoken of must be like the Chinese phases, Water, wood, fire, earth, and metal. Since there was air, she figured it might be more like the Greek elements, earth, air, fire, and water. As she read through the section, she discovered that there were species mixed with plants and some were mixed with funguses. There was no end to the things that the gods had mixed to get new species in the past.
There was a huge number of species available to choose from but there was a very big problem with that. They were expensive! Each species was sold in three ways, single specimens that were called specials. These were the most expensive but apparently had capabilities that regular members of their species didn’t have. Then there was the small batch of 100 that could be specified by percentage of either male or female in mix. Then there was large batch of 10,000 and they had the same percentage factoring. Doing some quick calculations, Kaori realized that the large batch was just a tad cheaper to buy that getting 100 small batches.
The problem was that there were so many species that Kaori wanted to add to her world but she couldn’t see a way to get them all. Even the small batches were going to put her way in the red for many eons if she bought them all. She still had to buy everything else for this world after that so there was no way she could get them all. It was like when a rare collection came out in a gatcha format. You couldn’t afford to buy enough tries to get every item you wanted and were doomed to have an incomplete set. Unless you figured out some workaround.
Kaori decided to buy the small batch of the other seven prime archetypes for now. That already put her way in the hole and she knew that she would most likely be centuries building her credit back up after this. There were also all the other things she still needed to consider. Thinking of the debt she was taking on made her very depressed. She began imagining gangs of demons or evil gods showing up and threatening to wreck your planet if you don’t cough up the credit that they lent you.
As her mind began drifting into a depressing series of diversions, a notification at the top of the page caught her attention. The notification was that her purchase was ready and had a glowing blue icon that looked to be some kind of tiny magic circle after it. She somehow knew she was supposed to touch the circle and when she did a glowing blue magic circle that looked like the one on the page appeared on the floor of her treehouse.
The three of them approached the circle and looked at it. It was Yaju who first stepped onto it. “Coming? *upon seeing the look of confusion on her face he chuckled and responded with a puzzled look of his own.* Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a teleportation circle. How did you ever get around? Don’t tell me you had to walk everywhere!”
Kaori began trying to explain cars to him but Einoro just smirked and told her to watch. She touched her forehead and her finger turned glowing blue then she tapped his. Kaori burst into laughter as Yaju got a dazed look on her face and then fell over on his butt. “What did you do to him?”
“I just gave him a memory of you riding to work in your car. He will come out of his daze in a moment and he’ll understand transportation on earth was way more advanced than he could ever have imagined! Humans on earth came a long way in a really short time”
“That’s a neat trick! Wait, if you could do that, why didn’t you do that when he didn’t understand videogames?”
“Well, I did consider it but which video game would you have liked me to show him and at what point in the game? Also, I don’t mean to seem selfish or discontent with my previously assigned role but as the angel of diligence, I have never liked videogames. I think that Rocell would likely be better to ask that of. At least when you were using the keyboard to play videogames, it was partially in her purview of gift typing.”
“Videogames are almost diametrically opposed to my purview of diligence. I was the one who encouraged you to be satisfied with a job well done. I also hope that you won’t come to feel that your death was my fault. I already feel guilt over you overworking yourself.” As she said the last part, she grabbed her arm to the side and looked away. Kaori could see tears in the corners of her eyes.
Kaori could tell that the guilt was really getting to her. Without thinking, she stepped forward and hugged the angel, shocking them both a little. Both women stepped back from one-another but Einoro reached out and grabbed Kaori’s hands and held them. “Thank you, Kaori-sama.”
The next moment they noticed Yaju shaking his head and they let go of each-other. “Whoa! The world you come from is, is… I don’t even know how to describe it! I’ve never seen anything like it. Not that I have much to go on but it was still amazing! Just watching as you got into the car and drove to work through the city. There were so many people and the buildings and, and… I just never would have imagined something like that is all.”
Kaori could only smile at him. After all, to her, that was just an everyday experience. “Shall we go? Even though that was the way we traveled from place to place in my worlds where there was no magic, it’s not like I don’t get the notion of how teleportation circles work.” With that, they all stepped into the circle and were transported to another location.