Setting Out to Sea

The waves ate away at the sand and threw up ribbons of white foam.

Yesael dove into the sea, climbed up onto a reef, and looked all around him.

"Hey, come on out!"

Out of the calm sea a giant beast tore through the surface and thrust a maw bristling with fangs and teeth straight at Yesael. That bite could easily have swallowed him whole, reef and all, and ground the lot of it to powder.

But Yesael showed no fear at all. He could feel exactly what the monster before him felt, their minds joined as one.

For all its fearsome look, it was as innocent as a life newly born.

Like a blank sheet of paper.

Yesael reached out a hand, and touched its wrinkled brown skin, rough as stone. "What's your name?"

"My name is Yesael."

"It means moonlight. The light the moon lays down when night falls, and the sight my mother loves best in all the world."

"She gave me the most beautiful sight in the world for a name. She wanted me to grow up to be someone like the moonlight."

"Not fierce and blinding like the sun. Just lighting up the land, the way the moon does."

The fusion monster made no response at all. It only stared blankly as this trilobite man danced about in his delight.

"You don't have a name?"

"Then I'll give you one!"

Yesael gave his companion a name.

"Nini!"

"Haha, your name is Nini now!"

"Let's go out into the sea together. You're so big, so mighty, there's nothing in this whole sea that can stand in your way."

In the Cambrian sea, the fusion monster stood at the very peak of existence.

No creature dared so much as look it in the eye, let alone challenge it. Its sheer size alone spoke of invincibility. More important, it never lost its way.

The temple of God Yinsai, and the place where the Mother of Life, Shelly, dwelled, stood forever as its fixed coordinates.

No matter where it went, it could always find its way back home.

Yesael had even heard his father say that the Mother of Life, Shelly, had raised that miracle of a pyramid and temple in the space of a few days. He hoped his own Nini might have inherited some part of that power as well, so that one day he could build a city greater even than the God-Given City.

Yesael knelt astride Nini's head, both hands gripped tight in the folds of its brown skin. The fusion monster tore through the sea's surface with ease and raced across the water like a raging wind.

His eyes went wide, and he felt as though the whole ocean lay beneath his command.

Their shadow slowly vanished beyond the line of the sea.

In the blink of an eye, several years passed.

A great crash, and a roar.

The fusion monster returned from the deep sea and came ashore, dragging behind it some unnamed dark stone from the seabed.

The fusion monster called Nini had changed completely in appearance, grown from its original ten-some meters in height to a body of twenty-some meters.

It had become an echinoderm creature, something like a sea urchin, its whole body bristling with terrible spines. Yet it could turn those spines into tentacles hundreds of meters long, or into all manner of other living organs. Several of them, it could be seen, had already become tentacles, and were dragging along the great stone it had found on the seabed.

Once it reached the shore, those tentacles changed again, this time into sharp metal chisels, while seven or eight more spines became tentacles of their own, each sprouting an eye at its tip to watch from every angle.

Dozens, nearly a hundred, of those sharp chisels blurred into afterimages, chipping away ceaselessly at the great stone until a human outline began to emerge, faintly recognizable as a trilobite man wearing a crown.

This was the gift Yesael meant to offer his father, the King of Wisdom. He had gone to great lengths to find the stone in the depths of the sea, one whose color matched his father's carapace exactly, and had it carved into a statue of the King of Wisdom.

The next day was Redlichia's birthday.

Yesael had the statue pushed out onto the stone plaza before the Wisdom Palace, drawing every soul in the God-Given City out to see it.

Everyone cheered again and again at the sight of that statue, towering more than ten meters high.

"A statue that big, and it was lifted like it was nothing!"

"Prince Yesael is God's priest, blessed with power by the divine!"

"That kind of power is just unbelievable!"

"I hear Prince Yesael is coming of age and he's going to start taking followers. I'm definitely going!"

The King of Wisdom came out from the palace as well, ringed about by his people, and looked upon the statue.

Yesael strode forward at once and knelt before him.

"Great King of Wisdom, your son Yesael offers you this gift. May your towering image stand forever within the God-Given City, as undying as the stars in the sky."

Redlichia looked with satisfaction at his son, now fully grown, and clapped him on the shoulder.

"Well done!"

"Though I would rather the statue stood at the foot of the temple, and not here."

Yesael obeyed his father's command, and had the Fusion Monster Nini carry the statue down to the base of the pyramid.

Against the pyramid behind it, the statue that had loomed so grand now looked small, and at a glance it seemed almost a guardian standing watch over the stairway that climbed to the supreme temple.

Redlichia looked upon the sight with satisfaction, then turned a stern gaze on his son.

"Yesael, never forget your humility before God."

Yesael nodded. "God Yinsai will forever be our master. Yesael will never forget it."

Redlichia's gaze slowly softened, and his eyes drifted past the pyramid's edge, out toward the sea.

"Yesael, have you not always wanted to go into the deep sea?"

Yesael was stunned for a moment, and then a look of wild joy broke across his face.

"You're letting me leave the God-Given City?"

Redlichia took Yesael by the hand, led him to the center of the great avenue, and climbed with him up onto a high stone platform.

He declared before the crowd, "My son Yesael will act in my stead, and lead into the deep sea all those willing to go, together with his own followers."

"They will open up a new homeland, and raise another city under God's protection."

The God-Given City had grown overcrowded. Even with the God-Given method of raising Ancestral Fish, the city was beginning to strain at its limits, and if it meant to keep growing, new cities and new homelands would have to rise elsewhere.

Redlichia had long intended to open up a new city beneath the deep sea, and word of it had already reached many within the God-Given City.

Whoever was sent to found that undersea city would become its master, and the city would be named after him.

The fusion monster was fully matured now, and Prince Yesael could command and control its power with skill. In Redlichia's eyes, the two of them were the ideal choice.

"Yesael, are you willing?"

Yesael had long hoped for this, and yet he had never truly expected to be chosen.

In his own eyes his elder brothers far surpassed him in both standing and experience, and it seemed much more likely his father would choose one of them to open up a new homeland in the deep sea.

He forced down the wild joy rising in his face, and knelt, striking his head hard against the stone paving.

"I am willing."

"Under the watchful gaze of God, Yesael will conquer the sea and open up a new paradise of divine blessing."