The new instructor walked into the academy hall, and every student in it had decided what he was before he opened his mouth. He had ordinary ears. Round, plain, unremarkable ears, without a single tuft or point or fold to mark him as anything worth respecting. In this world, that made him trash. It made him an inferior species, and the looks that followed him down the aisle said so plainly enough that nobody needed to speak.
He climbed to the podium and made one thing clear before anything else. They were never to use their divine powers against another person. Not in anger, not in a quarrel, not to settle a score. Those powers existed for the invaders, and for nothing else.
Of course, there was always one. A student near the back leaned into his own arrogance and announced that power was power, and that he would use his however he liked.
So the instructor made him a deal. If the student could manage to injure him — just once, just a scratch — then he promised not to show up tomorrow.
The student agreed immediately. He shaped a spear out of raw lightning, the air around it cracking and stinging, and told the man not to regret this later. Then he threw it.
It hit. Dead on. The smug smile was already spreading across the student's face when a dagger came flying out of the settling dust and passed close enough to his cheek to nearly make him lose control of himself entirely.
"Surprise."
The dust thinned. The instructor stood exactly where he had been standing, a barrier held up in front of him, entirely untouched. If he had wanted to finish the boy off, he said, he would have done it.
Then he asked a question. Did the student know the activation condition for the spirits?
The student answered the way he had been taught. You raised your divine power and conveyed it to the spirit, and the spirit gave that thought a form. Imagination, basically.
Partly right, the instructor said. But the real answer was wavelengths. Only after the spirits received them could anyone manifest a power at all. The student's face went blank at that, so the man went on. There were eight fundamental wavelengths. Fire, thunder, healing and ice — those four were the extent of what this era knew. The rest were gravity manipulation, light manipulation, atmospheric pressure manipulation, and spatial manipulation.
Even Lord Gita, watching from the side of the hall, could not hide his shock that the man was claiming all eight.
That is where this ends up. To understand how a man with ordinary ears came to stand in that hall, and why ordinary ears made him lesser in the first place, you have to go back a hundred million years.
A massive catastrophe descended upon the planet Earth and annihilated the entire human populace across the globe. The seed of the calamity took root when a mysterious virus began mutating animals, twisting them into otherworldly, terrifying things that were later given a name: Corruptors.
Within a few short years the outbreak spread so rapidly that humanity lost ninety-nine percent of its population to the devastation. What remained of the species gave everything it had to hold the front lines and keep fighting back. It quickly became evident that conventional warfare was entirely useless against these beasts. Driven by desperation, humans began experimenting on their own kind.
Out of every trial run, Jin Shidu was the only successful test subject to show any real result. Alongside him, scientists engineered a counter-virus made of nanomachines, designed to restore the planet's corrupted environment. Armed with his newly obtained and unparalleled abilities, Jin became the superhuman savior of that world, always throwing himself in front of the last surviving pockets of humanity.
Ultimately, it was all in vain. They were simply too late. Eventually even the final human survivors perished.
With no one left to protect, Jin's existence seemed stripped of its purpose. He had failed the very task he had been created for — or at least, that was what his scientist friend Kagura believed. Jin held a fundamentally different view. To him there was still a reason to keep going. Even if he could not save the present population, he remained confident that his powers could benefit future generations. With the nanomachines already hard at work purging the Corruptors' influence from the environment, he was optimistic that the Earth would eventually be restored, and he was willing to wait for that day.
So Kagura placed him inside a hibernation capsule built to keep him alive for the centuries to come.
While Jin slept in stasis, the monsters continued to ravage the planet. Yet as decades turned into centuries and centuries blurred into millennia, the shift in the global environment finally began to compound exponentially. Those extraordinarily mutated creatures gradually began to deteriorate, making way for new species to thrive. The cycle of evolution continued for a hundred million years.
It brought the world to a scene at the mouth of an ancient ruin, where a trio of newly evolved humanoid beings was desperately trying to outrun a terrifying monster.
The frantic survivors stumbled across the ruin and ducked inside to take cover. The demonic beast barged straight into the facility after them. Backed into a corner with nowhere left to run, the three of them were essentially ready to become a satisfying dinner. In a final desperate plea, the girl among them cried out for help, praying for the village's guardian god to rescue them.
Miraculously, her words were heard. They triggered the awakening of the man who had been sleeping in the capsule directly behind them for a hundred million years. The ancient human unleashed an energy beam and blasted the monster apart on the spot.
The confused trio had no idea what had just happened, and the situation only got stranger when a stark-naked man stepped out of nowhere.
The first thing he did was look for his clothes, which had been kept neatly preserved in an indestructible lockbox his friend Kagura had developed. After booting up the lab's ancient systems, he discovered that he had effectively skipped a hundred million years into the future. Countless ages had damaged most of the stored data, but the fact that the machine still worked at all was already a miracle.
It appeared that the nanomachine virus Kagura had made had done exactly what it was supposed to do, annihilating the Corruptors, which in turn had helped preserve the facility. He also found a communication cube his old friend had left behind, though its contents remained a mystery for now.
Then he turned toward the humanoid locals, having completely forgotten that he was still standing there with nothing on. Realizing there were literal children staring at him, he quickly got dressed, restoring the same look he had worn millions of years ago.
A short while later he walked out of the facility with the trio and was instantly blinded by the intense sun sitting above the horizon. Truthfully, he had not expected such a vibrant sight. The view in front of him was nothing short of magnificent, a stark contrast to the apocalyptic wasteland he remembered.
The kids immediately started heading back toward their settlement, insisting that their guardian god follow them. Jin, meanwhile, was far too preoccupied trying to work out exactly what kind of species he was dealing with. Humanity should technically have been fossil fuel by now. These humanoids with their distinct animal traits had to be the result of millions of years of evolution mixed with the continuous interference of nanomachines.
Not to mention that they were speaking the exact same language humans had used eons ago, which heavily implied they had branched off from the same roots.
He introduced himself as Jin Shidu, and asked that they simply use his first name. In return, the girl with goat ears introduced herself as Hakama Phil. The koala-looking boy was Danpo, and the cat girl beside him was Shandy.