The wasteland outside Uruk lay cool as water under the night.
Seiji Fujiwara stood on the open ground, and behind him were four top-tier Servants: Saber Alter, Jeanne Alter, Medea, and Rider. They were like his most loyal shadows, silent and still.
"Gilgamesh expects me to come and pay my respects?" The corner of Seiji's mouth curled into an amused arc as he murmured softly to the empty air. "No. A king does not go to pay respects to another king. I'll send him a proper gift instead."
His gaze shifted to Medea at his side.
The great witch of the Age of Gods understood at once and stepped forward, purple magical radiance circling around her.
"Master, what kind of palace do you require?"
"A palace?" Seiji shook his head and smiled. "Too petty. What I want is a temple. A monument that declares the arrival of a new era."
He extended a single finger, and immense magical power, blended with rules parsed from the Grail, sketched out a simple yet oppressive geometric figure in midair.
A perfect four-sided pyramid.
A pyramid!
"I want it to rise straight from the earth. The material will be the purest obsidian. The interior must apply your spatial magecraft so that an entire universe fits inside a mustard seed. Most important of all, it must be fast. It must be done before dawn, so that all of Uruk can witness this miracle."
"As you command, my Master."
A fanatical light flickered in Medea's eyes. For a magus of the Age of Gods like her, to unleash her talent freely in pursuit of so grand a goal was the highest honor.
The next second, a terrifying storm of magical power erupted with her at its center.
A deafening roar tore through the night.
The earth began to tremble violently, as if some colossal beast slumbering for ten thousand years was waking. The guards atop Uruk's walls were scared half to death by the sudden commotion and stared in terror toward the plain beyond.
There, above the wasteland, magical power had gathered into an ocean of pure substance!
Countless purple magical arrays unfolded, overlapped, and interwove across the ground, forming a composite Age of Gods ritual so vast it made the scalp prickle.
"Earth and stone, heed my command, and be reshaped!"
Medea chanted aloud, both hands pressing down through the air.
The ground split open in enormous gashes, and tens of thousands of tons of earth and stone were wrenched out from the depths by an invisible force, left hovering in midair.
Then Jeanne Alter gave a cold snort and joined this act of "creation."
She swung the banner in her hand, and the endless flames of the dragon witch surged forth, wrapping around the earth and stone. These were not flames of destruction, but smelting fire of the utmost heat.
The fire screamed as it burned, and in an instant the impurities within the earth and stone evaporated. Twisted by the rules of Age of Gods magecraft, the material was compressed, purified, and recombined into the densest, smoothest black crystal: obsidian!
Giant obsidian blocks, each more than ten meters along an edge, took shape rapidly in the air.
"Go!"
At a point of Medea's finger, these blocks flew toward their designated positions like the most obedient building toys, precise beyond measure, and began stacking layer upon layer.
Saber Alter silently released a torrent of her own dark magical power, providing near-limitless energy for the entire ritual. Seiji's own "Grail" pumped out refined magical power in an unbroken stream.
A vast pyramid, black from top to bottom, its surface smooth as a mirror, grew upward layer by layer at a speed visible to the naked eye, climbing wildly from its foundation.
This was no longer architecture. It was a divine miracle.
Inside Uruk, countless startled citizens and priests rushed onto their rooftops and ran up the walls, staring blankly at the scene beyond the city that overturned their entire worldview.
"That... what is that?" one priest's voice trembled.
"A god! A god is creating their dwelling!" a commoner cried out, losing his voice, then dropped to his knees.
"No... this is wrong! Our gods never had such power! Creating so magnificent a structure in a single night..."
The King of Heroes, Gilgamesh, stood at the summit of Uruk's Ziggurat, the shadow of that black pyramid reflected in his golden pupils. Beside him, the high priestess Siduri had long been too stunned to speak.
"Heh... heheh..." Gilgamesh laughed quietly, but there was a trace of gravity in his smile. "Refusing this king's summons, and instead displaying such power right under this king's nose?"
"False god... you are declaring war on this king, on every god of Uruk!"
The first ray of dawn pierced the darkness and shone across the Mesopotamian plain.
As the light spread over the land, a black pyramid a hundred meters tall, more majestic and more oppressive than Uruk's Ziggurat, had quietly come to stand there.
It was like a silent, ancient beast, gazing down upon the whole of Uruk.
At the pyramid's summit, Seiji's figure stood against the wind, his voice not loud yet carrying clearly into the ears of every person in the city.
"From this day on, this place is the Temple of Equivalent Exchange."
"My name is Seiji Fujiwara."
"Here, there are no empty prayers. Only real transactions."
"Whatever you desire... wealth, power, knowledge, beauty... so long as you can pay the price, anything can be exchanged."
Seiji's words landed like a boulder dropped into a calm lake, raising an uproar throughout Uruk.
"Equivalent exchange? What does that mean?"
"Pay a price and get anything you want? Is it true or not?"
"How arrogant! This is blasphemy against the gods!"
The citizens fell to heated debate, while the priests were beside themselves with rage, regarding it as a naked provocation. But the visual impact and psychological intimidation of that black pyramid, risen from the ground in a single night, were utterly real.
No one dared to act rashly.
Everyone chose to watch and wait.
Inside the temple, the space was far more expansive than it appeared from outside. Medea's spatial magecraft had created here a hall as grand as any palace.
Seiji sat at his leisure on a throne carved from obsidian, with Rider Medusa standing at his side like the most beautiful sculpture.
He was waiting.
Waiting for the first person bold enough to taste the crab.
The minutes ticked by, one by one, until at noon a ragged middle-aged man with despair written on his face finally stepped trembling into the temple.
His name was Una, a potter of some small renown in the city of Uruk. But he had recently run into serious trouble. His most important commission, a batch of ritual pottery meant as an offering to the temple, had all been ruined when something went wrong with the kiln fire.
Not only did he have to pay enormous compensation, he had also offended the temple. He had prayed to the god of clay for three days and three nights and gotten nothing but hunger for it.
With nowhere left to turn, he had thought of that mysterious "false god" outside the city.
"G-great... god?" Una knelt on the ground, his body shaking like a sieve.
Seiji opened his eyes, his cold gaze falling on the man, and the system instantly parsed every piece of information about him.
"Una, potter. You want flawless ceramic technique to complete a batch of costly ritual vessels, to recover your reputation and your wealth." Seiji spoke the man's private worries aloud.
Una shuddered all over and lifted his head in terror.
This new god... knew even the thoughts in his own heart!
"Yes! Yes, great god!" He clung to it like a final lifeline, kowtowing frantically. "Please grant me a miracle! I will offer up everything I have!"
"Everything you have?" Seiji smiled, and that smile sent an inexplicable chill through Una. "Everything you have is worth nothing to me."
Una's expression froze on the spot.
"However," Seiji said, his tone shifting, "the principle of equivalent exchange works for anyone, even a lowly mortal like you."
He snapped his fingers.
A ball of magical light, shimmering with the radiance of knowledge, appeared at his fingertip.
"Inside this is ceramic-firing technology a thousand years beyond this age. From the proportions of the clay and the design of the kiln to the precise control of the fire... possess it, and the pottery you make will become a treasure of all Mesopotamia. Wealth and renown will be yours for the taking."
Una's breathing turned heavy in an instant, his eyes fixed on that ball of light, full of greed and longing.
"What... what price do I have to pay?" he asked in a trembling voice.
"It's very simple."
Seiji's smile took on a deeper meaning.
"Your soul. I'll cut away one tenth of it, as the currency of the transaction."
"My... my soul?!" Una nearly fainted from fright.
The soul, the most precious thing a human had in the age of myth, the very foundation of reincarnation.
"Don't be nervous," Seiji soothed, his voice carrying a devil's seduction. "It's only one tenth. It will have no effect on your life or your lifespan. You'll only feel... mm, your emotions grow a touch more muted. That's all."
"To trade away a little inconsequential sentimentality for the craft and the wealth you've dreamed of your whole life... isn't that a bargain?"
A dead silence filled the great hall.
Una knelt there, his face shifting between light and shadow.
On one side was a soul, intangible and ethereal, provable only after death.
On the other was wealth and glory, within arm's reach, able to change his miserable fate at once.
For a man already driven to the edge, the answer to this question was settled long ago.
A few minutes later, Una raised his head, his eyes bloodshot, and rasped, "I... I'll trade!"
"A wise choice."
Seiji nodded with satisfaction.
He raised a hand and pointed, and an invisible contract formed in an instant. Una felt as though something warm had been drawn out of his body, and his whole being turned a little hollow.
But right after, that ball of knowledge-light flew into the space between his brows.
A roar went off inside his skull.
A vast, precise, unthinkable flood of ceramic knowledge filled his mind in an instant. In a single moment he had gone from an ordinary craftsman to a god of this field!
"A miracle... a miracle! This truly is a miracle!"
Una felt those masterful, almost supernatural techniques in his mind and shook all over with excitement. He kowtowed frantically to Seiji again, but in his eyes there was a little less awe now and a little more fanatical worship.
"Go," Seiji said, waving a hand. "Go use your new skill, create wealth, and spread the gospel for me as well."
Una withdrew with endless thanks.
Watching his departing figure, Seiji toyed with the faintly glowing fragment of soul in his hand, the piece that belonged to Una.
Faith? How could something so inefficient compare to this?
He gave the soul fragment a light pinch, and the pure soul energy was absorbed and converted by the system.
As long as the scale of the transactions is large enough, I could even recreate a Grail in this world out of thin air.
Gilgamesh, from today on, your Uruk is going to be played by a different set of rules.
Una's "miracle" swept across all of Uruk like a storm.
When he appeared at the temple with a batch of flawless ritual pottery shimmering with the luster of precious jade, everyone was dumbstruck.
That texture, that color, that craftsmanship... it was nothing a mortal could possibly have made!
The priests who had been about to punish him made an instant one-hundred-eighty-degree turn upon seeing these pieces, which could only be called works of art. They not only absolved him of his guilt but paid him far beyond the original commission.
Overnight, Una went from a craftsman on the brink of bankruptcy to a "master potter" sought after by the entire city.
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