This is my 36th book. Zounose here. I made it! I made iiit—! (I think) This is my first time publishing two books at one event! I wanted to manage that just once! Alright—!! But so, you could say this book is my most freewheeling so far, or that I just drew what I wanted with no concern for the reader. When you think about the ages of the oldest gods, it seems like they've been here long before us stupid primates, or even mammals... but how are you supposed to reconcile the legends with the actual history of evolution...? This book's ambition was to cut right to the heart of that paradoxical question that comes to mind whenever gods appear in a work! What do I mean by "ambition", anyway...? Maybe I'm just stupid?

Next should be a Yuuka book at Summer Comiket, if I make it in. Before that, I'm going to be absolutely buried in work in May and June, but I'll just have to survive somehow... But, well then. I hope we can meet again.

As for the art, I intentionally tried to make the lines thicker than usual. I also used a lot of those screentones I had left over from "Masque Reimu", but there were a lot of spots where the lines were too thin in relation to the patterns, so... But as always, I can't really know how it's going to look after printing, so I'm anxious to see the results.

And after squeezing their way through all the pressures driving natural selection, these lifeforms were strongly defined by their suitability for life on earth, and that compatibility was imprinted in our genes. Finally that subconscious respect was elevated into "faith". That's what I seriously think. (Read all the above in a really fast voice) Well, all this information I've listed here is over ten years old at this point, so a bunch of it may well have been debunked or replaced at this point!

But in any case, all that stuff about the planet, the land, the history of life etc. actually had some pretty serious effort put into it. Mishaguji-sama having been worshiped since the Joumon era is the accepted theory, but I tried to think about where the roots of stuff like earth mother and megalith cults might have come from. I think they might've been born in the process of primates descending from trees onto land, and leaving (or being driven from) the forest for the open plains. Going even further back, there's things like the global freezing and the hydrothermal vents, or the microbes surviving within the earth during the mass disasters caused by the superplumes, as this book briefly touched upon. The land and plants and such obviously also played a role in early vertebrates learning to breathe oxygen, grow legs and move out of the water, so if you really squint, you could say that the land has physically aided us all the way from the very first animals to modern humanity.

Afterword