The Creation of the Gods

Lore & Background

The myth, as it circulates among the Shogunate's inner court and the priestly orders attached to the execution grounds, holds that before the Shogun's ascension the land was mortal and transient. Rulers rose, fell, and were forgotten. The turning point—the 'Creation'—is tied to the discovery or cultivation of the Elixir, a substance produced on the remote island known as Paradise. In the oldest telling, the Shogun (or his predecessor in the seat of power) first consumed the Elixir and did not die. What followed was not a single act but a slow consolidation: the immortal ruler restructured the state, elevated the Jinnai as his living instruments, and codified the endless cycle of sending condemned criminals to Paradise to harvest more of the substance. The Jinnai occupy an ambiguous place in this mythology. They are described in court documents as 'vessels' or 'blessed,' yet their physical form—massive, inhuman, often bearing the marks of the Elixir's transformation—suggests they are something more than servants. Whether they were created, chosen, or corrupted by the Elixir is a question the manga leaves deliberately open, and the distinction matters because it determines whether the Shogunate's power is a natural hierarchy or a parasitic one. For the common people and the condemned, the 'Creation of the Gods' is less a sacred story than a warning: the gods did not fall from the sky; they were made in a palace, sustained by a garden, and kept alive by the blood of those the state discards. This framing is what makes the Shogunate's authority feel both ancient and deeply, fundamentally unjust in the eyes of characters like Gabimaru, who once served as the blade that carried out those judgments.

In Their Own Story

The old priest at the execution ground never spoke the name of the first Shogun. He would only say, 'Before the drop, there was only the dust.' He told this to the condemned in the hour before the blade fell, as if the story were a kind of mercy. Gabimaru, in his earlier years, had listened to that recitation a hundred times from the other side of the scaffold, his executioner's mask hiding a face that had long stopped believing in gods. Now, standing on the black-sand shore of Paradise with Yuzuriha's hand steady on his arm, he watched the island exhale its green fog and thought: the gods were not born here. They were grown. And something in the soil of this place still wanted to grow more.

Reader's Guide

The 'Creation of the Gods' is best understood as the Shogunate's origin narrative: the moment the ruler consumed the Elixir and the mortal world became an immortal one. It connects directly to the Shogun, the Jinnai, and the Elixir itself, and it is the mythological bedrock beneath every expedition to Paradise. In practical terms, it explains why the state perpetually sends criminals to the island—each harvest is a re-enactment of the original 'creation,' a ritual that keeps the god alive. The characters most entangled in this myth are the Shogun (the living god), the Jinnai (his enforcers, whose own origins are unclear), and, by extension, every condemned criminal who becomes fuel for the cycle. Gabimaru's personal arc is a direct confrontation with this mythology: he was once the instrument of the system the myth justifies, and his journey to Paradise forces him to confront whether the 'gods' are truly divine or merely the first to drink. The manga leaves several threads unresolved. The exact mechanism by which the Jinnai were created or sustained is never fully spelled out. Whether the Elixir is a natural product of Paradise's ecosystem or something cultivated by the Shogunate's own hand remains ambiguous. And the question of whether the Shogun was the first to drink, or whether an even older power preceded him, is hinted at but never confirmed. These gaps are what keep the mythology alive in the reader's mind, turning a creation story into an ongoing mystery rather than a closed legend. See also: the Shogun entry, the Jinnai entry, and the Paradise island entry for further context.

Did You Know?

• The Shogun's immortality is not presented as a natural gift but as something acquired and maintained, tying his divinity directly to a physical substance (the Elixir) rather than to lineage or prayer.
• The Jinnai's status as 'gods' or 'vessels' is deliberately ambiguous in the manga; their relationship to the Elixir and to the Shogun is one of the series' central unresolved questions.
• The 'creation' myth is told from the perspective of the state and its priestly orders, meaning the common people and the condemned experience it not as sacred history but as the justification for their own execution.
• Gabimaru's background as a former executioner makes him a living contradiction to the creation myth: he was the mortal blade that served the immortal god, and his story challenges the narrative that this hierarchy is nat