The oldest legend claims that in the beginning, there were just the stars. Among them, ever in disharmony, the two serpents fought. Eien-Hebi, the Ever Serpent, lit the constellations, as her twin, Musaborikuu the Devourer, consumed them. This struggle lasted for aeons, until Eien-Hebi consumed her sister, wishing to quell the darkness.
As the people of Sorakurai, to the north of Ikaiguchi, tell it, Eien-Hebi knew this would spell her end, for the poison of Musaborikuu spread through her body until it killed her. As her last action, she let out a scream that burned through the heavens, a scream that set her body alight. In that conflagration all things were forged. Her eyes became the sun and the moon, her scales became the plates upon which the land was formed, the shifting nature of the scales forming mountain peaks and the tidal floods.
Some variants of the legend say that seven aspects were born from the death of the serpent, but the nature of these aspects are endlessly contradictory across the islands. Traditionally, the creation of the world was placed thirty thousand years before the Banishing of the Shin’rei, but scholars unceasingly debate the possibility of this.