The world had not changed, yet it was utterly new.
For three days after the Awakening, Enki moved through the village like a ghost. The cacophony in his mind had settled into a deep, resonant hum—the hum of a civilization's entire knowledge base, now accessible as his own. He knew the chemical composition of the river water, the tensile strength of the reeds, the orbital patterns of the stars above. He saw the village not as a collection of huts, but as a complex system of physics, biology, and sociology.
To the villagers, he was just… quiet. Quieter than usual. Ninsun watched him with a healer's sharp eye, seeing the new depth in his gaze, the way he would stare at a grinding stone as if seeing the principles of leverage written in the air around it.
"The boy is becoming a man," the elders said, nodding sagely. "His thoughts grow heavy."
They had no idea.
The problem was the field. The sun-baked plot of land where Enki had begun his irrigation experiment was now a testament to failure. The channels were cracked, the seedlings withered and brown. The seasonal rains had been scant, and the river's level had dropped, its life-giving water just out of reach. The hope the village had placed in his "blessed" project was curdling into disappointment.
Enki stood at the edge of the failure, the villagers' anxious whispers at his back. In his mind, it wasn't a dead field. It was a simple equation: insufficient hydraulic pressure, compounded by porous soil and excessive evaporation.
The solution was equally simple.
He turned to the village elder, a man named Anu. "The river has more to give," Enki said, his voice calm, carrying a new, unshakable authority. "It is lazy. We must convince it to work for us."
Anu frowned. "The river is a god, boy. It gives what it wills."
"Then we will ask it politely," Enki replied, a faint, knowing smile on his lips. "With a digging stick."
He led them not to the field, but to a point upriver where the bank was high and the current strong. He used a sharpened stick to sketch in the mud—not a child's doodle, but a precise engineer's schematic.
"We dig here," he pointed, "a channel that slopes down, ever so slightly. The water will follow, because it must. It is a law." He traced the path of the proposed channel, leading it to a new, deeper pond he planned to excavate above the field. "The pond will hold the water. From there, we open small gates, and the water will walk to each plant's roots by itself."
The villagers stared, baffled. They dug holes for posts and trenches for foundations. They didn't redirect rivers.
"It is a great labor, Enki," Anu said, skepticism warring with a desperate hope. He gestured to the vast, sun-baked distance between them and the river. "What if it fails?"
Enki looked at the dying seedlings, then at the flowing river. He saw not just water, but potential energy. He saw not a drought, but a logistical problem.
"It will not fail," he said, and the certainty in his voice was not the arrogance of youth, but the confidence of a man who had, in a past life, designed systems for an entire planet. "It is just a matter of convincing the water to take a new path."
He walked to the edge of the gathered crowd and picked up his own digging stick. It was a personal tool, its haft worn smooth and dark by the sweat and grip of his hands, its tip blackened and hardened by fire. It felt absurdly primitive. In his mind, he could picture the nano-excavators and gravity trams of 2999. But this was the tool he had. This was the world he was in.
He drove the fire-hardened point into the unyielding earth. It was a small, definitive thud that seemed to swallow the villagers' doubts.
"Who will help me ask the river?"
It was his mother, Ninsun, who stepped forward first, her faith in him a force of nature in itself. Then a few of the younger men, shamed by her courage or captivated by the sheer audacity of the plan.
The work was brutal, a battle of muscle and will against the unyielding earth. But as they dug, something shifted. Enki didn't just command; he worked harder than anyone, his body moving with an unnatural, relentless efficiency. He didn't get tired in the same way. He corrected the slope of the channel with an eye that saw the invisible pull of gravity.
When the final earth wall was breached, they all held their breath.
The water did not rush. It crept. It slid into the man-made channel as if it had always intended to go that way, a shimmering, silent serpent of life. It flowed, slow and sure, down the gentle gradient, pooling in the new reservoir.
A collective gasp went up from the villagers. It was one thing to hear a plan. It was another to see a law of the universe, harnessed by a boy with a stick, bring life from nothing.
Enki did not cheer. He watched the water fill the pond, his face serene. He had not performed a miracle. He had simply applied a forgotten principle.
But to the people of Sumeria, kneeling in the mud as the life-giving water soaked the parched earth, it was magic. It was divinity.
They looked at the boy, now standing ankle-deep in the water he had commanded, his eyes holding the knowledge of ages.
"Enki," Anu whispered, and the name was no longer just a hope for sweet water. It was a title. A prayer.
The Witness had begun his work.