Child of the Beast, Egg of Gray

"An unfinished work?"

"That's right."

Cyril Cardinal nodded.

Iver remembered that among the hundred tribes created by the Beast Lord, the final twenty were imitations of existing races. Trolls, for example, were actually imitations of giants... while goblins were beastly races the Beast Lord had created by imitating dwarves.

There was a certain beauty to downloading a paper from the internet and running it through Google Translate twenty times.

Then... could humans be...

"Looks like you've figured it out."

Cyril Cardinal nodded slightly. "Humans are the Beast Lord's imitation of the 'elves,' except this work was never completed. As the Beast Lord's final work, 'humans' possessed all the strengths of his previous creations. You could say they were the culmination of his efforts—the Beast Lord intended to make this race his main race, and so he called them 'Beastmen.'"

"However, 'Beastmen' were never born. Because Constant Self deleted the rather abstract and bizarre traits the Beast Lord had added based on her personal aesthetic—things like 'muscles resembling a troll's' and 'tusks resembling a goblin's'—humans came to look more like elves. But she didn't delete the various internal traits the Beast Lord had given the 'Beastmen.'"

"Thus, humans were as hot-tempered as giants, as greedy as goblins, and as arrogant as elves... Humans inherited the strengths of the other races, along with their flaws."

"That was also why elves had always cared so much about humans. Aside from their different lifespans and personalities, humans were very close to elves in essence. Just as elves liked elves, elves would naturally like humans as well."

...So that was why elves loved humans alone among the races, excluding races like harpies and snake people?

Iver suddenly understood.

No wonder the other races in this world either had feathers or scales on their bodies. Only