We present the first application of the newly developed EKK theory of the effective nucleonnucleon interaction to shell-model studies of exotic nuclei, including those where conventional approaches with fitted interactions encounter difficulties. This EKK theory enables us to derive the interaction suitable for several major shells (sd+pf in this work). By using such an effective interaction obtained from the Entem-Machleidt QCD-based χN 3 LO interaction and the Fujita-Miyazawa three-body force, the energies, E2 properties and spectroscopic factors of low-lying states of neutronrich Ne, Mg and Si isotopes are nicely described, as the first shell-model description of the "island of inversion" without fit of the interaction. The long-standing question as to how particle-hole excitations occur across the sd-pf magic gap is clarified with distinct differences from the conventional approaches. The shell evolution is shown to appear similarly to earlier studies. Introduction. -The nuclear shell model [1, 2] provides a unified and successful description of both stable and exotic nuclei, as a many-body framework which can be related directly to nuclear forces. Exotic nuclei are located far from the β-stability line on the Segrè chart, exhibiting very short life times, mainly due to an unbalanced ratio of proton (Z) and neutron (N ) numbers. Exotic nuclei differ remarkably in some other aspects from their stable counterparts, providing us with new insights in understanding atomic nuclei and nuclear forces [3][4][5]. As experimental data on exotic nuclei are, in general, less abundant compared to stable nuclei, theoretical calculations, interpretations and predictions play an ever increasing role.Shell-model (SM) calculations handle the nuclear forces in terms of two-body matrix elements (TBMEs). In the early days, TBMEs were empirically determined in order to reproduce certain observables. A well-known example is the effective interaction for p-shell nuclei by Cohen and Kurath [6]. A breakthrough towards more microscopically-derived TBMEs was achieved by Kuo and Brown for sd-shell nuclei [7]. Although basic features of the nucleon-nucleon (N N ) force for the SM calculation are included in these effective interactions, empirical adjustments of TBMEs were needed in order to reproduce various observables [8][9][10].These effective interactions were all derived for a Hilbert space represented by the degrees of freedom of one major (oscillator) shell. As we move towards ex-