I have to agree with Scott's comment: Every development has its roots. The following three examples are thus only approximations.

The first is Riemann's work on the "On the Hypotheses which lie at the Bases of Geometry". As a habilitation talk it is almost devoid of any details, but it is not only one of the earliest accounts of geometry in $n$ (or even infinite) dimension, it also gives the ideas of a Riemannian metric and the Riemann curvature tensor! As Riemann said it:

[...] ausser einigen ganz kurzen Andeutungen, welche Herr Geheimer Hofrath Gauss in der zweiten Abhandlung über die biquadratischen Reste [...] darüber gegeben hat und einigen philosophischen Untersuchungen Herbart’s, [konnte ich] durchaus keine Vorarbeiten benutzen [...].

Translation: expect for a few very short hints, which Privy Councillor Gauss gave in his second work on biquadratic residues, and some philosophical investigations Herbart's, I could not use any previous work.

Also Gauss's work on the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic geometry of surfaces, culminating in his Theorema Egregium, might qualify. Of course, there was some previous work on surfaces, but this goes so much deeper that all previous work pales in comparison.

I also want to mention Grassmann's Die Lineale Ausdehnungslehre, ein neuer Zweig der Mathematik, which already states in the title that is a new branch of mathematics. (Note there are two quite different editions, 1844 and 1862). Essentially he invented linear algebra in this book. Again not completely without precursors, as people solved linear equations before, but to use geometric ideas in $n$ dimension, subspaces, linear independence, exterior algebras etc. was very new. See this this article for an overview of his contributions.