Regarding Death (3)
I wandered the world, collecting all sorts of human souls. Hm, saying it like that makes me sound like some black magician gathering souls as sacrifices for a ritual. But hey, I collected them the gentle way—putting in the legwork! The easiest method would be killing humans to harvest them, but I didn't want to do that!
Instead, I roamed every corner of the world, tracking down and gathering souls bit by bit from those who'd met their ends in various places. From the corpse of a young person who'd died in a sudden accident without even realizing how they'd perished; from criminals executed for their crimes; from elderly folks who'd lived full lives and passed peacefully of old age... Even ones that didn't sit right with me, like the souls of stillborn fetuses who'd never taken a breath.
After collecting souls from the dead all over the world and studying them, I finally got a decent grasp on their structure. This might get a bit boring, but I should explain the nature of souls first.
Souls may look like a single unified spirit at a glance, but peel back the outer layer, and you'll see they're made of two opposing parts intertwined together. Like a taijitu ☯, constantly devouring and blending into one another.
One side is bright, light, and warm. The other is dark, heavy, and cold. These completely contradictory natures tangle to form the soul.
First, the bright part. I arbitrarily named it the hun (). This is tied to a person's innate disposition—the personality, tendencies, and inherited traits they're born with. Being inherently warm and light, it has a tendency to rise toward the sky.
Next, the dark part. I called this the po (). This relates to the personality formed after birth. It's shaped by memories and experiences accumulated through growth, and being inherently cold and heavy, it tends to sink into the earth and scatter.
Thus, the soul is completed by the fusion of one's innate nature and the personality forged after birth.
How did I figure all this out? From observing various souls.
First, Sample A: The soul of an old man who'd lived a long, satisfied life. Compared to the era's average human lifespan, he'd survived an absurdly long time, and his soul was correspondingly huge—roughly the size of two of my fists in human form. Moreover, this soul that had lived over eighty years had an abnormal ratio. If we call the whole soul 10, his was about 2 hun : 8 po. A completely imbalanced form.
Yet, there were no major issues with the old man's soul.
Next, Sample B: The soul of a stillborn baby that never drew breath. It was tiny, not even half the size of my fist. Its ratio was roughly 9.9 hun : 0.1 po—almost entirely hun. A tragic soul with no memories beyond what it'd heard in its mother's womb, so the po never properly formed. Poor thing...
The rest... Executed criminals were around 4:6, young accident victims about 5:5. Most souls seemed to balance out to 5:5 around age twenty. From there, as they aged, the soul grew larger while the po's proportion increased. Younger souls were smaller with more hun dominance.
It seemed like the soul stabilized around twenty when hun and po balanced. But accumulating memories and experiences tipped the scales toward po, disrupting equilibrium. Is that why dementia hits the elderly?
Hm... That's intriguing. So what about elves, whose lifespans exceed humans' by over tenfold? Do they maintain balance thanks to their plant-like mentality? Not sure. There are definitely racial differences, but that needs more research.
I released the souls I'd finished studying, and they began dispersing in various forms. The unified soul slowly split apart—the hun rising to the sky, the po scattering to the earth. In four characters: hun flies, po scatters (). That's why I named them hun and po.
Most of the released souls vanished quickly.
Hmm... Do normal souls dissipate this fast? Then what's with the ones lingering on the surface?
That question resolved swiftly. I'd released all the souls I'd gathered, and most were gone. But one remained.
The criminal's soul. The one who'd sinned, been tried, and executed. Even after leaving its body, it denied its own death and refused to scatter. Examining it revealed why some souls linger on earth.
Normally, after the body dies, the soul emerges and lingers briefly before splitting and vanishing. But occasionally... At the moment of death, if gripped by intense negative emotions, a black soot-like blemish forms, preventing the hun and po from separating.
Unable to scatter as it should, the soul stays near the corpse, endlessly denying its death while the invading soot grows. Eventually, the soot engulfs the entire soul, corrupting it pitch-black.
At that point, it's no longer a proper soul—more fitting to call it an evil spirit.
I summoned mana to bind the criminal's soul, now twisted into an evil spirit, and examined it closely. A corrupted soul. What was this black soot? Negative emotions causing the mutation? But mutation purely from emotion felt off... Like something external acting on it... Nah, probably imagining things.
Anyway, I used mana to carefully excise the black soot enveloping the evil spirit. Damp, heavy fragments of soul shrouded in soot. This was... po. The emotions had altered the po fragments. Meanwhile, the hun retained its form even in this state.
The black soot seemed to transform the po. I infused a tiny bit of mana into the excised soot, and it withered instantly, crumbling and scattering across the ground.
Hmm... So mana is the black soot's weakness. Physical contact barely affects it, but mana works well.
Alright, now I had a rough idea how to handle lingering surface souls. Strip away the soot preventing separation, and they'll split naturally. Separate hun and po from the dead soul—let po scatter, send hun... skyward? But where do the hun that fly skyward actually go? Po disintegrates, but the hun?
Countless intelligent beings have died since souls emerged. Where did all those hun go?
Easy—if I don't know, just track one. I tied a faint mana thread to the criminal's hun and released it skyward. It slowly ascended. Its presence was so faint that even I had to focus to detect it without the thread.
I followed the rising hun into the sky, soaring quite high before spotting its destination.
Above the clouds, a massive quantity of hun clustered densely. So many faint ones together formed a visible mass—like clouds.
These clustered hun varied in size, but curiously, notably larger ones split in half, equalizing to match the others.
Hmm. Do hun have a property maintaining uniform size? Not sure.
But up close, the clustered hun gave an eerie vibe. All those faint, round blobs packed together... With countless hun gathered like this, something was bound to happen.
Then, some skyborne hun fell toward the earth. Barely perceptible, they rained down like droplets. I pursued one earthward.
As if drawn by something, it plummeted onto a small hut and seeped inside.
Inside the hut... A pair of human lovers lay sleeping. Hm. Respect their privacy. And they're naked—whatever.
I flew back to the hun cluster.
Hmm... So there is some circulation for hun. A huge amount's accumulated, but better than none.
Wait—if hun gather like this... what about po? The po scattering across the earth? Do they just vanish? Or... seep into the ground... and sink below...?
An ominous premonition hit me. How long since souls started appearing? If enough hun gathered for this... what about po? All that po seeping into the earth, blackened by negative emotions—the stuff turning souls into evil spirits...?
If some trigger ignites the soot in all that subterranean po...?
And above all, underground is... the prime suspect for where that child fled... Not good. Yeah, not good at all.
If I don't hurry, something big's gonna happen. Souls definitely need thorough management. Leave 'em be, and who knows what problems arise!
But wait. If hun gather up there and po scatters down here... what about those who died before souls existed? Did they have no souls? Or did they vanish? What happened?
And... me? Does my soul exist inside me?
Various questions bubbled up, but... for now, bury them. Felt like I shouldn't dwell too deeply...