Chapter 47: About Death (3)
I’ve been wandering the world, collecting various types of human souls.
Well, saying it this way makes me sound like a dark wizard trying to use souls as sacrifices for something, huh?
But hey, I collected them through pretty normal means, by putting in the legwork! The easiest way would’ve been to just kill humans to gather them! But I really didn’t want to do that!
I kept searching for the souls of those who met their end in different parts of the world and slowly added to my collection.
I gathered souls from the bodies of young folks who met sudden deaths in accidents without even knowing how it happened, from criminals executed for their crimes, and from elderly people who passed away after having a long life… and, though I wasn’t too keen on it, even from stillborn babies who never got the chance to be born.
After wandering all over the world and collecting the souls of the dead, I was able to learn a thing or two about the structure of souls through investigation and research.
This might get a bit boring, but I should probably explain the nature of souls first.
At first glance, souls seem like they’re all bundled together, but if you take a closer look, their internal structure consists of two opposing parts intertwined.
It’s kind of like the Yin and Yang ☯, where each part gnaws at and merges with the other to form a whole?
One side is bright, light, and warm, while the other side is dark, heavy, and cold. These two completely contrasting qualities get mixed up together to create a soul.
Let’s start with the bright side. This part I’ve whimsically named hún (魂).
This part is related to a person’s innate nature.
It’s formed from a mix of the personality and tendencies one is born with and elements inherited from their parents, and it has a basic tendency to soar into the sky because it’s warm and light.
Now onto the dark side. I’ve named this part Pò (魄).
This part relates to the personality formed after being born.
It’s connected to the personality that develops through various memories and experiences as you grow up, and because it’s usually cold and heavy, it tends to sink into the ground and scatter.
So, the innate nature and the personality formed after birth intertwiningly create a human soul.
If you’re asking how I came to know about these two… well, it’s a fact I figured out while examining various souls.
First up, Sample A. The soul of a satisfied old man who lived a long life.
This soul, having survived way longer compared to the average lifespan of humans in this era, was significantly larger than other souls. Roughly the size of two of my fists when I transformed into a human. Plus, the soul of someone who lived for over 80 years had an abnormal ratio.
If we treat the whole soul as 10, the ratio of hún and Pò in the old man’s soul was about 2:8. A totally unbalanced shape of a soul.
Still, the old man’s soul showed no noticeable anomalies.
On to Sample B. The soul of a stillborn baby that never got to be born. Its size was so tiny it wasn’t even half of my fist.
The ratio for this sad soul was around 9.9:0.1.
Meaning, it was almost entirely hún.
A sorrowful soul that remembered nothing but the sounds from inside its mother’s womb.
So, it’s no wonder the Pò didn’t get properly formed. Poor thing…
As for the rest of the samples… The death row inmate had a ratio of 4:6, the young person who died in an accident was about 5:5, and it seemed that most souls balanced out to a 5:5 ratio around the age of 20.
From that point on, as people age, the size of the soul and the proportion of Pò gradually increase, and if they’re younger, their size decreases while the ratio of hún increases a bit more.
It’s likely that around the age of 20, the balance between hún and Pò stabilizes the soul, and as they age and accumulate more memories and experiences, the share of Pò in the soul increases, thus disrupting the balance of the soul.
So, is that why issues like dementia arise as folks get older? Hmm… that’s quite intriguing.
But then what about elves, who live over 10 times longer than humans? Do they maintain a solid balance between hún and Pò because they have a plant-like mentality? I’m not too sure about that.
It’s clear there’s some racial differences at play, but I’d need to research that further.
I released the souls I had roughly studied, and they began to separate and drift away in various forms.
As the clustered souls slowly split apart, hún flew to the sky while Pò scattered to the ground.
If I were to summarize it in four characters, it would be soul-flying-spirit-scattering (魂飛魄散). That’s also why I named the two parts hún and Pò.
Most of the released souls disappeared quickly. Hmm… Do regular souls vanish this fast? Then what about the ones hanging around on the ground now?
That question was answered quickly.
I released all the souls I had collected, most of them disappeared, but one soul was still lingering.
The soul of the death row inmate. The soul of someone who committed a crime, was tried, and then executed.
The soul of the death row inmate, who continued to deny his own death even after leaving the body, didn’t scatter but remained behind. By investigating this soul, I started to grasp why some souls stay on the ground.
Typically, after the body dies, the soul leaves the body and sticks around for a brief moment before splitting into two and disappearing… But sometimes, when a soul carries a lot of negative emotions at the moment of death, something like black soot develops, keeping the hún and Pò from separating and scattering.
Because they didn’t disperse like they should have, the soul remains close to the corpse, continuously denying its death while the black soot invading the soul grows larger.
As that soot keeps growing… it eventually blackens the entire soul, transforming it.
That blackened soul becomes something you can’t really call a soul anymore. It’d be more appropriate to call it an evil spirit.
I activated my magic to bind the evil spirit that the death row inmate’s soul had turned into, and I began examining this evil spirit.
A transformed soul. What’s up with this black soot? Did negative emotions cause the transformation? But it seems a bit odd for it to change purely because of emotions…
It feels like… something external is influencing it… Nah, that’s probably just my imagination.
Anyway, I carefully began scraping off the black soot covering the evil spirit using magic.
The damp and heavy pieces of the soul covered in black soot. This must be… Pò. It looks like the soot is modifying the fragments of Pò.
However, the hún still kept its form even after turning into an evil spirit. Looks like this black soot alters Pò.
I infused a tiny bit of magic into the scraped-off black soot, and in an instant, the soot dried up, shriveled, and scattered into nothingness on the ground.
Hmm… Is magic the weakness of this black soot? It doesn’t seem to react much to physical touch, but it looks vulnerable to magic.
Alright then, I think I’ve figured out how to deal with the souls still hanging around on the ground. If I can strip the black soot from the souls that haven’t separated into hún and Pò, they should come apart on their own.
So, after splitting the two from the deceased souls, if I scatter the Pò, I just need to send the hún… flying off to the sky?
More importantly, where does the hún that goes to the sky actually go? Pò scatters and disappears, but what about the hún that’s off in the heavens? Since souls began to exist, countless intelligent beings must have passed away? Where in the world did all those hún go?
Well, if I don’t know where they’ve gone, I can just track them down.
I tied a faint thread of magic to the death row inmate’s hún and gradually sent it soaring into the sky. The hún began to float gently upwards.
The presence of the hún was so faint that even I might miss it if I didn’t pay attention. At least with my magic thread attached, its location was clear.
So, I soared after the hún, and only after I reached a pretty high altitude could I see where it was heading.
Up in the sky, lots of hún were packed together, so dense it looked like a cloud.
The gathered hún varied in size, but strangely, those that were significantly larger than the rest split in half and became two, matching the size of the others. Hmm. Do souls have this property where they like to maintain a certain size? Not sure about that.
But as I looked closely at the gathered hún, something about it seemed creepy. Watching these faint, round blobs clustered together, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was going to go down since there were so many souls hanging out like this.
Around that time, some hún floating in the sky started to drop down to the ground. The nearly invisible hún fell like raindrops, and I pursued them as they descended.
As if drawn by something, the hún that fell from the sky landed on a small hut and seeped into it. It seemed like some force was pulling the soul inside.
And inside the hut… a pair of humans, or maybe just one being a fetus?
I quickly took off back to where the hún was gathering.
Hmm… It looks like there’s some kind of circulation of souls going on after all. Even though a considerable amount is already amassed, it’s still better than having no circulation at all.
Wait a minute, if the hún is able to gather like this… what about the Pò? The Pò scattered across the ground? Are they just going to vanish? Or…
Are they seeping into the ground… going downward…?
I had a seriously bad feeling. How long has it been since souls started appearing? If so many hún have gathered, what about the Pò? What’s going on with the Pò that’s scattered and seeping into the ground??
If the Pò, which turns black just from exposure to negative emotions, and transforms souls into evil spirits, seep into the ground in large quantities…?
If the Pò filled in the ground end up developing soot due to some trigger? Then…
And most importantly, the ground is… a likely hiding spot for that little one…
This is bad. Yeah, very bad. I feel like something major is about to happen if I don’t hurry up.
Indeed, souls need to be managed thoroughly. If left unattended, who knows what kind of mess might pop up!
But hold on a second. If the hún is gathering like this and the Pò is scattering like that… what becomes of those who died before souls existed?
Do their souls just not exist? Or have they been snuffed out? What’s the deal?
And… what about me? Does my soul reside within me?
A ton of questions flooded my mind… but for now, let’s put those aside…
Something tells me it’s best not to dive too deep into that…
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