Part of me had always prepared for the possibility that I wouldn’t be able to bring everyone back. After all, I had been gone for months, and a soul’s lifespan outside of the body should theoretically only be a single month. After that, the chances of a successful resurrection quickly dropped. I was already lucky that Terra was able to survive through her unique properties, both her strange relationship with Gaia and her enduring golem body. It only stood to reason that Garnet, who didn’t have anything special about her, would have passed on and been absorbed.
I still had to try to resurrect Garnet. I understood that pulling her from the clutches of Twilight wasn’t quite like resurrecting someone from Gaia. However, unlike Gaia who broke a soul away, Twilight merged with the souls. That meant that the soul would remain intact. Even if it had been several months since they died. Yet, I also realized that with the slave bond severed, I had nothing truly connecting me to her soul. I looked through the stuff in my soul world, and I quickly realized that I had nothing of Garnet’s, nothing with her signature that could be used to resurrect her.
The silvthril sword that she had a hand in making was still in the dungeon treasury. It had remained unperturbed even through the Maid’s Lament. Powerful enchanted items tended to not be digested by dungeons for mana. The effort of doing so often exceeded the energy that could be gained. This was probably also why certain souls weren’t digested by a dungeon. Powerful souls and strong lores survived. It was too much effort to break one down.
I started to realize there was probably a second reason too. Strong lore had a chance of changing a dungeon. Seeing the lore that made up Twilight, and just how insignificant I was compared to her world lore, I began to realize that’s likely how a normal soul felt when it was being devoured by a dungeon. However, if that balance wasn’t so exaggerated, then the absorbed soul would alter the lore just as much as the lore would alter the soul. Suffice it to say, that this experience with merging with Twilight had given me a lot of insight into the lore and what soul absorption truly meant.
However, those thoughts were only a means to an end. The point was to bring Garnet back. I shot Terra a look.
“Where is her body? Clothing? Did you keep anything?”
“It’s not that simple.” Terra sighed. “You remember the difference between karmic souls and mana souls, right?”
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“A karmic soul is made of miasma, and a mana soul is made of mana,” I responded impatiently.
She nodded. “What happens when someone with a karmic soul leaves it?”
I blinked. “They… slowly are converted to mana?”
She nodded again. “And the opposite is true as well, when a person enters a dungeon, their soul is slowly corrupted by miasma and becomes karmic. Do you remember the difference between miasma and mana?”
“Mana comes from this world, and miasma comes from other worlds…” I frowned as the meaning behind her words started to click.
“Miasma is essentially mana with a different life signature, one coding to a different lifestream. That’s what all of this is… it’s the congealed miasma from Twilight’s lifestream.” She gestured haphazardly. “The fundamental reason you can’t resurrect a person from a dungeon is that once their soul is exposed, the dungeon will begin to alter them, turning their soul karmic. It isn’t just that their soul is broken up and turned to miasma, but the signature changes completely. Their soul becomes unrecognizable.”
Her words made a lot of sense. I had always assumed that priests didn’t both resurrecting the dead in dungeons out of fear of dungeons, and because of the way dungeons broke apart souls quickly to feed themselves. While that was certainly a reason, one could theorize that a priest could make a good profit just by waiting at the entrance and then resurrecting anyone who died within a day or two.
However, there was a second problem at play. The very act of the soul becoming karmic changed its nature. Every soul had an identity, its unique code. You could only resurrect someone by summoning their code. That signature could be read off of various things.
Something that they imparted their mana into, a slave bond, or a drop of blood. However, if something started to scramble that signature… resurrecting them would be impossible. Priests didn’t have a resurrection spell or the mana reserves of half of my own. It was likely they didn’t resurrect people from dungeons… because they never succeeded in doing so. I felt like this was something I should have known already. I should have had more conversations with Mary. Since my White Mage ability always seemed better than the Priests, I had never really asked very many questions about them. Plus, they were mostly secretive and closed off, not wanting their secrets to leak outside their respective religion.
However, the point of Terra’s words was crystal clear. Garnet’s signature had already changed. That’s not to say she had a karmic soul already, but it probably wasn’t fully mana either. Even if I had her body, and even if I had the strength to pull her from Twilight’s clutches, I wouldn’t be able to summon her.
Regrettably, I didn’t have time to dwell on it any longer. Shadows began to rise from the ground, forming into three-dimensional shapes all around us. Twilight had started her move.