Even from the start, my creators knew extracting souls would be a herculean undertaking. Separating where the soul begins and ends in the body and mind is extremely difficult to pinpoint, the body is the soul and the soul is the mind and the mind is the body. The three pillars of a finally built house, take one out and the entirety crumbles.

There’s an intricate art to extracting the soul from the body, pull too hard and you risk creating tears, ruining the quality of the soul, pull too slow and too much of the soulstuff dissipates. Now, I’m sure you’re asking, why go through the hassle of extracting souls when you could just eat someone whole and get the soul while at it?

Soul extraction was useful due to the way bodies functioned afterwards. For a few days, they’d continue to act on autopilot, mindless and alive in the loosest sense of the word. However, with the delicate balance between the body, mind, and soul ruptured, it doesn’t take long before the mind and body starts to decay. Although the degeneration of the mind and body was troublesome, it created compliant test subjects out of anything and anyone.

Furthermore, my creators believed that an extracted soul was far more potent and pure when untainted by a physical shell and they were right. I remembered the first proper taste I had of a soul, unmarred by blood or tears. It was like slowly waking up from a deep sleep.

It was a gradual thing, like each grain of sand collecting at the bottom of an hourglass. With every soul I tasted, I grew.

No one noticed.

No one noticed the weight of the things so impossibly light yet so impossibly heavy.