Science - Soul Energy
Soul vs Soul Energy
The standard scientific understanding is that the soul is a separate entity from the physical body, presumed to be in the shape of the amalgamation of characteristics of the parents that gave life to a given creature. The soul appears unchanging, unwavering from the moment your soul is created. Trying to alter it in any shape or form is possible; Buhraies have done so, but perhaps it was one of the reasons, or the reason for now being considered an ancient species, presumably extinct, as some tales of seeing one still are told in random conversations amongst adventurers in campfires. Some still try to break research into these strange grounds, but most scientists have concluded that the risks outweigh the rewards of messing with the soul. Some now consider it taboo, especially given the seemingly random outcomes of trying to tap into the Buhraies interface.
Meanwhile, soul energy, also referred to as soul fire in older texts, is widely considered to be the contents of the soul, where our mind and memories are located. It is believed that the bluish, whitish ghastly flame that appears in our physical world across all the different interfaces is always this same soul energy being released through the soul strands of the creature casting it, with the cells of its body making the conversion from immaterial to a semi-material state as the energy is charged in spells, then fully converting to a material state when the spell is released.
Soul Strands
It is unfathomable how many connections between soul and body there actually are, their density, location, or if there's even a standard amount of strands per creature—or if there's even something strand-like at play since no direct measurements of it have ever been taken. However, it has been measured that losing body parts over and over seems to decrease these amount of connections. This outstanding fact was discovered by scientists who compared the average soul death age between siblings, where one spent their life in relative safety while the other lived dangerously and somehow survived long enough to retire. From the group, a median age of five years was removed. However, looking at individual data points, it is entirely random as it varies from person to person, with the conclusion that, once again, the critical factors were how much soul energy and, presumably, life experiences they had versus the number of lost strands they suffered.
However, it is known that soul energy itself can be measured in a standard way and that the amount you can store or how much you create depends on the parents who gave you life and how much you practice with it. Unlike usual learning, it doesn't favor younger brains, which makes sense since the soul does not conform to the inner workings of flesh, but rather the other way around.
Aging
The commonly understood scientific framework is that something binds the physical body to the soul body—or whatever it is. Aging is the process where these binds, presumably in a double helix shape given their appearance on spells, deteriorate.
The primary reason most scientists concur with this part of the theory is that what has been recovered from Buhraies knowledge, alongside fringe experimentation, showed a clear pattern of both old and young de-aging, or aging respectively, towards a center point, what one would consider true-self.
Perhaps it is for that exact reason that older people pass away or young ones suffer from SID, with resurrection attempts failing despite applying healing magic to their bodies.
Decrypted Buhraies research has shown that even they could not rebind soul and body once it disconnected. However, they could create new souls, most often with unspeakable results that not even fringe scientists today would dare to talk about in public.
Death vs Soul Death
Death, or more scientifically accurately, physical death, is not the end. What is the actual end of one's life is soul death. No one knows what happens afterward, but there is strong evidence to show that it also has some decaying processes present, with memories and soul energy being at the core of how long it takes.
For example, adventurers who had their desecrated corpses found and revived within weeks of their death showed some loss of brain cognition, often involved with their memories. The longer it took to recover the adventurer, the more likely they would not awaken after being revived, or if they have awoken, they would likely be a sliver of their former selves—sometimes a tabula rasa or behave like a crying newborn.
Soul strength also follows a Bell Curve profile, with early adulthood having the most resilience, making revival virtually guaranteed. The same cannot be said for infants and the elderly. The exact reason is not fully known, but there are theories related to memories playing a part alongside the soul infused by the parents (for infants) and how fulfilling you lived your life (for the elderly).
Physiology vs Psychology
So how are physical changes possible? The common conclusion is that the body is nothing but an instantiation of a blueprint, in this case, the soul. Once instantiated, it can be changed! To undo the changes, one must cast a spell that remolds the flesh back into what the blueprints state.
Studies have shown that reshaping the flesh doesn't appear to promote an earlier soul death. What has been shown is that the longer you remain in a different state, the more likely your mental state will shift to it, with desires and eventually personality changing as well—perhaps hormones have something to do with it. Rare cases have been studied where someone changed their physical body for decades, and once they used something to revert to their original form, the physical manifestation of the soul did not look the same from when they were born.
Scientists still debate the reason for it. Is it because of the new physical body over time forcing the strands into the soul to reshape? Or is it because the person, or more specifically, their soul, truly and fully sees themselves as someone else, and the physical change is just the cheery on top to allow them to alter and reshape their soul over time?
Scientists have yet to pinpoint the process, but many believe it is a bit of A and B, and they stand behind it due to proven research that the more one lingers in one emotion the easier it is to generate soul energy from it, at the expense of generating, sometimes even feeling, other emotions.
Unlimited possibilities
The same applies to wildly different body states, with a familiar phrase often taught by some parents, "The more someone else you are, the less you are!"
Meanwhile, any scientists wannabee would, without a doubt, have come across entire journals dedicated to "Winga Syndrome." A set of renowned studies by Forway of its guards who spent a long time wearing fake skin of winga, or big winga, and began to act like birds, often flapping their arms, turning their head sideways to look at things, beaking, or doing the notoriously funny winga hop instead of regular walking.
A specific morbidly comical case was of a guard that spent thirty-nine years as a big winga, and when he was forcefully reverted for his retirement by Forway, his body hair was feathers instead. His nose, mouth, and jaw transformed into a large fleshy, bony beak, and he only screamed out bird-like noises before he broke down in tears and went on a rampage. He only settled down when he became a big winga again, and further studies show that his intellect was somewhere between human and big winga, with him being more prone to do big winga things than human—inclusively in the amorous department.
To this day, papers on "Is it still beastiality at that point?" are still written out by people arguing on each side of the aisle, usually by younger scientists. In contrast, older ones tend to ignore that question—perhaps a life of seeing what could be crudely described as "a lot of weird shit" changes one's perspective and priorities.
Unlimited possibilities (cont’d)
Now to answer another critical question: How do interfaces interact with the flesh? This seems to be a relatively simple question, with most scientists agreeing that just as the soul strands connect with the physical body with its own rules, the soul energy interfaces also do something similar while obeying their own rules of setup and teardown. Some believe the interfaces operate at the same level as the soul, with the soul just being another interface. In contrast, others prefer the hypothesis that the soul is the fundamental frame which the interfaces interact with.
Either way, multiple interfaces can be active at a time, with combination or hybrid interfaces being a dynamic field of study given that a hybrid interface usage at a spell Tier III might output a comparable solution to a problem that a single interface solves at a higher tier.
This struct that we call the soul is undoubtedly complicated, given only the ancient Buhraies species could tamper with it, perhaps causing their demise for messing with things they shouldn't have. That's the lesson a growing majority of scientists agree with. Nevertheless, there will always be divergent, fringe scientists trying to push boundaries, for there are unlimited possibilities to be extracted from tampering with the soul.