WELL OF SOULS
Seishi
Hey there. It's me, Seishi. This place is the Spirit World. You see, all those religions humans worship... Well, they're not wrong, but they're not right either. It's like this. The world is a shapeless mass that can be formed into anything. As its default, it is simply a mist that life and death are in constant flux. The trees planted for instance, and any buildings placed directly in the area shift from growth to decay. After humans arrived though, they used their hearts and imagination to create these personal universes. Each island has its own ecosystem. Furthermore...
Whatever whims strike these mortals stays fixed in this realm. If this is true of creating simple objects, what does that say of the Afterlife? Anything which can be believed in, then, is likely to become a reality. Everything Heaven to Hell, to custom notions of what will happen after death. Since we are not born, and do not die, we have no direct influence of the world of Afterlife, unlike these humans. We guide them to making their dreams real.
Yomi ends the lives of those living on Earth, while Rinne brings them here, and teaches them to build afterlives using their own will. What do I do? Well, first off, I make new souls. Well... God does, I harvest them. These souls become new children, and populate the Earth. Since Yomi also takes souls that no longer want to live out of the cycle of reincarnation, new souls are born from the Well of Souls, this thing behind me. Which leads to my second job. I guard the Well of Souls. I make sure no critters come in and try to gobble up or corrupt the spirits that are birthed from souls. You see, souls are immortal and incorruptible spheres of pure being, but spirits are the ghostly bodies that surround these souls. And finally, my job is to reincarnate the previously living who want to live again, back into life. When they are tired of their afterlives, and I give them a new life. I turn them in to children, and send them off to their next life. But.. lately, there have been problems...
On the Earth, this shows up as stillborn children, but here, the truth comes out... somehow, these spirits have been replaced with monsters, and the original souls were trapped inside. As my duty as Reaper of Birth...
Rinne
Oh c'mon, you can't really talk about duty! Your job is easy!
Yomi
You have no idea how tough it is to watch people die, or worse, to send them to death.
Seishi
Hey, you guys, I'm trying to be serious here! Gimme a break.
Both
Nope!
Seishi
Meanies... Anyway, we've gotta stop these critters.
And so, we wandered through the Afterlife, seeking answers. The land was filled with small islands, separated by seas of a sort of solid mist. The mist became white, and the nearby islands sprang into life with trees, grass, and flowers, with flowing rivers running through. The mist became black, and suddenly the waters ran dry, as did all the plant life. It was like some bipolar teenager made a painting and periodically tosses splotches of bright or dark paint on in layers. The buildings also were in a constant state of decay and restoration, one moment having serious tears to the roof or walls, and another minute in perfect shape. The only real constant here were the people, and the occasional island that was fixed a certain way.
You see, these people were spirits, and they made their reality. If they were well-adjusted, stuff they made was pretty much stable in a good way. But depressed people, things might actually be stuck in a rut instead. For instance, the man on the first island we came to had earlier tried to imagine a grand house into being, but when I asked him later where it went off to, he told me, "The market collapsed, and I had to sell it." In truth, he had imagined the circumstances that would make the loss logical, but what really happened was that it disappeared when he lost his positivity. Humans always do this, they try to fill in the holes of their reality rather than just admit it changes with their thoughts and feelings.
The second island seemed the opposite extreme, a cute little heart-shaped island with a large tent and a girl with a reverse harem. It seemed pretty idyllic, but something about it was off. The girl seemed perfectly contented with her three guy friends, but then I looked closely at them. Suddenly, they went all reverse color monochrome. "Fades," I gasped. "Stop that," I told her, "you can't base your Afterlife on unrealistic expectations. Someone could just do something like this, and all of it would shatter in a million pieces." As I said the word 'this', I poked the three guys, dispelling the illusion. The girl sat alone, hunched over in depression. I wanted to just leave that woman to her sadness, but Rinne has always been sentimental. We stayed behind to explain to her how she needed to look for real boyfriends, that this world could only create nonliving matter realistically.
We headed to the next island, but before we could get there, some nightmares attacked the area. These were blue-black horses with glowing eyes. They charged at me, but I sidestepped. These creatures were very dangerous to the mortal spirits, able to suck out their very hopes and dreams. But to Reapers like us? They didn't even rate as a threat. Nightmares were both spirits and physical creatures, so all of us could hurt them. My curved blade sliced across its body twice, and the nightmare was in four chunks, sliced in half twice over as I charged through it. It had no time to blink before it was in pieces, forming a puddle of blood and viscera on the floor. Yomi was far more elegant in her strike, making a single attack on many nightmares, moving on to the next one and the next. But then, that was typically all she needed, since her scythe was literally a weapon of death, while mine healed the living and hurt those of the spiritual world. Rinne's scythe was all physical, and she wasn't quite as direct as I was. Unlike spirits, all of us could hurt these things. The nightmares she attacked were instead cut in several places until they collapsed. Such carnage filled me with a disturbing thought. What if one day a Reaper went rogue? How would humans fare against such weapons?
The gore and wreckage of what we had done did not last. When the mist turned white again, the corpses were purified, and the various creations on each island were restored. The next island wasn't particularly pleasant, but the old man living on the subarctic climate apparently was happy with how things are. The island didn't change with the growth and decay cycles. A man happy with unhappiness, that was something that got me thinking about how I could be even more cheerful than I seemed on the surface.
"Hey," I asked the man, "do you know anything about these people turning to monsters?" He told me to go check out the Well of Souls on the central island. I was about to do exactly that when someone caught me attention to the south. "Is that... the little girl who turned into a monster earlier?" I asked. She apparently heard, and scolded me, "You're a bad Reaper, you are, calling me a monster!" I asked the others what was going on. Yomi explained, "I asked the Reaper of Physics for help, stopped time just before all this happened, so we could determine the source of all this." With that explained, it seemed like we were free to investigate as long as we wanted, so our first lead was the Well of Souls itself.
The Well of Souls looked like a large well, but most of it was inaccessible to creatures that couldn't fly or who didn't have a key to the well. Reapers can fly, in an awkward way, but we don't need to as we have the key anyway. You see, my scythe is the key. I jabbed the butt end of my weapon into the small hole in the door, and pathways of energy extended from the point until they lit the entire door, causing it to explode. And yes, I had to build a new door each time.
The Well of Souls is not like a regular well, there is no rope, no bucket, none of that sort of thing. Instead, it is more of an entrance to a specific area, known as Fount of Creation. This is the place where new souls get created, and where new souls create everything else. You see, a soul is part of God, a fragment of creation itself. Everything it imagines forms around it. This is why there are two bizarrely different opinions about something political, it is not that one is the "truth" and the other is "fake news", but rather these are two different universes which each have a different set of events. Each person has a sort of Territory extending from their soul that governs how reality is. Such a power is dangerous in the wrong hands, so even if the door was busted down, there were a number of protective runes to prevent someone I didn't want from just barging in there.
Assuming they somehow broke the door down or flew over, this floor has a rock moving puzzle covering the stairs. I set to work pushing this rock north, and this one east, and that one south... only for Yomi to just concentrate really hard and use her destruction powers to shatter the rocks into soil. "Dammit, I was having fun there!" I protested. Fun was a rare thing, for we were always on one mission or another. There were no sabbaticals and no vacations, so any entertainment we could find was welcome.
The next floor was more or less an open lobby. The stairs led down, but before that, two imposing statues were in the path. Having dealt with this sort of thing as part of my job, I knew about this challenge. These statues would become animated when we drew near, forcing us to fight the creature is we wanted to pass. To my left was a behemoth statue, while to my right was a carbuncle. These were summoning effects, so the statue itself wouldn't be hurt if I defeated them, but it was a pain to have to do this battle every time I wanted to check on the Well of Souls. The carbuncle itself was a nuisance but not a major threat. I had to keep in mind not to wield any magic against it, as it reflected spells and even our Reaper powers, but it was more of a hesitation against a creature that was almost too cute to slaughter. Rinne slashed up what amounted to a big-eared rabbit, if the rabbit had a large crimson reflective growth on its forehead and grey-green skin and fur. So much for being sentimental. Unlike the horse, it only took one small slice to put this bunny down, as the scythe was honestly bigger than it was. The blade pierced its fur, and that was that. The behemoth on the other hand, was not so easy to put down.
Behemoths are a significant challenge even for Reapers. Not a "threat" mind you, for nothing can really kill us (if we're wounded enough, we do go into dormancy though while our body recovers, so something like being impaled or trapped in an inherently deadly area can make the distinction irrelevant as long as we are stuck there, at least for awhile), but they were capable of putting up a very good fight. Yomi's destructive spells couldn't explode this thing in one shot, as its thick armored skin was made to disrupt magic of all sorts. With humans it would erase runes outright, but even with our magic which doesn't use runes, such attempts to directly affect it such as trying to explode it like those rocks before was basically a non-starter. That left conjuration and indirect magic. Yomi used her mastery of the elements to shake the ground, and give the critter a hot foot, Rinne slashed at it with her scythe, and I used protective buffs to reduce much of the damage from the beastie between its tail, teeth, and claws. It tried to pounce on us with its massive body weight, it tried to slam against walls, and it tried to eat us. The last one might have been problematic just from being stuck inside it, but we managed to get out of the way in time. Yomi's own scythe wasn't any good, it had stubborn endurance and could shrug off death effects, so her scythe was no better than a normal one against this creature. To make matters worse, Yomi had usually relied on her scythe's instant death effect so she was the worst of the three of us at actual weapon proficiency. Her attacks were more like pinpricks while Rinne's were decent carvings gouged into its body. A long war of attrition ensued, with the behemoth stabbing and swiping at us, while we in turn countered with stabs and slashes of our own weapons.
As usual, I had to play the support role, but it was a role that I was good at. Occasionally, I used some barrier spells in an unorthodox way to press down on it. The wounds were beginning to catch up to it, and it was getting slower. It tried one last desperate charge, but this created an opening. Yomi and Rinne sidestepped while I grabbed it by the horns, their scythes swinging it unison. The blades went snicker-snack, and lopped off its head. Unfortunately, like chickens, there is a bit of residual motion. The body continued slashing, and the mouth kept trying to bite me for a full two minutes after its head was severed off, despite blood pouring from both sides. Then all of a sudden, mid-bite, the mouth went slack and the eyes rolled. It had a glassy listless look and then it was dead.
We continued down the Well, answering a statue that questioned how many victories in battle we had. Apparently, Yomi was so preoccupied with guilt over everything she had ever killed, that she could accurately account for our kills, defeats, and escapes."7204 kills, and 580 battles won. Not counting creatures that I personally have had to kill as Grim Reaper." And so we made our way to the Fount of Creation. "This is it," said Rinne, "the bottom of the Well of Souls. But I don't see anything!" I told her, "Just wait!" All of a sudden, light burst forth. It expanded from a single point, exploded in a flash until it covered the area, and then condensed back until it was a small sphere. A new soul. "The Fount of Creation," I explained for their benefit, "The most sacred place in all of Existence. This is where new souls are created. They come from here, and are sent into the Six Paths to become form spirits and mortal bodies." The soul seemed perfectly pure. There were no foul creatures within the Fount of Creation. Rinne said, "Six Paths... Now why does that sound familiar? I could swear I've heard it." I rested my palm near my face, "Don't you govern the Afterlife? Doesn't your name even mean Six Paths? How do you not know about this?" She sighed, "Gimme a break, I send most people off to the Wheel of Life, and it sorts people through the Six Paths. I haven't checked it in years! It's... probably fine!" It was probably not fine.
The Six Paths is a wheel of sorts inside a giant critter, with six distinct locations controlling the path of rebirth.
These zones, or paths, governed the wheel of samsara in the Desire Realm. I suppose the point of existence was possibly to free oneself from the Desire Realm (the part above with the Buddha pointing to the moon), but in the mean time, mortals got involved in one of five rebirths (hungry ghost, angel, demon, animal, or human), or they got stuck in Buddhist "hell" and didn't get reborn. The latter happened when people got wrapped up in various hangups and addictions.
Sure enough, the Six Paths was polluted with evil spirits as a result of the years of inactivity. But after I quickly dispensed with them with an aura of holy energy, the inside of each path was clean. Rinne blushed, "Okay, so maybe I've neglected it a bit. It still doesn't change the fact that this is not the source of the problem. We're looking for a big monster here!" After systematically checking every part of the Six Paths, I had to admit, "It wasn't in any of these... What now?" The areas were clean. In fact, they were so clean that a Dream Fish was able to swim by. As everyone knows, Dream Fish can only function in extremely pure worlds, well beyond what is normally possible for the Six Paths. We had done a good job, but still....
Rinne suddenly had a look of horror on her face, "Oh no..." Yomi looked confused, "What?" She hadn't any experience with the Afterlife, or anything that happpened after she sent the dying off, so I don't blame her for her ignorance. Rinne explained for me, "If it isn't something corrupting people in the process of creation itself, and it isn't in the life on Earth through reincarnation, there's only one other place." Yomi asked, "The Afterlife?" Despite me arriving at that same answer, I had to ask, "But didn't we check there already?"
She explained, "We were looking for an outside source..." Now the two of us looked confused, so Rinne explained.
Despite Rinne's explanation, when we got back to the Afterlife, I had apparently forgotten everything. The townspeople said, "Miss Reaper, will you send us? I look forward to a new life," and I nearly fell for it. I had pulled out my scythe, ready to slash them with it to send them onward to birth, when Rinne and Yomi cried out, "No, don't!" I asked them, "Why not?!?" Rinne pointed to the group, "Take a closer look at these spirits..." And so, I did.
Normally, a spirit would have a pure light extending outward from their astral forms, connecting their soul with their spirit perfectly. However, when there is qi deviation, such light is blocked or distorted or even inverted into a sort of darkness. We call this being... "They're tainted!" Rinne exclaimed.
Nearby, a Ball of Flesh floated freely. I had just noticed it but immediately decided that this was an idol that possibly had corrupted them. With it gone, maybe everyone would return to normal. The Ball of Flesh resembled little more than a collage of bodies coiled in a ball. I saw overlapping hands and faces and other limbs or orifices all pressed together in obscene display, generating large amounts of darkness and rolling at us to attack. The faces tried to bite us, and the entire whole tried to crush us, but between Rinne and Yomi, we were on top of things. Yomi's scythe was able to kill sections of the Ball, but this more resembled hedging a bush than delivering a fatal blow, as each body was a connected yet ultimately distinct life. Only portions of the Ball would die each time, so it took a bit of work to cleanse the evil of the Ball.
"Whew, it's over," I sighed in relief when it was done. The others didn't share my optimism, pointing out that the group was still tainted. The Ball had been incidental, and was not the source of their corruption either. What could it be? "These spirits can't be sent on..." Yomi said. I asked, "But why?" She explained, "Don't you see? They taught each other to become evil spirits. They hid their corruption from us, in hope that we'd send them on. If they get reborn into the human world and affect others, we'd have a world like Hell!" I gasped, "No... Surely you don't mean..." She nodded, "We have to kill them all." The thought filled me with dread. Every spirit here currently in the Afterlife would have to be cut down by my scythe. The screams alone would keep me awake for years to come.
Sometimes there is some grand moral lesson to be learned, of hope and life. Sometimes lives can be saved, and people pass from this world, enriched by the experience. But sometimes, nothing can be taken from what we have to do. The scene faded to black, for I will not show such things onscreen. This was the day that we learned there are not always easy endings.
