Jason holds up the mind pearl, “This little pearl solves that problem and why your kingdom is so keen on keeping the ecosystem balanced. From what I can see, someone skilled in alchemy should be able to create a potion from them and some other stuff to fix the problem. These mind pearls can control the swarm cat’s body. A tail or two wouldn’t phase it.”
Peter takes a deep drink from his mug. “Well, you found me out. How did you figure it out? You said you examined it, but I didn’t detect any skill use.”
Jason places the mind pearl back on the table. “A skill to assay the pearl wouldn’t bring up what I just talked about. Instead, I used my Energy to examine it. I’ve trained to control it at a very fine level of detail. While I can’t project it too far from my body, I can infiltrate such a small bauble with ease. Now I couldn’t tell you too much about the mind pearls. If it wasn’t for one specific quirk, I might not have even known.”
Courtney rolls her eyes, “Don’t leave us hanging. It is obvious you are going to tell us what it is so out with it.”
Jason laughs, “Simple enough, I need them myself. In fact, I could use whatever potion the kitsune uses to adjust to their tails. See, I control my Energy as threads and I’m reaching the limits of controlling them.”
Peter nods, “Yeah, it would help with stuff like that. While not well known, the potion of limb compatibility is always in demand. There aren’t many who grow extra prehensile limbs, but skills that create fake limbs are a dime a dozen. Though that is likely because of this problem. If they set the skill up to get around the limb limit, they would be so much harder to figure out. Any fool can copy their arms, but with mana. It takes a genius to figure out how to use them and their real arms at the same time.”
“Since the potion is a shortcut to that, of course people want it. And it is a shortcut, mind you. It isn’t like you can’t train to get the control you need. This isn’t the physical brain being used to control the limbs, but the soul. Though I wonder if it will work on you. Travellers don’t have the connections needed to get a potion. That and the ones that do, don’t believe it will work on them.”
Jason smiles, “So does knowing you count as having connections?”
Courtney shakes her head, “Does it matter? You should know better. Mind modification does not work on travellers.”
Jason gestures at the mind pearl on the table. “The thing is, these don’t affect the mind despite mind being in the name. They should instead be soul pearls or some such.”
Peter laughs and shakes his head, “Can’t hide anything from you. The swarm cats aren’t too different from other cats. They keep all their thoughts in their head. These pearls,” And he grabs the pearl off the table to put away. “The way they connect to the other cats is allowing the influence of the swarm’s soul to take control.”
Rosha frowns at the mention of souls and interrupts them. “I thought a soul meant being sapient. The swarms we are fighting aren’t sapient. Plus, doing things like culling sapients will not make you popular.”
Peter shrugs, “Swarms don’t have souls, at least not to start. The mind pearl provides the connection, and a pseudo-soul of sorts forms within the swarm. That decides in which direction the swarm will develop after going past being a swarm. If one specific member of the swarm monopolizes the pseudo-soul, then it becomes the queen of the swarm. When the pseudo-soul has spread out over the swarm, it becomes a hivemind.”
Rosha fixes everyone else with a glare, “And what might be the difference between a pseudo-soul and a genuine soul?”
Peter looks away and Jason coughs. Only Courtney answers, “That, that’s a little tough to answer.”
Rosha crosses her arms, “Is this one of those we want there to be a difference circumstance?”
Peter shakes his head, “I can promise you that is not the case. They are not sapient, they do not have a soul. The gods can vouch for me, even the System can vouch for it. My kingdom has even had some of the most powerful travellers come by and check for us.”
“The swarms do not have souls. The pseudo-soul that they have is to regular souls like dirt to stone. It has all the components of a soul but isn’t one. When a person dies, their soul goes to whatever afterlife they earned. When a swarm dies, all those little particles of not-soul drop to the ground.”
“The way the System stops a swarm from becoming too powerful is by putting pressure on those particles. Should the swarm fail in becoming sapient? That pressure will blow apart the particles. Should they succeed, those particles will collapse inward, forming a soul. You could almost see that moment as when they are born.”
Rosha keeps her glare up for a moment more before nodding. “I can accept that. It wouldn’t have felt right if we had been killing a sapient.”
Jason raises an eyebrow, “What about if we fight bandits?”
Rosha shrugs, “They are asking for it. With how Peter was lining up the swarms, that would be more like being part of a firing squad. Shooting fish in a barrel except the fish are people.”
Jason nods at this, “I can respect that.”
Thanks for chapter
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The struggle in finding the difference between pseudo soul and soul reminds me a bit of our struggle in finding out if there are other animals on our planet that are truly sapient and not just sentient
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Also there certainly is a difference in taking a life in self defense and being the aggressor. A good line to draw for the morally just
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Have a good day
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IRL I don't think we will ever be able to have a specific "This is a sapient being" marker. In my story I can have a shortcut by literally just saying if you are sapient, you have a soul which makes the more game-like nature and rampant killing of things that some would want to question the morality of (goblins and such). The pseudo-soul is a more defined thing than the IRL difference between sentient and sapient (if there actually is some sort of hard difference which there might not be). The problem most people have is the fact that a pseudo-soul involves some deeper knowledge on how a soul actually works.
Basically once something has a soul it begins to build up a shell around it which in a world with levels will be like the rings of a tree. That shell is what basically everyone refers to if they ever talk about manipulating a soul and it represents a sapients growth. The soul as a whole is like a computer. The core (sometimes referred to as the true soul) being the power supply and the shell is everything else. Beings the reincarnate with memories of a past life or some form of inherited ability that isn't based on their body are souls that start with some of that shell already in place, either from the past life or passed on from the parents.
Without the true soul, a being will still gain the fragments that would build up on a soul, but a shelf full of computer parts isn't exactly going to let you browse the internet. What a pseudo-soul represents is those fragments being put together in a form that a soul will fit in and thus making it many times easier for the soul to just slip right in. Basically you have a fully built computer and are just waiting on said power supply and once you get it, it is just a few minutes of work before you can plug it in and start setting it up.
This however is also where the comparison breaks down because even without the soul, the being will be able to start taking on sapient adjacent characteristics. The best example of this are some undead. Basically anytime you see an undead that copies the complex actions they took while alive without being aware enough to be sapient. Those undead have lost their soul because they died, but were brought back in a way that some of their soul shell was still intact. Of course if they gain a new soul, they won't suddenly remember their "past life" because unless someone managed to find their original true soul before the void between dimensions washes it clean they will be a new sapient being.
More to the point, while a completely blank true soul can be anything, most true souls haven't been in the void long enough to lose literally every bit of their last life's shell and so will tend towards certain aspects. Whether that means species or something else is completely up to what was left behind and of course that remaining shell bits don't mean the soul can't become anything.
Now with swarms specifically. Normally insects have a hard time becoming sapient because of their size and lifespan. While being smaller or bigger doesn't directly equate to whether something will have an easier time being sapient, beings that are too much smaller or bigger than a dimensions average sapient size will have a hard time gaining a soul because dimensions do have some affect on what souls they attract. Lifespan is directly related to how easy a non-sapient being will find it to become sapient. After all, the longer a being lives, the more bits and pieces of a pseudo-soul they will have gathered. Of course like having the pieces of a Lego set, unless you follow the instructions the harder it will be to end up with anything that looks like what the set supposedly is supposed to be. So while anything can gain a soul, some beings have an easier time because they naturally develop in the direction of gaining a soul (legendary and mythical beings like Dragons and Phoenixes fit into this category to such a degree that to be a True Dragon or a True Phoenix, they have to be sapient).
Swarms cheat at this. By combining themselves together they act like a grab bag of Legos and sure, you could put them together so they match a set, but you could also just make a giant ball of random Legos. The first path is that of gaining a pseudo-soul and becoming a hivemind. The second path is what the System is preventing, that of becoming a True Swarm. After all, once you build a lego set, you've built the set and even if you expand it, if you want it to still look like the set there is only so much you can do. A big ol' ball of Legos though? You can just keep slapping new pieces on. Worse yet with a true swarm, when a member of the swarm dies, it doesn't lose the piece it added, that only happens if the member leaves the swarm. If a soul shell is comparable to a healthy multicell creature, the true swarm is like a blob of cancer. About the only upside is that they can't absorb sapient beings into their swarm... with caveats but we won't be seeing that in NeoRealm.