do not ask about v1
So in my world, there is energy in the air made of souls which most people, at least where the beginning of the story takes place, call it essence. In short, its kinda like magic or spirit energy in ao. Otherwise, the world’s somewhat similar to our world but with an extra continent and the worldmap is always displayed upside down. Also, the story takes place like 70 years in the future and most places have ‘just finished’ recovering from world war 3.
World stuff
Essence
Essence is pretty much life energy. Everything that lives has essence and a “soul”, which is the core of every living being. Since essence is life energy, naturally, it can be found in abundance in places where there is a lot of life, like a jungle or coral reef. Where there is life, there is also death, so when something dies, it releases its soul into the air, which eventually dissolves into essence and later gets absorbed by something else. Consequently, places with less life, such as deserts and the arctic, have less essence since not much stuff lives there, causing creatures in such places to absorb essence slower. Essence also has several attributes that can be increased as one grows stronger or trains to increase them.
Capacity is how much essence a person can handle. There are circumstances where it’s possible to ‘overcharge’ and have more essence than your max capacity but the excess will drain faster than you can absorb it, temporarily increasing your output. There’s an upper limit to how much essence a person can hold, and it’s usually around 150% of their capacity. Any more and their soul will get damaged.
“Count” refers to how many different actions or ‘units’ you can perform with essence at a time (the simplest demonstration would be summoning x orbs of energy, with a higher “count” increasing the maximum amount of orbs you can summon. Things such as aura shifting, activating Surge, using Vis and performing a quickstep all count as actions that use up ‘units’ and once you reach the limit you cannot perform any more actions unless previous ‘units’ are spent.
Output determines how much essence you can use per unit, with a greater output usually meaning a larger action, for example, having a higher maximum output would allow someone to fire bigger and stronger energy blasts. This is affected by diminishing returns or else attacks would get too big too soon.
Tension refers to how much you can compress essence. A high-tension, high-output energy blast would appear smaller than a low-tension blast yet would carry a more focused impact.
The Soul
Everything that lives, from microbes and plants, to animals and people, has a soul, although smaller and less sentient organisms tend to have weaker souls. For example, trees usually have larger souls than humans due to living longer, but their wills are (usually) weaker due to not being sentient.
(more details below)
The Mind
The Mind is where a person’s soul stores their memories and experiences before copying them into the brain. If the mind is broken, a person will forget everything, and then the brain will gradually send memories back to the mind as the soul attempts to restore it by creating “false” experiences to connect to those memories, but they won’t feel the same.
The Ego
The Ego is the personality and emotions of someone. Unlike the other parts of the soul, a large portion of the ego is inherited by a person’s parents before they can develop it into something uniquely their own. Someone who’s lost their ego would be like a hollow shell of a person; emotionless and “soulless” while they can still do things, just without feeling anything. just like me
The Will
The Will encompasses the desires, fears, preferences and goals of a person. With a broken Will, a person is unable to do anything. They’d still be alive and able to breathe and feel emotions, but will just be there, unable to move or even think until their will is eventually restored. When a person (or something) dies when they still have attachments to this world (regrets, grudges, unfulfilled promises, etc.) and their will is strong enough, their soul will not fade away into the ether and instead become a ghost. After death, parts of the will may still linger within the body for a while.
Daemons
Uhh, these are kinda like my world’s equivalent to devils in chainsaw man or abnormalities in project moon’s world
Daemons (not demons) are beings manifested from the Ether through concepts, influenced by the (usually negative) feelings nearby people have for them. They can have various shapes and forms, from that of a cute small animal to a grotesque, eldritch abomination, to even a completely human appearance.
There are several factors that may affect a Daemon’s manifestation, such as the context surrounding a concept and the amount and type of feelings toward it determining its power(e.g, a Gun Daemon in the u.s. would be much more powerful and aggressive than one in most places, but would require a lot more negative feelings from a wider area to manifest), the type of emotions felt for the concept (a Dog Daemon in one place may protect people who like dogs, while a one in another place will chase and attempt to bite someone afraid of dogs) and the strength of said feelings.
A Daemon’s power comes from their Aspect, which is derived from the concept and emotions that spawned it and grants it an ability related to it. They know the name of the Aspect that brought them into existence and can use its abilities like how humans wield their Gifts. Like any other living creature, they have a soul, but they aren’t able to manifest a Gift or Anima or resonate with soul gear.
Although Daemons have been manifesting since several millenia ago, their appearance has been extremely rare until roughly 40 years ago, when an event known as The Rupture happened, causing millions of daemons to appear worldwide, wreaking havoc and resulting in the deaths of almost 20 million people, especially in large cities. Eventually, the amount of manifestations died down to a relatively manageble level, although daemons still kill roughly 2,000 people each year.
When a daemon is “killed”, its corpse will fade away after a bit and its core will be revealed, which is usually in its center (or where its heart was if it had one). The cores resemble crystals, which looks different depending on the Aspect, and is typically used to extract Soul Gear and essence from. However; cores have a limited amount of essence and cannot regenerate it on their own, so a daemon can be kept alive and have its essence directly extracted from it, which is usually done forcefully and causes them great pain, but can create an unlimited supply of Soul Gear.
A Daemon with a strong enough Mind can also create a “contract” with a person, which allows them to borrow its power to manifest Anima (or Aberration) from its Aspect based on the contract’s conditions. In some cases, the contractor ‘absorbs’ the Daemon and can even summon it at will. It is possible to hold multiple contracts at once and also borrow multiple Animas at once.
“The League”
The New League of Nations, more commonly referred to as just “The League” refers to the succesor to the united nations that was formed after the war, although somewhat different to its predecessor. It has three representatives for each country that is a member, and it is headed by the not well-known yet not exactly hidden Council of Aesir (not that Aesir) that makes the most important desicions that could directly affect the entire world, taken up by the lower council of representatives. The members of Aesir are above the law in most cases except the laws of the Council. You can think of Aesir members as an equivalent to the world nobles in one piece and the Council as the elder stars, i guess, including the corruption in recent years. Things such as what is considered ‘human’ (there are people who are technically not actual humans but are protected by human rights), how many weapons of mass destruction a country is allowed to have, guidelines and restrictions for technology, and so on are determined by the League, although more specific laws are left to each country to decide for themselves. The few nations that aren’t a part of the League recieve very limited support from it and are not affected by its laws.
“The Association”
“The Agency Association” is an international organization under the league that deals with things such as rankings or bounties for individuals, threat levels and such. They have seven main branches which oversee the lower national branches of each of the eight continents besides Antarctica.
People who work for the Association are known as “associates” or “agents” (placeholder names? think of them as project moon’s fixers) who can either be independent and take requests on their own, or do so in small or large “offices” made of a multiple members or work under one of the 13 Circles
A universal rule of the Association states that; Unless they have a death warrant, killing people is only permitted if they are actively seeking to harm someone, and should ideally be done only when absolutely nessecary.
the Inferno Express
(Somewhat inspired by the Library in library of ruina?)
Also known as the Hell Train, is a phenomon that started with an event around 80 years ago, and has since occured every 999 days exactly.
During this event, exactly 1002 tickets manifest themselves over a period of nine days, and people seem to be drawn to them by fate, as all 1002 tickets were found every time. Signing a ticket will teleport you and anyone within a 4 foot radius to an ominous area that appears as a somewhat modern but recently abandoned train station on a floating island in the middle of an endless red sky and feelings such as hunger and thirst and sleepiness progress much slower.
At the evening of the ninth day, the entire area gradually becomes awash in a red light, which means the train is coming. When it arrives, the remaining ticket holders must board the train within 16 minutes and 39 seconds or else they will be left behind to witness the station’s closing, which you probably wouldn’t want to be there for. Afterwards, the train takes off and passengers may either just wait or participate in a series of “Ordeals” to gain points which can be redeemed at the destination. It is advised to be wary of the night, because during nights in the train, every passenger is allowed, encouraged even, to kill each other. However, if someone attempts to harm another passenger during the day, they will die instantly.
There is some significance to the number 9 often displayed on everything related to the Inferno Express.
The Ether
The realm of potential and endless possibilities, the Ether can be seen as a many-sided mirror between alternate universes. You can say it’s the soul of reality itself, since it’s where all essence comes from.
The fifth-dimensional proximity of an area to the Ether determines its influence on that area, which varies throughout the universe(s). So a place “too far” from it would be devoid of essence- and therefore lifeless, a slightly closer world could support life, although without the other phenomena associated with essence. A world in close proximity to the Ether would cause some individuals to accumulate enough “Talent” to develop abilities such as aura manipulation, and what this world calls Gifts and Anima.
This world’s uncommon closeness to the Ether can cause dimensional Rifts to appear which, depending on the type of rift may either cause otherworldly beings or objects to emerge or pull things into another dimension.
There has been a rather recent event in which in a somewhat successful attempt to give everyone access to Talent, a group of scientists on an island near Japan have artificially torn a hole in reality, causing the energy of the Ether to leak into Earth.
It is also possible for one to go into the Ether as it is a spatial dimension
Powers of the Soul
Aura
Aura is the essence someone has within themself, and normal people can only control it very slightly but Talented people can control it like trace energy in ao.
Talent and Gifts
Talent refers to the amount and control everyone has of their aura. Naturally, like actual talents, some people are simply born with more than others and some train it to their limits. Both are known and effective ways to gain power, but the strongest are those who are both born with power and don’t take their luck for granted, allowing them to reach greater heights. People who can activate their aura are referred to as Talented and those with a special ability are Gifted. Talent is hereditary to some extent, but there have been cases where a weak person is born to a powerful family or where a nameless nobody has godlike potential. Most Talented individuals awaken at the ages of 13 to 15 but awakenings can happen anywhere from 10 to 19 and even outside that range extremely rarely.
Gifts are manifestations of that Talent through a person’s ego.
Anima
The first realization of Anima usually happens when someone encounters their “true self” or goals or when their life is in danger. At this stage, Anima manifests only as the ability itself with maybe one Anima Gear, but over time, the user will be able to summon more of their Gear at once until they reach Full Realization and eventually indefinetely maintain their manifestation. (like effloresced e.g.o but different.)
At this stage, one can enter their inner world to complete the Trial of the Heart and awaken their Twin Soul Anima, borrowing power from an alternate self and using it alongside their own. (think of this as bankai, i guess)
Upon realisation, if the anima user previously had an insignificant amount of Talent, their anima will quickly accumulate enough talent for them to use aura and maybe even unlock a gift.
Inscriptions
Inscriptions are special passive abilities “inscribed” on a person’s soul that are usually hard to notice, and contribute to their Story. As a person develops their personality and tendencies, they may gain inscriptions that conplement them. Most people, even un-Talented, unlock their first inscription at around the age of five. Having multiple inscriptions is rare, though.
For example, a paranoid person may have an inscription that causes them to sense nearby dangers to themself, or an insightful person having one that lets them somewhat feel if a person is lying. They may also include things like luck, perfect memory, pain tolerance and even the power to ignore fate itself on one case.
Vis and Mindscapes
Vis (literal ripoff of shin and mang i need more ideas) (also called by other names such as “Iryoku” or “Aur” or sometimes just “Light”) is essence refined into pure Willpower.
Vis is useless by itself and has to be channeled through something for it to work, which then can significantly boost an attack and imbue it with metaphysical attributes(?). In order to use Vis, one must focus their mind on a memory, and the emotions that memory may evoke will influence the quality of the Vis that was manifested, like rage being like flames or the feeling of hopelessness manifesting as ashes. It is also possible to manifest Vis from the present in the heat of the moment, which is more powerful but less reliable. You technically cannot “run out” of Vis, however using it for an attack drains your willpower, so as long as your will is still intact and your mind is focused, you can still use Vis. Vis also gains unique attributes depending on the user’s soul affinity. (tba)
The Mindscape (placeholder name?) is essentially a person’s “inner world.” They can enter this space, usually while unconscious, and its unique appearance and physics depends on the owner’s personality, thought processes, and most prominent memories. Sufficiently advanced Anima users can physically warp themselves and even other people into their mindscape (domain expansion, pretty much), wherein a set of ‘rules’ and conditions are established, usually giving the owner an advantage when used in combat. (tba)
Unconventional power
Physical augmentations
You can artificially boost your physical capabilities if you have the money and find someone willing to help you out with it.
Prosthetics
Most people with prosthetics had previously lost an arm or leg and get one to take on the role of the missing part. However, there are a some who purposely choose to replace their body parts with artificial ones with greater capabilities such as an eye with x-ray vision or a hand equipped with an energy blaster.
Nano-augments
“Nanomachines, son! They harden in response to physical trauma!”
A recent (and very expensive) development has enabled the possibility for someone to inject themself with nanobots capable of giving them abilities previously accessible only by Talented individuals. Some of these include but are not limited to; kinetic energy absorption, electricity manipulation, magnetic telekinesis, body hardening, and regeneration.
Soul Gear
Soul Gear refers to any (usually holdable or wearable) item that develops a soul that isn’t manifested naturally. Such objects that are neither holdable or wearable are considered (unnamed). In a way, they could be considered a ‘lesser form’ of Anima Gear.
The most common way an object becomes Soul Gear is when someone (or multiple people) have particular level of attachment to it for a while.
Soulbinding happens when the attachment one has to a Soul Gear item becomes so strong they effectively turn it into Anima Gear, allowing them to summon and unsummon it and use it with a greater level of power.
When an Anima user dies with their gear manifested, part of their soul will enter it, causing it to become Soul Gear. Gear produced with this method tends to lose a fraction of its power and its Twin Soul becomes lost due to the original owner being dead, however like other soul gear, you can still manifest your own Twin Soul onto it if it becomes soulbound to you.
Other unique gear
Silver Soul/Ignition Gear
- There are cases when, after being imbued with enough feelings, an object will gain a ‘Silver Soul’, causing it to gradually absorb Essence and gain some resistance to damage. Eventually, it will manifest an ability but not in the way soul gear does. (this was inspired and the name was ‘stolen’ from one of @key’s ideas.) The conditions for an item to develop a Silver Soul instead of becoming Soul Gear aren’t well known, but (to be added). The main functional difference between Silver Soul items and Soul Gear is that while soul gear mainly uses the energy of the wielder, silver souls have their own supply of essence.
Abberation
Abberation happens when someone’s loses control of their Will, causing them to morph into a (usually) monstrous form somewhat resembling their Anima. This usually causes them to go insane but there are exceptions. There are two main ways a person can Abberate; One is when an Anima User loses sight of their ideal/true self or their goal and sinks into an unstable mindset (usually while having their Anima manifested), losing their grip on their Will and letting the Ego take over. Failing the Trial of the Heart guarantees Aberration. The other way is by using Soul Gear (usually from a daemon) one is not compatible with or has a will to weak to control it, causing the soul of the Gear to consume the user and mold them into its image. It is possible, but rare for an abberated person to use Vis, because Vis uses the power of the will that is slipping away.
Abberation has five stages of progression, which i will name later:
- Stage 1; This phase is characterized by a few small unnatural features appearing on them. (for example their arms start to elongate and their skin begins to take on the texture of wood).
- Stage 2; Said unnatural features become more prominent as the subject’s will sinks deeper into the abyss.. (parts of the example’s body are starting to resemble tree bark, they start growing branches from their arms).
- Stage 3 (tba)
- Stage 4 (tba)
- Stage 5; There is no turning back. The mind of the subject has sunk to rock bottom and the darkness comsumes all, causing their soul to crystallize. (the subject has lost almost every semblance of a human; their limbs are like great tree branches, …(will add to this later im getting tired)
Mark of Sin
The Mark of Sin is a rare power that appears as a marking loosely resembling a character from an ancient language, somehere on the holder’s body. One may realize this instead of Anima if they meet certain requirements. One of those requirements is a desire that diverges greatly from the “natural order” that GOD had tried to force upon the world. It was originally a curse bestowed by Him to seal the will of those who oppose Him, but since He was weakened by a certain event, the Mark had evolved into a powerful ability while the negative effects have softened.
Manifesting the Mark inflicts you with a negative effect (which could be anything like insanity, taking physical damage from using abilities, or being more vulnerable to soul damage) along with a few abilities such as Cursed Armament (basically haki but it hurts to use(?)), Bleeding Heart (ability to drain your life-force to make your attacks more violent), and most importantly, the ability to Aberrate at will and maintain your sanity and human form to some extent. (think of this as Resurección in bleach). While active, the Mark weakens your Will by about half, which makes it harder to use powers like Vis and is also the reason it’s (with a few exceptions) incompatible with Anima.
Empty Vessel (might not fit in with the rest of the system? idk)
Through an unknown and dangerous method, one can sacrifice their Talent and all the essence in their body, converting it to pure physical power far greater than what they could achieve with the power boost from aura, and allowing them to use the other powers of the soul, especially Vis, more easily. Also, Empty Vessels can detect essence using the five physical senses rather than the ‘sixth sense’ Talented people have.
Although it’s significantly harder for an empty vessel to manifest Anima than it it is for a regular or Talented person, it’s not entirely impossible, and one can regain their Talent by realizing Anima for the first time.
This process is dangerous because it destroys the ego, with the risk of causing the entire soul to break, killing the person instantly. Even if the operation is successful, it will forever impact their personality due to their ego being different from what it was before being destroyed and regenerated.
Ascendance (probably getting retconned)
Ascendance refers to the penultimate form one can use by tapping into the powers of all parts of the soul at once, temporarily removing all limits. Because of this, Ascendance requires an extreme level of mastery of at least two of the three powers of the soul. Due to the immense cost of this ability, most of those who can perform Ascendance can only do so briefly, allowing them to unleash a devastating ultimate attack or a desperate last resort. Using Ascendance may cause permanent soul damage, potentially sealing one’s Talent forever, or worse. (think Ichigo’s Mugetsu)
Transcendence takes this a step further. By grasping a strand of the infinite energy of the Ether, one may attempt to use their body and soul as a conduit for that unlimited power at the risk of opening an interdimensional rift causing who knows what to come out and almost certainly losing your soul to the infinite flow. Out of 142 attempts to achieve Transcendence, 6 were successful and only one survived.
Inspirations, mostly webtoons
unOrdinary, Hand Jumper, Shogunned’s power systems - how i kinda want the primary power system to feel like.
Project Moon’s Shin and E.G.O (and distortion/corrosion to some extent), Ordeal’s Talents and Talent gear, Bleach’s Bankai/Resurreccion/Voll-Sterndich - how i kinda want my secondary power system, Anima, to be like, also some of the names.
several other stuff such as ronillust’s soul magic system and my own ideas
i’ll add more to this later
i need ideas
