Chapter 86: Chapter 84: A slice of butter

Demons.

What is a demon?

To understand the nature of a demon, one must first understand the concept of souls.

Every living entity, be it a person, a goblin or a slime, has a soul.

Within the confines of our living world, there is no way to see such an ethereal thing. However, if one were to follow this entity into the spirit world after its passing, you would see its true form.

Reports of those who have returned from the dead confirm that a soul is a strange, string-woven construct that vaguely resembles a child’s doll, made out of thick yarn threads of prismatic colors.

These threads, like real threads, can fray with time and misuse.

Most often, this ‘doll’, the soul, does not persist in the after-life long enough to come undone as the cycle of rebirth returns it to the world after a process of mending and healing in the restorative waters of the well of souls. However, in some cases, this mending process of the soul goes wrong.

When these threads fray, they catch and become tangled, like curly-hair that is never brushed. The person-like shape of the soul becomes a jumbled mess as the arms come undone and get caught in the legs, and the head gets caught in the shoulder, and eventually it all degrades into a knotted mess.

Once this degradation process is complete, the state of demon-hood is fully achieved.

We know little of demons, but we know of this process, and we know the following:

- Demonic magic is highly unusual in its make-up, often diverging far from the natural elements available to a caster. It often embodies an abstract concept manifested into magic.

- Once they escape the spirit world and return to ours, they have particular hatred and anger in their souls, leading them to either become either severe threats to society or recluses that live in somber shadows, there is little in between.

- A demon’s exterior is changed, their skin taking on an easily identifiable exotic hue, most often red.

In our future studies, we hope to hand-recreate the full demonification process on noted test-subjects, to be listed in the following compendium.