Death... and me

Kafan continued. "We needed to find a way of getting rid of the Dead Souls. As long as we did that, the Soul Devils would have no more food. Well, they could kill living beings and take their dead souls after that. Still, compared to the abundantly available dead souls after so many years of war between the three realms, that was just a drop in the ocean."

"That would also resolve your other problem, having enough experts to deal with all the soul devils," Roan said. "Eliminating the dead souls before they could be consumed by Soul Devils also meant the Soul Devils wouldn't grow in power anymore. Sure, the Soul Devils' cultivation speed was extremely fast, but they also needed a ridiculous amount of dead souls to keep that speed."

"Yes," Kafan confirmed. "That's another advantage our Death Spirit Race had that the Soul Devils didn't. It is true that we cultivate very slowly, but we don't need even a thousandth of the dead souls that Soul Devils need to reach the same cultivation level. Once again, balance."

"Now then." Kafan didn't stop there. "We knew what the real problem was, and we knew what we needed to do to stop it. The problem was how to achieve that. How would we get rid of so many dead souls, especially since more and more of them continued to appear as living beings died? The same way we couldn't simply go around killing Soul Devils, we also couldn't simply go around getting rid of the Dead Souls."

"I and the guys continued to research this issue for a few thousand more years until finally, we found a solution. Death Spirits are, in the end, single souls that evolved to use Death Energy. Could we induce a dead soul to become a Death Spirit? We had to at least give it a try."

Kafan sighed. "I'm not proud when I say that we truly wiped out countless dead souls in this quest to find a way to artificially create a Death Spirit. The number of experiments we put them through was never-ending, and the pain we caused to them was probably something we would never be forgiven for."

"We do know we use dead souls to cultivate, but we don't torture them. Some of us couldn't even bear to continue with the experiments and separated from us. Others even tried to stop our research, saying that this was wrong. Nonetheless, we continued. In the end, the secret to creating a Death Spirit Copy wasn't in a single soul. Instead, it was in two of them."

"Two of them?" Roan heard that and pondered about the implications, the Death Spirits abilities, and what could be achieved with two instead of one. "Death Energy and a soul..."

Kafan smiled. "Seems like you have an idea."

Roan immediately answered. "You merged two souls, right?"

"Not quite," Kafan shook his head. "But not that far either. If we fused two souls, then we would basically be creating a Soul Devil. The memories of these two souls would conflict, and they would go crazy while looking for more souls to join their existence. Of course, only two souls were far, far from enough to create a Soul Devil. For a Soul Devil to be born, you would need at least a few tens of thousands of dead souls to merge together. Nonetheless, fusing only two souls would still be the same process that creates a soul devil, even if it would never really give birth to one. We couldn't do such a thing."

Kafan then gathered a little of Death Energy in his hand. "The trick of this fusion was in our Death Spirit Race's power of converting Dead Souls into Death Energy."

"First, we tried to find two dead souls that were similar to each other. The best cases were usually family members who died together. After that, we would use our power to start converting the first soul into Death Energy. However, we used a different method."

"Usually, we would transform a dead soul into Death Energy in small amounts. That way, not only could we do a good job in the conversion and waste the least amount of energy, but we could also prevent the dead soul from suffering as much as possible."

"However, in the process of creating a Death Spirit Copy, we transformed the first soul into Death Energy as a whole. Yet, we didn't make the entire soul become Death Energy. Think about it like mixing Black and White inks. You would not get black ink or white ink in the end. Instead, you would end in a common ground called gray ink. You could see both the presence of what was white and what was black before. That's how the soul ended. It would be halfway into becoming Death Energy and halfway still a dead soul."

"Only then did we take the second soul, which was compatible with the first transformed soul. Because they were close to each other, they didn't reject themselves. The second dead soul, which is a normal dead soul, would then fuse with the half-dead soul. The half-dead soul would accept the complete dead soul, and slowly, it would disappear, swapped with the complete dead soul."

"In exchange for the disappearance of the half-dead soul, the complete dead soul would fuse with the Death Energy. Remember, 50% of the first soul was now Death Energy. Yet, a new soul was now fused with this 50% Death Energy. Finally, we succeeded. We got a Death Spirit, which isn't exactly a Death Spirit, capable of using Death Energy."

Hearing all of that, Roan couldn't help but ask. "Then... I once wiped away the existence of some family member?"

"It doesn't necessarily mean that we used a family member's soul. As long as they were compatible, they could be used. Yet, it is very likely that you did since compatible souls without bloodline links were very rare," Kafan explained.

Roan sighed and couldn't help but think he, too, had a family in a previous life, a life from before he even became a Death Spirit Copy. However, he couldn't do much about it, nor could he remember it anyway, so he decided to leave this matter aside... until Kafan spoke. 

"We also seal the Death Spirit Copy's memories of his previous life to prevent any issues. Death Spirit Copies are many times easier to train when they don't have memories of their past lives. They are like babies. As you know, it is always easier to absorb new experiences the younger you are. Still, if you want..." Kafan's expression turned serious. "I can unlock those memories from before you became a Death Spirit Copy."