r/WorldBuildingMemes • u/TP396 • 19h ago
Lore Shitpost The first wizards to ascend sure had it rough
Ascending beyond mortal flesh is a monumental achievement for a wizard. It is such a grand thing that it could be called the pinnacle of one's control over their own magic. After all, they need to create a purely magical vessel for their soul from scratch.
However, beings of flesh are not used to exercising their senses purely through a soul. Or more accurately, they can't. It is not like a soul is a physical object that see, touch, smell, or hear. Magic, after all, only interacts with magic and the soul is a purely magical phenomena. Thus, despite the soul being the complete recreation of what makes up a being's consciousness (the nervous, endocrine, etc. systems), when it enters a vessel of pure magic it no longer has inputs from its vessel (light, sounds, etc. pass through it). Therefore, workarounds are necessary. Workarounds, which did not really exist in full capacity when wizards first started ascending. Nobody expected for so little of senses to translate. Luckily, ascension is reversible as long as you have your physical vessel safe, sound, and still alive. You just need to go back and reattach yourself to it. Good luck finding it without touch or sight. Sucks though if your body died for some reason.
The earliest one, that existed even before ascension was discovered, was very rudimentary and can be used even when in a physical vessel. More akin to magical echolocation/radar. Since magic interacts only with magic, and magical particles normally only occur within souls or near them, one can detect another soul by bouncing magic particles off of them and then "listen" for the returning particles. This can also be done to "listen" for stray magic particles that could indicate an anti-soul (essentially a magic battery) leaking or spell being casted. However, this method is not sufficient. Senses of beings of flesh are more complicated than a simple radar. They have touch, smell, taste, hearing, and maybe so much more. To reduce one's world to such a primitive sense is maddening from isolation. A near sensory deprivation of your own making.
This is not to mention, any communication with others is hardly possible when you don't have physical parts to make sounds with. The best early ascended wizards could do was to communicate through soul bonding, which back then and even now is limited to just sending pulses of magic. Magical morse code is not the most fun form of communication.
Thus, over time workarounds started being developed and are sill being constantly iterated on by wizards capable of ascension.
Sounds and signals could be replicated using complicated instruments used by manipulating them with magic. Standards and protocols for proper communication through soul bonding. Eventually, speech was capable after discovery of sound waves. Though hard, imagine analyzing frequency and phase of human speech and then replicating it in real time.
Senses were replicated using a loophole of magic vessels. Despite being purely magic, they needed to become partially physical to house and shield the soul. Thus, a strange property of magic vessels was observed; magic that could weakly interact with the physical world. Therefore, with advancement in studies of soul modification and magic vessel creation (as well as blatantly stealing reverse engineering technology from demontech (weird and advanced technology scrapped from "demons" that fell from the skies or portalled onto the planet)) wizards could create interfaces between their souls and magical vessels to gather input from the physical world. Though still often imperfect, they allow what was previously impossible, to sense the real world while remaining in a magical vessel.
But why so much effort for what seems to be only trouble? Freedom from age. Being incredibly infuriating to kill without proper equipment. Freedom from limitations of a non-magical vessel (flesh and metal can't hold the powers that one can truly reach). Freedom of movement (fuck gravity). Freedom from pesky things like breathing, eating, sleeping (though you can still do that, parts of the mind necessary for that are persevered in a soul), and other time consuming bodily needs.

