need big furrry women to sit on me rn
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Yeah so, reincarnation is real, but when they started this whole operation they only made like a billion souls for all the living creatures on earth. yeah it's not a super big deal because souls are trans-temporal so they can just reincarnate backwards or forwards depending on what's needed but it does mean at any given moment in time there are 120 beetles, 98 dandelions, 43 tetra fish, 12 tree frogs, 6 spiders, 3 poison ivy plants, 2 mice, 2 house cats, an elephant shrew, a crayfish, a crow, a raccoon, a poodle, a turkey vulture, a goat, a donkeys, a binturong, 2 fig trees, a jackal, a dolphin, an alligator, a hyena, a bison, a giraffe, a turkey vulture and 8 humans who are all just overlapping incarnations of you. sorry.
They did make more souls after that first batch but Soul.2s work differently. Yeah, they decay and meld with earths ambient qi after death and then the energy reforms as new souls around moments of pure incandescent joy like unto cosmic dust shaped by the gravity of a star. That actually happens a lot more often than you’d think but it's a little inconsistent so they keep the S.1s around just to have that stable base; they limited it to a couple species so they could keep better track but there's some crossover, obviously. Some folks even end up with both, which is how you get stuff like sanhunqipo.
It is possible to escape samsara but only 38 souls have ever actually done it. Some of them multiple times- yeah they wipe themselves and start the whole process from zero. One guy is actually responsible for like, 60% of all enlightenment events, and every time ae goes back in ae swears ae's not going to ascend again but, like. Obviously ae’s gonna.
The rest of them just take shifts as bodhisattvas and spend the rest of their time working on Soul.5 for Earth-final_FINAL-fsrs_best.wlrd.