Experiment - Mystery of Souls

Xander smiled at their reactions, while at the same time measuring the intellect of these sprites. They were basically just birthed into the world, and isolated from any form of communication. Would they be able to understand him? Would he be able to understand them? How should he communicate with them?

Not only that, the markings of the sprites all over their body seemed similar to magic pathway systems in humanoid and animal dissection research papers that he had read in the past.

These papers were never publicly published, due to issues relating to race tensions after all. After all, the research was done by opposing races of dwarves and humans; elves, magic beasts, and all sort of oddities were the target specimens.

He slowly approached the plant sprite, his movements attempting to show that he was harmless. However, the plant sprite was quite vigilant and continued to move back towards the plant. After a few steps, it started flailing its arms, wanting to hit Xander. Of course, with the movement of the sprite's arms, the roots and the thorns of the rose plant started to move towards Xander, flashing quickly from their positions.

Xander, upon seeing this, laughed and waved his hand. Immediately, the roots and the thorns shot out from the stem froze in mid-air, vibrating and struggling in place, before stopping altogether. What Xander did was completely stop the space in place, including the space occupied by the plant, down to its very atom.

The plant sprite, upon seeing this, yelped before moving up to the rose, and hiding there. Xander just shook his head and attempted to communicate once again.

This time, he opened his hand, gesturing the sprite to hold his hand. The plant sprite, a bit wary, didn't budge at all. The earth sprite, however, seeing that Xander meant no harm, drudgingly walked towards him, albeit slow, taking nearly a minute to reach him. Even if it saw its companion heading without fear, the plant sprite was still wary.

"This is like dealing with a disobedient child..." Xander muttered, and snapped his fingers. The plant sprite suddenly froze and was unable to move its body, and its eyes showed confusion and fear. The body began to move towards Xander's location, and upon reaching him, the plant sprite reached out his hand towards Xander's.

Xander removed the binding space around the sprite and held the sprite's hand securely. The sprite, still confused and afraid, didn't know what to do. Xander observed the plant sprite's facial reactions and just laughed silently.

While holding the sprite's hand, he asked, "Do you have a name, little one?"

The plant sprite stared blankly at Xander, unsure what he meant. At this, Xander shook his head and using space magic, transported several books on language, culture, and history to the vicinity of the plant. Nudging his head a bit, the earth sprite looked curiously before heading back to the vicinity of the root, and continued munching away.

Using time acceleration, he quickly taught the plant sprite how to read and speak. He wanted to teach the earth sprite as well, but it just continued to laze around the base of the plant, still munching on the roots.

3 hours quickly passed by in the outside world, but Xander had already taught the plant sprite how to speak and write for 3 years. In this three years, the plant sprite was already at the level of a high schooler. Similarly, the earth sprite managed to learn how to speak by just listening and lazing around nearby, yet it was too lazy to talk at all!

In this period of time, the aversion the plant sprite had for Xander had vanished, and only experienced happiness and care under him. Xander named the plant sprite Sam, and named the earth sprite Pan.

He exited the space leaving the two sprites inside, and he went inside the house to eat lunch. According to his observations, the experimentation was so far good. Although it didn't go ahead as originally planned, which was to cause the plant to have a consciousness, the generation of sprites as the holder of sentience was quite unexpected.

This begs a curious question: Are sprites actually the manifestation of consciousness of things that didn't have a soul? Are they a form of evolutionary response to adapt in the environment, ensuring that their bodies do not explode, decay, or corrupt due to long-term exposure? If the latter was the case, then that means, the plant nor the non-living soil successfully formed sentience, but rather, the collected and condensed elements did. So that means, elements, when reaching a critical mass, may form sentience, but are they considered living beings at this point? Do they have a soul, like other beings, or merely sentience from a clump of elements?

However, with his power, he could easily detect the presence of souls on the bodies of Pan and Sam, vigorous and stable in nature. So what caused the appearance of souls?

"Plants and non-living things would redirect magic and elemental power…forming a sprite…that means it was guided and had a trace of origin from the sources, like the rose plant or the soil…" Xander muttered, before he quickly stood up from his chair.

"So the formation of souls involves the elements, and a trace of a guiding power, may it be from the plants or from non-living things, such as the air, the soil, the leaves, heck, even flowers…"

"Upon reaching a certain amount of concentration, with the trace of origin, a soul can be formed, connecting the clump of elements that had formed a metaphysical form to the physical, creating a soul, giving birth to sentience!"

Xander was quite excited, as this would give way to another research direction: Given that a plant and earth sprite appeared from things commonly said to have no souls, can he artificially create an ancient sprite, one that is 1000 years or older? How about 10,000 years? 100,000?

Another question that bother him is that if he removed the 2 sprites from the time acceleration, would the will of the world rebound back, removing their existence? If they weren't, then in the same manner, can he infer the formation of souls from artificially growing the sprites? Would their souls also increase in quality?

He had briefly researched with the help of the system the information regarding elves, sprites, and the other supernatural beings in the planet.

Sprites were generated for a specific element when the concentration of all elements in one place is quite high and favorable. They are the manifestation of one specific element that dominated that place, and was attached to their origin to grow and thrive. For example, the Heavenly Tree the Elves live upon has a sprite whose age was estimated to be more than 10,000,000 years old. It is also a plant sprite like Sam, and is restricted by the same rules. He was quite curious if the tree was really just that old, but he would only know if he visited it to check the fluctuation of time.

Anyway, these sprites cannot be harmed by anything, unless their origin is harmed. The origin refers to the item where they were born or created from. For Sam, it is the rose plant, while for Pan, it was that small patch of soil. At the same time, there is only a certain distance from which the sprite can go away from its origin, or else the sprite disappears and returns back to its origin. Of course, this distance varies depending on two factors: The origin type and the age of the sprite.

If the origin type is originally mobile, like air, or water, or even fire, the sprite can move freely as well but requires the origin to be brought close to where they are.

The second factor, the age of the sprite, was never tested for sprites with an age greater than 10,000 years, as anything older were either quite rare, or quite powerful to control. For reference, a 1000 year old sprite was equivalent to a Master class stage 1, while 10,000 year old sprite was a Legendary class stage 1. A 10,000,000 year old sprite, like the Heavenly Tree, was at least a Divine class expert.

From his recent discovery and hypotheses, it was possible that natural birth of sprites required a myriad of coincidences to form, such as a wind gully for wind sprites, a valley or area full of lightning for lightning sprites, and even dense deposits of metal for metal sprites to appear.

With the information at hand, he wanted to check the second factor for sprites' mobility. After eating lunch, he returned to the garden and began to modify the plot of land where the rose was in.

He modified the time acceleration, from 1 second: 100 minutes to 1 second: 7 days. One day on the outside was a total of 1656 years. Multiplying it till the start of classes, around 33,000 years would have passed in the small plot of land.

He didn't just stop there; he modified the time and space of the whole garden. Besides the small plot of land with a faster time progression, the rest of the garden had a time ratio of 1 second: 1 day, so the plants and small critters that may be present in the garden would roughly be 4,700 years of age when college starts.

After setting up the time dilation in the garden, it was isolated similarly to that of the plot of land, meaning only Xander could ever enter and discover the changes in it. For those viewing on the outside, it would just be very foggy, and seemingly impenetrable by both magic and physical bodies. Even machines wouldn't be able to pry through to see what was happening within.

Xander headed towards the plot of land and told Sam and Pan that soon, they'll have other siblings, and when that time comes, he entrusted them to teach them how to speak and write. He mentioned he would drop by from time to time, to give books and information for the two of them to learn, as well as observe them using their powers. He gave them a set time: Only after 33,000 years would they be able to take the test he set to check if they can go to the outside world.