Lore: Childhood Training in the Nine Worlds (Patreon)

Something a little different for this lore post! Though it will contain a variety of information about soulcrafting, it's also preparation for an eventual visual tutorial with the characters discussing the issue. These two will be somewhat redundant, but your questions and comments can help improve the tutorial graphics once there's time for it.

One thing that TWC skips over, and perhaps should have emphasized more, is the early stages of soulcrafter development. In the first book, I allude to how Theo skips over the training stages and gets out of the basic classes, but this is more work than might have been implied there.

Basic skills that Theo takes for granted, such as passing into a soulhome or absorbing materials, require a significant amount of training. Skilled young students like Fiyu or Nauda learn these within a month, while less talented might require a year or more. Every spiritual skill requires work, as you've seen as Theo branches out in more recent books.

However, this training doesn't begin immediately, because it can't. You may have noticed a lack of children and young teenagers soulcrafting, and this isn't accidental: the soul doesn't develop enough to support sublime materials until later. There are a variety of reasons for this, but from a meta perspective there's the fact that I don't think child warriors and teenage prodigies make for interesting conflicts.

For most cultures, the maturation of one's soulhome is considered the final stage of puberty. After the body completes its development, the soul finishes developing into its adult form as well. Obviously, most of these cultures are pre-industrial, so they don't have our exact view of adolescence, but their view of maturity is shaped by this element. Someone who is physically an adult but hasn't developed enough for soulcrafting training is viewed as not fully mature. This also matches mental development in most species.

All of this means that you don't have people soulcrafting from birth, as seen in some other cultivation-adjacent settings. So, what do they spend this time doing? Getting more into that is one of the reasons I wanted to write this lore post, actually.

At the earliest ages, children help their parents and learn basic discipline and cultural elements. As they grow older, they typically learn reading or other culturally essential skills. Starting at this point, however, their paths in life start to diverge based on their likely future.

For parents who want their children to be soulcrafters, the adolescent years are an essential time for physical training, especially in weapons. In a setting with such overwhelming power, hand-to-hand skill is a bit less important, but it's still relevant. When an adolescent's soulhome begins to develop, they generally have a strong foundation of physical skills and a chosen weapon.

Due to how soulhomes work, all of this training typically shapes the child's soulhome to be appropriate for the skills they've spent their entire lives building. There are exceptions, however, and these are a major concern for militarily-oriented groups.

For that reason, most cultures put significant effort into systems trying to suss out which children will be adept soulcrafters. Because of the variables in the system and delays in results, these systems are far from perfect. How much they impact the development of children and how unfair the results are varies from culture to culture.

Certain children are acknowledged as or expected to be prodigies, and they usually receive accelerated training. By focusing on sublime materials early, as well as certain practices like meditation, their tutors hope that they will finish their soul maturation early and get a head start on other soulcrafters their age. Pushing a soul as hard as possible can potentially backfire, however, either by damaging the soulhome foundation or simply due to the mental and emotional fatigue caused the child.

That about covers what I had in mind! When the tutorial is created, Nauda and Fiyu will give more personalized notes about their pasts, but that's what I intend to cover. Does anyone have questions or other topics they'd like to be included?