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| The Water Dragon. She’s in charge of water. And dead people. Her operations are not running properly due to the very<\/em> hostile takeover and subsequent downsizing of her department.<\/td><\/tr><\/table>In Jade Empire, when people die their souls are (normally) drawn to Dirge, where they pass through the gate and into their rest. I think just their energy passes back into the world while the spirit itself goes to the afterlife. I don’t know if you would call this reincarnation or not. (Dawn Star does, at one point.) In any case, the game makes it clear that the Water Dragon cannot create anything, only guide the dead to keep the cycle going. This is called “turning the Great Wheel”. The Great Wheel is like a water wheel, and as spirits pass through it turns, and the cycle of life & death continues.<\/p>\n Spirit Monks are given the ability to “bind spirits”. This power is supposed to be used on wayward spirits. Once in a while someone dies and decides to hang around and cause trouble instead of going to the afterlife. Usually this means they died under very unhappy circumstances. Spirit Monks are supposed to use their power to grab these ghosts and help them get where they need to go. <\/p>\n
The cycle of spirits is a lot like the water cycle. If you could stop the water cycle (say, allow rain to fall but not evaporate locally) you might halt a drought in the region, but doing this would have a profound impact on other places. Sun Hai stops the spirit cycle – the Great Wheel – and so suddenly life is only going one way. I’m curious what would happen if his reign had continued. Would the world become so full of ghosts that it was uninhabitable? Ghosts had a habit of killing people once they went crazy enough, so once they reached a certain tipping point the population would have begun to drop off sharply. Ghosts would have begun killing people faster than they could reproduce, and eventually only ghosts would remain. Perhaps it would have taken a few more centuries, but this outcome was probably inevitable under his rule. <\/p>\n Sun Li only understands slightly more than his older brother. Once he has control, he speaks of “forcing” the dead to their rest. He’s probably taking about controlling the ghosts and preventing them from interfering with the living, but I doubt he was interested in becoming the shepherd of the dead and guiding them all through the gate, if he even understood it. What would have happened under his rule? The ghosts might not overcome humanity under his rule, but perhaps the lack of souls going to the afterlife would have caused a “drought” of new life. Perhaps mass infertility (or mass stillborn babies) would have been the result of this road. <\/p>\n |