Admir's face was blank — clearly the term meant nothing to him. Lin wasn't in any hurry; he was content to walk him through it step by step.
"When Sergeant Arlo and Lieutenant Vigan's squad came back, they reported what happened to you, right? That two monsters had been hunting you?" Lin asked.
"That's right. Two creatures, each around twenty metres in length, both with combat power assessed at least on par with a Tigrex based on their size."
Admir shook his head. "Honestly, we'd seen both those species before — we'd just never engaged them directly. Nobody expected the two of them to show up together right after we finished hunting the Tigrex. Even after surviving on this planet for so long, the local ecosystem still manages to surprise me."
"Good that it surprises you, because by any normal ecological logic, two apex predators like those should be completely incapable of cooperating. The higher up the food chain you go, the more energy a creature needs to sustain itself. If two monsters of entirely different species can work together, how do they even divide the kill?"
Lin pointed to the simplest truth of any ecosystem: "In fact, when they first came after me, they didn't touch the Tigrex carcass lying right next to them. Not a single bite."
Admir picked it up immediately. "You're saying someone was pulling the strings? This 'World Soul' you mentioned? But what actually is a World Soul?"
"Take it literally. Think of it as a Machine Spirit operating at a planetary scale. Right now only the Protoss have any real technique for communicating with them — humanity has precious little understanding of it."
A World Soul, as the name implies, is the soul of a planet. It exerts profound influence over the world it inhabits, typically through indirect means — but in every sense that matters, it is the planet's true master.
How a World Soul comes into being on its own remains poorly understood, but legend holds that during the War in Heaven, the Old Ones possessed a method for creating them deliberately. They would select specific worlds and awaken an entire planet's self-awareness, with the World Soul then helping the Old Ones fight against the Star Gods and the Necrons.
Some of those special worlds have endured to the present day. The homeworld of the Space Wolves is said to be one such planet, inhabited by a World Soul — though Lin had never had the chance to see it with his own eyes.
After the Old Ones' final war against the Necrons reached its conclusion, the systematic methods for awakening World Souls appear to have been lost entirely. Only the Protoss — who claim the Old Ones' legacy — still retain a technology known as the Infinity Circuit.
By placing soulstones bearing Protoss souls into the Infinity Circuit, they can cultivate something analogous to a World Soul within a planet. It is precisely under the protection of such World Souls that certain isolated, wild Protoss have managed to slip free of Slaanesh's grasp.
Lin had begun to suspect something was wrong the moment Deviljho and Bazelgeuse started hunting him in defiance of all natural behaviour. That suspicion crystallised into near-certainty when he saw the black dragon shrine the Felynes had been worshipping.
In Monster Hunter, the black dragon is the archetype of the Elder Dragon classification — a broad term for dragon-type creatures so powerful they have transcended the ecosystem entirely, capable of manipulating climate and environment at will. And if faith never points toward something that does not exist, then in the Warhammer universe, the entity that would embody a planet's natural environment could only be a World Soul.
It was still a theory — but Lin was now essentially certain it was correct. There was no need to walk Admir through every step of his reasoning; the Machine Spirit analogy was enough to make it click.
"I've heard of boltguns that produced an extra round at the critical moment, and guns that checked out perfectly fine in every inspection but jammed the instant they were fired — all because the Machine Spirit was displeased."
Admir looked thoughtful. "So if a World Soul is a Machine Spirit at the planetary scale, then what it can do scales up from a single weapon to the whole planet — including driving the monsters on that planet to hunt down whoever has displeased it?"
Lin gave an approving nod. He was growing fonder of these old veterans from the Great Crusade by the day. Their rational, methodical cast of mind meant they could reason by analogy rather than retreating into dogma the moment something confused them.
However strange the situation, they would accept the facts first without demanding full understanding, then work outward from those facts toward a solution. That kind of flexibility and openness was something the Space Marine Chapters of the current era simply could not match.
"Precisely. The loss of effectiveness you experienced with ranged weapons — that should be a rule the World Soul has put in place."
Lin continued his explanation for Admir's benefit. "A World Soul is like a Machine Spirit in this respect: a Machine Spirit that takes a dislike to its user doesn't leap up and shoot them. A World Soul won't do that either."
"Although a World Soul has some capacity for direct action, it generally prefers indirect pressure — nudging everything within its domain sideways, such as dampening the effectiveness of ranged weapons across the entire planet. The flip side of that, of course, is that the World Soul on this planet actively encourages close combat and melee engagements."
"What about your Plasma Pistol?"
"That's a Zeras-manufactured Plasma Pistol — its output has been boosted beyond factory spec — but on this planet it performs about the same as a standard pistol fired without a charge-up."
Lin produced the Plasma Pistol with its cat-paw engravings and turned it over in his hand. "A World Soul's influence is real, but it has limits. High-output ranged weapons get suppressed, not neutered entirely. Still, the World Soul resents ranged weapons being used, so after I dropped the Tigrex with one, it sent two creatures — both considerably more powerful than a Tigrex — to run me down."
"Lucky for me, I used the terrain to shake the really troublesome one, and then with the Felynes' help I finished off the other one — aggressive as hell, but nowhere near as durable. I don't expect any more trouble in the short term."
The harrowing ordeal was condensed into a casual three-sentence summary. Admir didn't add much — only the look he gave Lin had quietly shifted to include a thread of genuine soldierly respect.
They saw to settling the Felynes inside the camp first, then woke the Dreadnought and summoned Deputy Aibo, Sergeant Arlo, and Lieutenant Vigan to brief them all together on the situation with the World Soul.
The core plan hadn't changed, but everyone present showed visible surprise that what had previously been framed as 'escape from the planet' had suddenly escalated from 'reclaim a derelict void-ship' to 'contend with an entire planet.'
"I've fought across the galaxy for years — and I've crossed blades with the Protoss more than once — but I've never heard the term 'World Soul' until now." The Hunter Dreadnought was the first to shake his head. "A Machine Spirit the size of a whole planet? That is something else."
Sergeant Arlo began to think back. "Right at the start, when we first crashed on this planet and still had weapons and ammunition in abundance, we were attacked by monsters constantly. But once our weapons were ruined and the ammunition ran dry, the number of monster encounters actually dropped."
"I always assumed it was because we'd killed enough of them in the early days to carve out a reasonably safe operating area. I never thought there was a World Soul angle to explain it..."
Deputy Aibo's thoughts ran in a different direction entirely. "Is it definitely a World Soul? You said World Souls are something only the Protoss can communicate with — but we've been here for the best part of a thousand years and never once encountered any Protoss. Our range of movement is admittedly tiny compared to the total size of this planet, so a creature like a Felyne might slip past our notice — but a civilisation as developed as the Protoss? It's hard to imagine a thousand years passing without a single trace of them turning up."
"A World Soul doesn't have to be Protoss-made. It's just that the Protoss as a people have an innate capacity for communicating with them. I don't think there's any Protoss involvement here — but the suppression of ranged weapons and the two monsters sent to hunt me are both hard facts regardless of what's behind it."
"Whatever is actually pulling the strings, we need to prepare for more variables appearing inside our original plan, and do everything we can to minimise them." Lin emphasised.
"But how do we prepare for 'more variables'? By your own account, the core of the World Soul's displeasure is that we've been using ranged weapons — that's why it's been making life difficult for us."
Lieutenant Vigan frowned; he was still wearing the CMC powered suit Lin had lifted from StarCraft. "To keep this World Soul satisfied, are we supposed to just stop using ranged weapons altogether?"
"No need to be that accommodating — we're trying to escape this planet, not assimilate into the local ecosystem. Low-yield ranged fire is still fine; it can only suppress anyway. High-yield weapons — like this Plasma Pistol — are best saved as a trump card for critical moments. No sense in letting the World Soul crank up the difficulty on us unnecessarily."
"I'm not sure that's going to be enough to beat any serious threat." Lieutenant Vigan had always had a talent for cold water.
"Which is exactly why I'm going to give you the means to beat serious threats in melee."
Lin answered breezily. He began laying out the materials he'd brought back onto the table one by one, then asked Admir for the Power Sword and set it alongside them. Looking at the assembled collection, he could practically feel the blueprints lighting up inside his head.
"Trust me." Lin swept a hand through the air with the confidence of a man who had already won, addressing everyone in the room. "The secret weapon for slaying monsters — it's already in my hands!"
Author's Note: The World Soul lore is honestly pretty thin on the ground — mainly because the Exodite Eldar aren't exactly a major faction in Warhammer 40K, which means GW can't be bothered fleshing out World Soul lore that's basically tied at the hip to them.
On one hand, when the Fall of the Eldar happened, the Craftworld Eldar survived under the protection of the Craftworld's Infinity Circuit, while the Exodites survived under the protection of their World Souls — sheltered by their virgin worlds from Slaanesh's reach. But on the other hand, GW also says the Infinity Circuit technology capable of generating World Souls wasn't invented by the Eldar until M33 — which is actually later than the current timeline of the story.
If you go strictly by that lore, then Slaanesh was already born and the Eldar had already fallen by M29 — meaning between M29 and M33, the Exodite Eldar had neither soulstones nor World Souls. So what exactly were they? Slaanesh's afternoon snack? If the virgin worlds were just ordinary planets, what on earth gave them the power to shield the Exodites from Slaanesh?
In that scenario, four thousand-odd years would have been more than enough time to wipe the Exodite Eldar out of existence.
And yet, there they still are.
There are two possible explanations that patch it up, though.
First: World Souls existed long before the Infinity Circuit was invented, and the Infinity Circuit is simply a technique that allows the Eldar to use their own souls to actively create new World Souls.
Second: the Infinity Circuit technology existed all along, it just wasn't mature enough to use in the early days.
This story adopts the first explanation. Hopefully GW won't prove me wrong — though I suspect they won't bother.
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