A perfect sphere floated in the emptiness of space. an almost infinite array of colors marred the translucent sphere, shining marvelously in a dance of color that no audience would ever have the pleasure of observing.
The colorful dance continued for millions, no billions of years. With no respect to the laws of physics, as if the fundamental laws of the universe had no sway over the sphere with an apparent infinite amount of energy.
The colorful dance continued, never once stopping. But something was happening, the sphere was absorbing the colors that constituted the dance. Within the sphere, the myriads of colors were bouncing around inside. And the colorful dance was becoming less colorful as the river of time flowed ruthlessly.
The dance was no longer beautiful as it once was, a singular white light remained in the despondent backdrop of space.
Dancing pitifully, alone.
Before long, the white light, like every other color that made up the dance, was absorbed into the sphere's interior. And the colorful dance was no more.
The colors bounced and intertwined with one another, trying to replicate the dance within the restrictions of the sphere. But without the freedom of infinite space the dance failed at every step.
The sphere was glowing bright and only getting brighter as time passed. Before long, a soundless tremor spread throughout the cosmos.
The colors within the sphere imploded.
Within the sphere, all the colors were gone. But something took its place, a formless transparent entity.
A Soul.
Compared to the complexities of creating a soul, the replication of the soul is much easier. By a process of dividing oneself into smaller portions, an almost infinite number of souls were amassed within the sphere.
The sphere has finally completed its intended purpose, and with one final explosion. The Mother of Creation perished and propelled the souls into the vastness of space with two goals ingrained within their very being.
Their first goal is to fuse with a planet. And the second goal is to expand the power of their soul.
A soul is what makes the physical body they inhabit unique. A soul grows by accumulating experiences, emotions, memories, etc. These experiences attach to the soul, creating a self-identity, and expanding the soul's power and size. Allowing for the soul to have more complex thoughts, emotions, and understandings.
Naturally over time a planetary soul will expand. But just waiting is wholly inefficient, A singular soul can experience things only one thing at a time. So, by splitting up the soul into multiple pieces, the number of experiences the soul can process at a given time increases.
But the number of experiences, emotions, and memories a planet can experience is finite. So new experiences, emotions, and memories need to be created. To create these new experiences a new perspective is needed to understand them, something of a lower level than that of the planetary souls.
By creating physical bodies and infusing a part of their planetary soul within them. Life is created and new experiences and emotions are developed. when the lifeform perishes the lifeform's soul is absorbed back into the planet, taking that lifeforms experiences as its own. All lifeforms created by the planetary soul has the sole purpose of accumulating more experiences for soul expansion.
Planets generally fall under three methods of soul expansion with endless minor variations in each one.
The first method is quantitative. Where the planets make lifeforms that have an extremely fast reproductive cycle. allowing for more souls to experience things at once but generally these lifeforms are much weaker and live for a shorter amount of time. The souls they produce are small but the number of them make up for that disadvantage.
The second method is qualitative. Where the planet makes a lifeform extremely strong or has the potential to be extremely strong. A strong being will have higher levels of understanding and be more experienced than weaker lifeforms due to their longer lives. The soul they produce will be bigger and stronger, but the limited number of them will counteract their advantage.
And the final method is a mixture between to two. Not going all in on one method but hedging the bets on both of them. Souls from this world are both small and big depending on the lifeform, this method has no disadvantages or advantages in the grand scheme of things.
Planets have to choose a method both for offensive and protection reasons. Planetary souls are not friends with each other; no, they actively want to destroy other planets and steal their soul accumulation while preserving their own. They make their planets lifeforms strong and instills in their lifeforms a natural instinct to conquer and plunder resources from other planets. And a natural instinct to protect their own world from outsiders.
Planetary souls naturally have many things to worry about, because of that they cannot afford to manually do everything. They create systems that follow the natural order of the cosmos. One such system is cycle of life and death; when a lifeform dies a portion automatically goes back to the planetary soul, while the other portion is repurposed for the next lifeform the be born.
But the system is not perfect. on rare occasions a lifeform is missed, and they are born without a soul and only a physical body. These lifeforms are called Soulless. They are cursed beings, who can retain no memories, can never experience emotions, and are destined to a life with no prospects or future.
A life where the only hope and respite they can expect is the eventuality of their death. Either by the hands of other lifeforms, or time itself. Freedom from the nothingness which is their life. A mercy the cosmos gives to these pitiful beings.