Quote Originally Posted by Cleretic View Post
I would reason that it's probably the latter, because the former sounds kind of overly complicated; like, if that's how it works why would dying even factor in, and if dying matters wouldn't it require both souls to be roughly the same level of dead at the same time. But I would also argue--and I know that people are probably sick of it from me--that it probably doesn't matter enough to be worth answering.

More soul doesn't equal more better; we were getting our butts kicked just as hard by stuff in the First as we were in the Source. (Debatably moreso, I could make a case for Ran'jit being the most powerful 'just a regular dude' person we've ever fought.) In fact, we now know that what your soul was only really matters in death, when you go through that process of memory realization and then cleansing. So if someone merged with their Thirteenth shard on death, they wouldn't be meaningfully different... and if that Thirteenth shard was resurrected as a regular person, then both that ex-Thirteenth soul and that Source soul wouldn't be meaningfully different.

The only actual difference comes if that 'unverified and unverifiable' theory about Reaper Avatars being the Reaper's Thirteenth shard is true. If it is, and your Thirteenth shard was, say, Cagnazzo who died over on the Source, then you wouldn't be able to be a Reaper. ...but given how Reapers are like, I get the feeling that they'd probably call you lucky for that.
This is enough of a satisfying answer for me, thank you.