Quote Originally Posted by 17cupsofcoffee View Post
I was also a little fuzzy on this, but a post I saw on Reddit made a really good observation: the term that they commonly use to describe the energy used to sustain the Endless in English is 'life force', but in Japanese they use 'seimei-ryoku', which is the same term that was previously translated as 'corporeal aether' (the type that sustains your physical presence, seperate from your soul - it gets spent by exerting yourself, is replenished via eating/drinking, and without it you'd become a ghost). 'Life force' seems just be what non-scholarly people call the same concept, from what I can gather.

So I think that Sphene's plan was basically to turn the physical bodies of the entire population of the Source into a giant aether bonfire to power the Endless (and then possibly convert the leftover souls into cells + Endless, which would require more life force, which would require absorbing more reflections, etc...). Grim!
Thanks for the information!
Though I'm still even more puzzled as to why it's so special you can't find it anywhere else, when we can create clones, summon living beings and that puppet who stole aether from a corpse left that corpse behind. Voidsent replenish their body aether by consuming other aether directly, like when Zero just turns that apple to aether.