Problematic notion about Zone 5 & 6 story bits.

[Alenore]

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.

[17cupsofcoffee]

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.

I think it's less that the aether is special, and more the sheer amount of it that Sphene wanted/needed. Aether can't be created from nothing - when someone casts a spell or summons something, they're either using up their own aether (which makes them tired/hungry) or the aether of the surrounding environment (which messes up said environment if done to excess, as see in the Sixth Umbral Calamity). When they consume food (whether it's in the normal way or... whatever the heck Zero does), they're taking the aether of that food to replenish theirs.

It seems like Living Memory has hit the point where it demands more aether than the natural cycle can provide (probably not helped by the fact that the entire living population of Alexandria got teleported into the Source), and so the only way to keep things running is to get more from somewhere else.

[Alenore]

I think it's less that the aether is special, and more the sheer amount of it that Sphene wanted/needed. Aether can't be created from nothing - when someone casts a spell or summons something, they're using up their aether to do so (which is why people feel tired/hungry afterwards), and when they consume food (whether it's in the normal way or... whatever the heck Zero does), they're taking the aether of that food to replenish theirs.

It seems like Living Memory has hit the point where it demands more aether than the natural cycle can provide (probably not helped by the fact that the entire living population of Alexandria got teleported into the Source), and so the only way to keep things running is to get more from somewhere else.

I suppose it's more "anima" (the aether we use for teleports and such) more than "corporeal aether" as in someone's physical body, I suppose.
Actually I think Anima was described as life-force in 1.0, so that would track.