#while Seira's death scythe has five

[laryna6]

Nobles reproduce asexually and non-pureblood nobles originated from true contracts.

In a true contract the noble and human's souls join together and kind of merge around the edges. When the human dies, the noble's ~immune system goes 'hang on there's a part of me that's blurred with another mind and this could be dangerous for keeping myself 'myself.'' - The biggest danger to immortals is going insane/mindless if they don't decide how they're going to be and then act like that person consistently - see the human concept of 'integrity.'

(That is where the noble concept of 'inelegance' comes from - the Latin root is 'eligere' or 'choice,' and calling someone inelegant is saying 'you're making bad choices and if you keep acting this way you're going to lose your selfhood.' People who don't value the selfhood and rights of others will get a habit of acting as though people don't matter, and this habit means they will apply that to themselves too, and eventually degrade into bugfuck nuts or just mindless things over the millennia.)

So post true contract the part-human soul piece gets budded off and manifests as a new noble. Those nobles are capable of having children which are also non-purebloods. There are some nobles who came from true contracts with species other than hominids, too. There aren't any part-werewolf nobles because werewolf mental defenses don't permit a foreign influence over their souls (at least not long term w/o fighting it off) and a true contract requires cooperation from both parties to form.

Living around nobles caused humans to select for the ability to control psychic energy - not just true contracts, but nobles ~leak aura and humans who could absorb that aura could use it for healing and communication even without having a contract themselves. That's why there are humans with powers in Rai's Adventure and why Shinwoo is so tough: they've been living in range of a noble.

Nobles are required by law to have red eyes so humans can identify them: the criminal noble in Rai's Adventure has blue eyes and Raskreia assumes that Frankenstein is a noble breaking the law because he has noble style eyes (nested pupils) that aren't red.

Non-pureblood nobles aren't as powerful as purebloods because their souls/energy forms are smaller and the human ability to control energy isn't as good as the noble ability - yet. If either Rai or Frankenstein were to die, the resulting noble would absolutely be as tough as a pureblood. Rai hasn't told Frankenstein that 'oh hey if I die there's going to be a baby' because he assumed the Previous Lord explained the birds and the bees of true contracts. Unfortunately, nobles not realizing 'oh hey I should use language to tell people important things' strikes again.

Before they picked up language from humans, nobles communicated by mind control - inserting concepts into the other noble's mind. And mind control isn't something to do lightly. A noble calling someone 'talkative' was originally not quite an insult, it was more like 'stop trying to control me or I will start stabbing you.' Because of the need for integrity to remain themselves over the millennia of immortality, a noble changing how they act/what they think is Serious Business. This is why Gejutel is stubborn AF and why he raised Regis to be the same way.

After all, the hierarchy of survival needs is very different for a species that doesn't need to eat or breathe and doesn't need to worry about dying from exposure when they can just manifest clothing, etc. The Landegre and Loyard clans dying wasn't impractical chivalry, it was 'if we stop acting as though people's lives have meaning then we will cease to be ourselves and that's worse than just going to sleep.'

My worldbuilding for how nobles and werewolves happened in Noblesse goes like so:

Nobles are energy/dimensional beings and the first one to achieve sapience, the original Lord, got very bored and wanted intelligent company. So he started looking for other intelligent life: he found other beings like him, but they weren't actually smart because they didn't need to be, they just floated around and existed.

Then he managed to filter signals out of the universal background noise, and found an intelligent species roughly similar to humanity - carbon based, evolved on an earthlikeish world, etc.

Unfortunately, they had developed the ability to modify themselves, and of course the rich and powerful were the ones to benefit and use it to become even more powerful/oppressive, while treating the people who couldn't afford to extend their lifespans like their lives were worthless.

Basically, they were making the same mistake the Union made: not valuing selfhood means losing selfhood when you're an immortal. Kindness, actual intelligence - the species was losing those traits by assholes killing all the non-assholes.

So the Original Lord was like 'shit I found people but I can't use them as a template for uplifting my kind because they're devolving into mindless things that just kill, which is even worse than being mindless things that just exist.'

So he created the original Noblesse to make sure that never happened to him (if he started looking down on his intellectual inferiors too much) or his kind.

Eventually he got sick of being alone, created a child, and then went into eternal sleep (went back to just mindlessly existing) as technically the second soul weapon (the Noblesse being the first).

That Lord was the one who went 'okay, this other species became intelligent from being in bodies on a planet' and pushed the rest of the nobles to manifest bodies on Earth and also put some of the descendants of that species there too in case that helped - which it sort of did, because the species that would eventually become werewolves attacked everything including the nobles, so they had to do/get good at *something* (fighting/self-defense) instead of sitting around like lumps.

After Earth developed its own life, that Lord saw that evolution was a thing and made it a rule that if you couldn't keep your body from being destroyed you had to go to eternal sleep. However even in the present day the youngest nobles are only sixth generation so they haven't had enough time for any real evolution to take place.

Nobles interacted/contracted with more species than just early hominids and gradually started to pick up how to think/solve problems from the minds around them, which accelerated when proto-humans came around and they started cohabitating. The Lord then ordered that nobles had to take human form because human brains were good at thinking.

Unfortunately, the werewolves were modified into chimeras that got the abilities of other species by eating them, and humans obviously objected to being eaten. But if werewolves didn't keep eating humans for their neurons their intelligence dropped back down. Nobles lent humans power so they could defend themselves and there was basically a werewolves vs. nobles/humans war until the Previous Lord figured out enough of werewolf biology that he could make them grow their own neurons and pass quasi-human bodies with brains down to their descendants. This is the result of a ~spell anchored in one of the noble sanctuaries and one of the reasons Muzaka was 'if we fight with the nobles and humans we don't win' when other werewolves were 'why DON'T we subjugate the inferior humans?' because forget fighting, the noble Lord could have turned off the array and lobotomized their entire species. (The Previous Lord did NOT pass any of this information down to Raskreia. None of the awake nobles know how their species originated except Rai, because the Noblesses have some programmed knowledge so they know what their job is.)

The rest of the werewolves didn't know about the array because like the nobles, they lacked any oral history tradition and the older werewolves didn't want to talk about how they once had no choice but to eat actual people because they were ashamed of it. Muzaka was told about it by the werewolf he defeated to become Lord.

So even though there are two other species on earth that are in theory very different from humans, they both think a surprising amount like humans because they're mostly using human brains to do it with, so there's no Lovecraftian 'these beings are so different from us we're just ants to them' and this is enforced because the Noblesse exists and their job is to go 'oh, so you think the powerful have the right to crush the weak? Alright, have it your way' before people who think that way can kill, or worse, influence others.

The concept of superior(gets to abuse)inferior is a predatory meme that already wiped out one sentient species - the modern werewolves are descended from that species, sure, but they're so different from them it would make more sense to call them humans than remnants of that species.

The nobles were confined on Lukedonia because they kept getting attached to humans and then as a species of immortals, not having any healthy way to deal with LOSING generation after generation of humans was really fucking them up. So the nobles still awake were quarantined on Lukedonia until humans became less fragile/achieved immortality and would stop dying on the nobles. The Previous Lord took most of his generation of clan leaders into eternal sleep so that their kids would have tons of problems and would have to get better at thinking to solve them. That's why he didn't want Raskreia to be Lord, because he felt guilty about how his entire plan for noble development was making the lives of the next generation of nobles as hard as possible, with them barely having any idea what they are or how their powers worked and then starting to interact with humans again when humans are predators and humans thinking nobles are shiny isn't necessarily going to end well for a noble once the average human is capable of fighting a noble without a contract.

So the project to uplift nobles is doing pretty well, but they still need to actually start talking to each other and passing on information. Given how good some oral traditions are, certain humans probably remember more about what things were like when nobles like Gejutel and Lagus were young than those nobles do.

The Union/Maduke's fascist 'family' need to be taken out before they do to this planet what happened to the original werewolf species.

Rai's brother tried to wipe out humanity because in their generation there were two noblesse and so their job got split in half, with Rai being tasked with internal threats and his brother with external. Rai's brother decided that humans were causing so many nobles to enter eternal sleep and humans were also possessive of nobles, so once humans evolved to be equal to nobles they'd probably try to subjugate them, so they had to be wiped out. Rai was 'the strong killing the weak is a much bigger danger to nobles than humans are' and ofc genocide is wrong, so Rai had to take him out. Some nobles who lost too many family to humans (those family members choosing to enter eternal sleep instead of staying awake with the noble family who loved them) were making bloodstones to support Rai's brother because of all the nobles who were attacking him to protect humans.

Rai's brother didn't want Rai to die, so the idea was to knock him out until he was done eliminating the humans and then make him eat a bloodstone to repair the damage. Most of the humans Rai's brother killed and the nobles who also died in the conflict were resurrected by the Previous Lord: there's an array that gathers human souls so they don't cease to exist on death that he created. It's powered by the array that drains the Lord's power in the throne room so they don't rip open the Earth's crust every time they lose their temper (see the two large blue crystals). He didn't tell Raskreia that the castle array does anything but protect Lukedonia from her power either.

Gejutel knows about the artificial afterlife but it wouldn't occur to him to tell anyone because talking is a fairly recent concept for him and doing it unnecessarily is being noisy. Raizel knows about it too but assumes Franken knows about it because Franken knows a lot of things. It's possible to resurrect them just like it's possible to wake up sleeping nobles. Unfortunately it doesn't work on werewolves because werewolves have defenses against getting engulfed by foreign energy fields and dragged out of their bodies, so werewolves actually die when they are killed.