A soul in itself was not strange. Through his Soul Detection skill, given to him as a reward for completing the Creator's experiment some time ago, he was constantly sensing souls all around him.
There were hundreds of souls aboard the carrier, the troops and pilots and crew, each of them a small, bright presence that Ning could perceive whenever he cared to look. He had grown so used to the feeling of people around him that he barely registered them anymore.
But this was not one of them.
It was something else entirely. It was a single presence, vast and quiet, spread through the entire structure of the vessel around him.
It was in the walls, the floor, and the ceiling, in the frame of the hall and the hull beyond it. It was not concentrated in one place, the way a person's soul would be. It was everywhere at once, woven through every part of the carrier, as though the ship itself were the body that held it.
Ning sat very still.
