Russell blinked softly as understanding dawned on him.
Two souls in one body were actually not uncommon in this world.
How to put it... perhaps because the world was nearing its end, childbirth had become a tremendous problem.
By this point, even the women who could give birth to healthy children had mostly grown up in the various affiliated towns, where they could at least eat black taro.
But their bodies were almost completely incapable of providing enough nourishment for twins, let alone larger multiple births.
Yet while pregnancies with more than two children were exceedingly rare, twins were not all that uncommon.
Once a woman conceived twins, however, even a noblewoman... would struggle to keep both children alive.
And not every family could provide a pregnant woman with enough food and nutrients to sustain a normal life.
The greatest problem was that the better a child's aptitude for magic, the greater the demands placed on the mother's body... this was not something that could be satisfied simply by eating and drinking one's fill.
The drain was enormous... more than many minor nobles, or even lesser mages, could afford.
But who could bear to give up such a precious child?
In the end, the simplest solution emerged: turn the weaker child into nourishment for the stronger one.
Perhaps because this practice was so... vicious, a child who absorbed a sibling before even being born had a thirty percent chance of ending up with two souls in one body.
Moreover, even those children who did not develop two souls in one body seemed to be born without much sense of security. They had little genuine affection for either their parents or their families... perhaps, while still in the womb, they had understood that if they had not been strong enough, they