There were indeed beast souls inside. But instead of the brightly colored, wildly thrashing spectral forms he had seen in the other stones, the souls inside the Blood-Jades were pitch black. It wasn't just an absence of light; it was a sickening, oily void.
They weren't just angry at being trapped… they were thrashing around madly, tearing at their own metaphysical flesh with spectral jaws, completely and utterly insane. It looked like a spiritual cancer, a black rot that had eaten away the pride and sanity of the Lord-Beasts, leaving only a rabid, infectious madness.
He thought there was something uniquely wrong with that specific stone and hurriedly shifted his focus to the next one. But again, all of them were the exact same. Pitch black, violently corrupted, and radiating a mindless, feral madness that made his stomach churn. If he had anchored one of these into his core, the oily black rot would have flooded his endless sky.
