Chi Ghost

Chi Ghosts are the souls of Chimians, able to be summoned following the death of the physical body. At some point soon after the end of the Tiger—Lion War, over 900 years before the events of the Roleplay, the Gorillas used alchemy to create the Chi Ghost concoctions, a drug that allows a user in the physical world to summon the spirit of any deceased being. The concepts of Chi Ghosts, and by extension the Chi Ghost concoctions and Chi Ghost Realm, were created by Egorsmirnov.

## Chi Ghost Concoctions

The Chi Ghost concoctions were created by (and exclusively used by) the Gorillas for hundreds of years. They are a vial whose contents are inhaled by the user while performing a ritual, as if the drug is a "hallucinogenic". However, the Chi Ghosts are no illusion, as they are truly pulled from the Chi Ghost Realm and into Chima through the ritual, and become visible to anyone, not just the summoner. An attribute to Chi Ghosts clearly caused by the Gorillas' creation of the concoctions is that, if a gorilla is the summoner, he or she can choose to directly control the spirit, dictating its actions, whereas any summoner who is not of the gorilla species cannot control the Chi Ghosts.

The Chi Ghosts can interact with physical objects in the living realm, but are themselves impervious to damage. Despite this advantage, a Chi Ghost will be instantly disintegrated (and thus sent back to the Chi Ghost Realm) if the specific concoction that'd summoned him or her is damaged or destroyed. For that reason, Chi Ghosts who aren't being controlled by a Gorilla, and wish to remain in the living realm, will often grab and safeguard the concoction that'd summoned them. This is the method that Scorpix used to remain in Chima for an unspecified amount of time after his summoning. An alternative (and much lesser known) way for Chi Ghosts to remain in the physical world after their summoning is to possess a recently deceased or incapacitated body, thus making the destruction of the concoction meaningless, since the soul is unable to "dissolve" while inhabiting a body. This was the method Razar used to remain in Chima after his summoning.

### History

Soon after the concoctions' initial creation by an early (possibly the first) Gorilla King, the Lions were the first to learn about the creation, when the newly-formed tribes were sharing their inventions with each other. When it became clear that only the Gorillas could create Chi Ghost concoctions, and even control the Chi Ghosts, Lyron was worried that a gorilla could summon and control an army of Chi Ghosts, leaving the Lions severely outmatched in such a war. This spurred Lyron to forge the Primordial Blade. In response, the Gorilla King assured Lyron that the Gorillas would never employ Chi Ghosts for combat purposes, and also passed a law that made the usage of the concoctions exclusive to the royal family, despite the rest of the Gorillas knowing of their existence (see the Primordial Blade page). This exclusivity to the royal line was kept in effect through at least 31 BR. At some point after that year (likely after the usurping of the last King by the Gorilla Republic), the law was revoked, making it so that all Gorillas (and even non-gorillas) could use Chi Ghost concoctions.

Due to the rarity of the Chi Ghost concoctions' uses throughout the centuries (and partially due to Lyanor taking the Primordial Blade with him when he ventured over The West Sea), knowledge of the concoctions, and of Chi Ghosts, was lost to most Chimians, and left in general obscurity to the Gorillas outside the monarchy. This changed at the time of the RP, when Razic, Lycor, Balthazar, Fal'qar, and other non-gorillas learned about the existence of Chi Ghost concoctions (see these characters' respective pages for detailed accounts of how they used the concoctions). There was also at least one non-gorilla priestess at a religious temple that distributed the concoctions at the time of the RP, a fox who'd been part of the Gorilla Tribe for an unspecified amount of time beforehand. Recently, a supply of Chi Ghost concoctions was shipped to Aether Island (having previously been exclusively made and distributed in the Gorilla Jungle), and Anastasia Gulikovsky summoned the spirit of her ancestor, Aether Gulikovsky.

## Chi Ghost Realm

The Imaginary Numbers Domain (or, the Chi Ghost Realm, as Chimians ended up calling it) is the immaterial world created by the Dragons alongside their newly formed material world. It served as a supplement to the Physical Numbers Domain (Chima), providing both a place for the Dragons to go when they decided to take on a passive observational role, and a place for deceased Chimians' souls to go after their bodies' expiry in the physical world. While all beings in Chima have their souls materialize in the Chi Ghost Realm after their deaths, the Phoenix in particular only remain there for a limited time, in between their reincarnations (see the Phoenix page). The realm itself is an infinitely expanding dimension in order for it to accommodate the ever-increasing amount of souls. An existentially paranoid Scorponok once speculated that Chi Ghosts were just "simulations" formed from the deceased person's memories, rather than the actual soul of the being, and that the Chi Ghost Realm was a hive mind of sorts, where the Dragons could have their creations work for them eternally. This was disproved soon after, however.

### The Realm-Merging Plan

Lion King Lycor, after learning the extent of the Fire Wing Harnesses' powers, began formulating a plan to use a Great Illumination to fuse the living realm with Chi Ghost Realm, thus creating a world where "war is meaningless and death no longer exists" (see the Realm-Merging Plan page).

## Trivia

* Egorsmirnov's original Fanon Approval Committee submission for the idea of Chi Ghosts is as follows: "Basically how it works is really weird, but this is the idea: you take a drug (as in this definition: a medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body), it's a [hallucinogenic], and after you take this drug, you need to be under Cavora standing right next to either a chi fall, chi pool or a chi orb, and then you will hear and see a chi-ghost. Now whether it's just your imagination or not can be decided later. Technically it's not magic, it's just pseudo science/medicine."
	+ Several of the ideas in this submission, such as the Chi Ghosts being stationary and only perceptible by the summoner, being more of a hallucination than a literal summoning from the Chi Ghost Realm, "Chi-Ghost" being a single hyphenated word, and the concoctions being a creation of pseudo science rather than alchemy, did not carry over into their portrayals in the RP and stories.
	+ Interestingly, the rule that one must be beneath Mount Cavora and in the proximity of "pure" chi to successfully summon was present during the Chi Ghosts' very first appearance in the RP, when the fox priestess taught Razic and Lycor how to use the concoctions. This rule was no longer present in any appearances of Chi Ghosts that followed.
* When Razic summoned Razar, it was stated in that post that Rawzome's Chi Ghost was also summoned, with Rawzome being roleplayed by Torahvision in several successive posts. Since Thefirstdecade later decided that Rawzome, unlike Razar, had faked his death and gone into hiding, this appearance of the old Raven King's spirit was retconned to be a long-lasting hallucination on Razic's part, as an apparent aftereffect of using a Chi Ghost concoction for the first time.
* The Chi Ghost Realm was first mentioned by Egorsmirnov in his FAC submission for the "Mask of Life" (which evolved into Inika's mask, with its more "overpowered" attributes, such as the realm-jumping, removed): "The mask also grants its wearer the ability to enter the **chi ghost world** at will[...]"; the concept of the Chi Ghost Realm was later expanded upon in JGREAD's story, "The Last Reincarnations".