RESTRICTED

— ENTITY PROFILE — CLASSIFIED —

Despite the name, the Tree of Life — which calls itself the Sacred Tree — is not a tree at all, not in any physical sense: no bark on its trunk, no chlorophyll in its leaves. Yet it has a trunk, and leaves, and even fruit. It stands at the center of the Soul Sphere, within a translucent globe where white flakes course like living things, and it is the living spiritual force that binds the Soul Sphere to every living world. Its branches hang with worlds like fruit — Earth, Mars, Saturn, and countless others — each draped in a translucent leaf whose size seems to track that world's reincarnation traffic; Earth, a heavily transmigrated 'boot camp' for souls, wears the largest. Its base is a massive trunk of crisscrossing yellow and red energy that plunges past the globe into an endless chasm of blackness, and its roots reach out from the Soul Sphere all the way into the physical world — sprouting from every plant, blade of grass, and strand of seaweed. Souls pass through the Sacred Tree on their way to physical incarnation; it is the source of the sensation of nirvana. Its branches, cut into swords, burn with a white fire that consumes and purifies demons. To the living it seems silent and dead — the irony being that it is the source from which all living bodies sprout. The Circle of Medusa exists to destroy it: to kill the Tree is to end all reincarnation, forever.