Wall of Darkness

The Collector's psionic profile floated within the depths of the greater system hosted within it. The system not only stored biomass without changing the Collector's physical dimensions or adding to its mass, but it also most importantly stored every single psionic profile of the creatures the Collector consumed.

The female daemon specimen had called psionic profiles 'souls', and indeed, the Collector understood from its stored memories of tinkering civilizations that most of them, when they were in more primitive stages of development, correlated psionic profiles with some part of their active will that stayed beyond the deterioration of their physical forms.

Yet, this was incorrect.

Psionic profiles that did not have a tether to a physical, living body were merely records.

Snapshots of the energies that comprised the mental processes that formulated living beings. No more alive than a tinkerer's image caught in a photograph.