Phlebotinium powered by deeply unethical means in Fan Works.
Crossovers
- Aeon Natum Engel has a Patrone system being both using and used by Special Services sorcerers.
- In the Avengers of the Ring sequel Methteilien, Wanda Maximoff is forced to act as a power booster for Morgoth's own control of the Mind Stone, unwillingly helping him shield the planet he is using as a base of operations.
- Boldores And Boomsticks: Faba's machine to create Ultra Wormholes caused Nebby horrible pain every time he used it.
- In Divine Blood, most of Kodachi Kunō's power comes from eating the minds of her mass-produced daughters, leaving their identities fragmented and their souls chained within hers.
- Fate Genesis: In the final arc, Dr. Eggman kidnaps Illya so he can drain the Holy Grail out of her to power his Genesis Ray.
- Metal Gear: Green: Snake and the MSF is thrown three hundred years into the future due to Night Owl's dimension exploration, with Snake in the main base where the dimensional exploration is held. Upon finding out it was being powered by a child no older than seven, he is disgusted, with it spreading to the rest of his fellow MSF members.
- In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and Bleach crossoverA Hollow in Equestria Nightmare Moon IS this trope. Her first appearance was made possible by consuming the souls of 17 innocent foals, allowing her to exert total control over Luna's body and gain access to her alicorn magic. Fast forward a millennium to her season one defeat, she was ripped from Luna's body but her spirit remained alive, feasting on fear until gaining enough strength to return and consume the souls of 21 foals to regain her physical form and become powerful enough to hold her own against Luna and Celestia simultaneously. And just for added measure, she bound her spirit to Twist to ensure she had a foal hostage to exploit.
- Maybe the Last Archie Story: Mad Doctor Doom kidnaps Sabrina and gets her hooked up to a time machine that works by siphoning her magic energy.
- There Was Once an Avenger From Krypton: When the Miraculous team are discussing everything they know about Hawk Moth to try and figure out how to defeat him, Caline states her belief that he's sacrificing animal souls in order to corrupt the Butterfly Miraculous' powers in order to make it fit his goals.
- And Hell Followed With Them: The ritual Zouken uses to summon Azrael requires massive amounts of life force. In an effort to avoid attracting attention from authorities, he opts to target the homeless population of Fuyuki City. Even Illya is horrified by the casual disregard he shows for their lives.
- When you learn that Dante is the doctor in the AU Asylum
, you can tell that this trope will be in effect.... In this universe, Philosopher's Stones can be fueled by alchemic energy, but you can't get enough unless it's pushed through an alchemically potent human, or 'conduit.' If done in excess, this process will eventually turn the conduit into a Soulless Shell. Of course, Dante doesn't care much.
- In Blue Steel, the Goblet of Fire was created by the blood sacrifice of five virgins.
- In Death's Champion, Hedwig tells Harry that it took the sacrifice of hundreds of human souls for the Flamels to create the Philosopher's Stone.
- In Harry Potter and Godric's Legacy, Voldemort performs an annual ritual that prevents him from dying by sacrificing an unborn child and sending its soul to hell in his place.
- In Harry Potter and the Soul Gems, a dark wizard used large diamonds containing the souls of children with special abilities to power the traps which protected the tombs he built for his clients.
- Becoming a True Invader: Zim uses Nick to power a beam that causes the people afflicted by it to be overcome with joyful emotions.
- Invader Zim: A Bad Thing Never Ends: The concept of Childergy, an immense amount of energy naturally generated by children, is carried on from the movie. Aldrich Coathanger's main goal is to harvest enough of it to warp reality and make it so that people immediately bypass the childhood stage, as part of his Irrational Hatred-fueled desire to wipe out all children.
- The Legend of Zelda: The Missing Link:
- A book in the Monktown Valley Library claims that bombchus are created by binding the souls of mice to bombs, though both the bombchu shop owner and Word of God state that it's an In-Universe Factoid Failure.
- Saria created the Soul-Charged Sword by binding her own soul to the blade after she was mortally wounded by Arborachnid, giving it its Sword Beam abilities in addition to letting her briefly act as a Spirit Advisor.
- Pulse and Void has a villain with a quirk that can siphon energy from other people. He kidnaps poor Present Mic after seeing him and his Super-Scream on television and has his cohort torture the poor guy nearly to death, then does himself and Mic with the quirk-boosting drug Trigger. The result is the abandoned factory hideout being leveled and fissures opening in the ground as poor Mic is ravaged by dark energy. The destruction is quite extensive and when Mic is rescued, Aizawa deduces that Mic was also used as a power source for the villain with a teleporting quirk. Poor Mic looks Nothing but Skin and Bones due to all of it pushing his metabolism into overdrive.
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
- A Crazed Gleam, sequel to A Mad Glimmer: Hundreds of years into a Bad Future where Queen Chrysalis successfully conquered Equestria, the changelings' society is powered by an artificially engineered race(?) of fetus-like ponies called "generators" that were created from the genetic makeup of Princess Cadence. They're barely sentient enough to feel love and psychologically incapable of feeling anything else. But hey, at least they're happy.
- The Dashverse story Hot Heads, Cold Hearts and Nerves of Steel starts with Sombra's minions kidnapping every foal in Ponyville and several other towns. Several chapters later, when said minions confront the Mane Six, they reveal that the reason the foals were taken was so Sombra can sacrifice them to empower himself.
- The Pieces Lie Where They Fell: The sequel Picking Up the Pieces reveals that the Hivemind Body, one of the three Pillars of a Changeling Hive, is created by fusing twelve Changeling infants into a single being, with their individual minds erased by the process. While they're so young that they had almost no conscious minds yet, the whole creation process and effect still horrifies Page, to the point where she mourns those who were sacrificed for it.
- In the Pony POV Series, Fluttershy, upon learning how cruel the world can be, finds a source of powerful magic and sets out to turn Equestria into a perfect utopia by siphoning out all vices, sadness, and wickedness of the world... using herself as container to hold them. She decides to bear all the evils of Equestria upon her back, and suffer eternally herself just so no one else has to ever suffer anymore. This also ends up grotesquely deforming her. She even refers to herself as the Forsaken Foal of Omelas.
- The Powers of Harmony: Zemblaini sacrificed Horizon — a two-year-old foal — in order to use the innocence of his Lifeforce to force open the Gates of Tartarus and release Nightmare Moon's army. Celestia managed to link his remaining Lifeforce with the Echoes, stabilizing him and keeping the Gates sealed. However, he's remained trapped there for the twenty years since, awaiting the day the Elements of Harmony are restored and used to undo the damage. And part of his mind is still aware...
- Rainbow Factory:
- Rainbows are made out of foals who fail their flight exam. Specifically, their ribs are broken, and then they are mutilated in what is essentially a giant meat grinder.
- The sequel, Pegasus Device, makes it worse by mentioning that the victims must be fully conscious because the fear and pain is an integral part of the process.
- In the Tarnished Silver series, Princess Celestia convinces herself (on scant to nonexistent evidence) that this is how Equestria works, so she sets out to clandestinely shield paedosadist slaver rings from justice such that an adequate population of forsaken children will be maintained.
- In The Power That's Inside, Infinite Energy is revealed to come from pokémon used as Living Batteries. Specifically, this 'bioenergy' actually comes from their souls. Most of the victims are low-level Normal and Bug-type pokémon caught specifically to be harvested in this fashion.
- In Episode 67 of Sonic X: Dark Chaos, Eggman and Rouge discover the truth behind Beelzebub's fake Chaos Emeralds; they're empowered by Dark Chaos Energy - produced by dozens of lobotomized slaves undergoing And I Must Scream.
- With This Ring: The Renegade gains access to a database of Apokoliptian technology and is able to use that to build squads of flying blaster-armed drones, but they have poor battery life because Apokoliptian power generation "is either too advanced for me to replicate safely or is of the 'runs-off-the-misery-of-paraplegic-kittens' variety."
