The criminals at the hospital are after the Male Essence meant for Goro
After all, what could make things worse for Goro then not getting a complete transfer, if she gets any at all? Note that all the criminals are female as well.
- Jossed They're after some rejuvenation stuff.
The reason Tanica didn't die right away after ripping her lifeforce out was because the seed kept her alive until it released her.
Looking at Tanica through Chapter 13, her condition remains about the same from Page 21
(just before tearing out the lifeforce) to Page 27 (after having kept Goro alive until morning) to the beginning of Page 30 (when she sees Goro and Aki together) ... and degenerates severely over the three minutes it takes for Sarin and Mori to prepare the egg afterwards.
On Page 37, Sarin says that the seed released him when he had accepted his fate and let go of himself. Well, Tanica tore out her life because she believed Goro's life with Aki was what was worth throwing her life away for — and a Heroic Sacrifice is pretty much the exemplar of accepting your fate and letting go of yourself. She didn't start decaying from lack of life force until the morning because it wasn't until that moment that she knew whether she had succeeded or failed.
- Creator Speedball here: Sure, why not? It all makes sense to me, and I did mention how the seed's life force had merged with Tanica's. I was more going for Rule of Drama on the timing for when she started visibly rotting, but this works too.
Of the mentor variety. We never get to see Sarin's mentor's hair color, but it was probably green, and Sarin's mentor likely went through a similarly-hard childhood, was turned into a tree by the seed of a previous 'victim', and turned his life around after that. We don't know what he did, but it was probably benevolent and he was clearly skilled with transformation magic.
Fast-forward to him seeing Sarin walk the same path, and Sarin goes through similar redemption, gets trained, and becomes a total magical badass who is certainly benevolent and is one of the best at transformation magic. Sarin already has many of the same qualities as Sarin's mentor did.
Now come to Tanica, whose similarities to Sarin have been noted. They both were walking down a bad path, only for the seed to instill a Heel–Face Turn in them. Tanica (now as Elka) has been turning her life around since then, already showing great signs of benevolence. It's basically canonical that she's Sarin's apprentice (although she is around several other powerful doctors, Sarin is her main influence), and has within her incredible power.
The people are not exactly the same each time; Elka's ultimate gift may be related to transformations, but her own "gift" is going to be different from Sarin's. So how she uses her powers will ultimately differ. But the path is already laid out. A powerful potential wizard, transformed by the seed from a bad life into a better one, with the desire to help others, being trained by a powerful wizard that has great skill in transformations.
- Fridge Brilliance also kicks in when you realize that the tree is basically one of the strongest transformations a person can go through. So it'd make sense that the person emerging from it would have a natural talent in that field.
The Cary and the King of Dust are the same "soul".
Cary is essentially the force of entropy shown as fire. The King of Dust is the eventual end of everything and is shown as only existing outside of our universe. However if looked at as the order caused by entropy when everything is equal than the
Ko D is what Cary's soul will be once entropy is done everything stuck as unmoving sand. Because time only has meaning where entropy exists the King of Dust exists before the beginning of the universe, outside of it, and at its end where. When there is entropy he exists as the inevitable, irreversible progress of time, as the creation of order by the destruction of order, Cary. in essence he and the soul that is currently Cary are different points in the same process. an immortal soul destroying all order until there is nothing but order. And he has won, he will always win, the universe will die. But Cary's soul must manifest to ensure magic never reverses entropy. he must cause the Brekings. To ensure the inevitable. The king of dust is patient, he dose not force himself on the universe. He is infinitely waiting for the universe to come to him. Those he seers he kills are those who come to his domain willing or not they have come and he is the end life is order sustained by chaos and he can allow no chaos into his domain. Cary causes wounds that are impossible to heal suggesting that whatever fuels his magic so fundamentally alters the universe as to be irreversible. This and the statements she makes indicate that she is some form of entropic decay that causes change irreversible by magic, which is why she used a gun to hurt Jack, her magic would have made him bleed until he died. The only reason Kili was spared is because her perception had been expanded, not removed entirely from the universe and was not completly in his domain, although experinceing a truth that horrible at a spiritual level harmed Kili enough to permanently whiten her hair. The irrelevancy of time in his relm is what let him interact with her right after he killed the other seer, she was actually viewing it live.
