The tendrils spanned across twenty seven special and temporal dimensions, warping in and out and doing all sorts of creative work. In one quiet layer where all the tendrils converged to a single form, an octopus cradled a little blue monkey in a crystal ball.

  It mimicked the thrum of the infant's. Various types of blood surged through its tendrils. Each vein darkened and bulged a bit before brightening back up and constricting back to its normal thicknesses according to the rhythm. It timed its work precisely with the tiny jitter of the monkey-like phantasm's heart as well. The fleshy pulsing tentacles that acted as the asynchronous hearts of the creature passed through the crystal ball and manifested inside the womb where the unborn phantasm was developing. One of its hearts was stroking the phantasm along its cheek.

  "Ah my precious little phantasm," it cooed "You mean everything to Yaya. I love you, yes I do. Yaya is working so hard, just for you. Such a perfect little soul is in the works little one."

  Yayaboublyork'nthrop rocked the ball gently, like a cradle. A flush came to its cheeks, hints of coral-pink and cobalt blue cropped up responding to the utter delight it felt. Then it happened! The little phantasm's tail brushed against its palm and it moved! The phantasm's tiny, adorable, impossibly cute little hand reflexively grasped its own tail.

  "Awwwwe! You moved~ the reflexed of your race are so cute and perfect. You're so cute and perfect, yes you are!!"

  Yayaboublyork'nthrop's heart-tentacles pulsed through a spectrum of colors outside of the comprehension of men. Emotions so vast and specific they didn't exist in any human language. Then, with a little wiggle, the great Yaya continued working on its little soul project.

  The haunting blue of the hellfire hadn't quite changed that horrid yellow all the way to the hue of the phantasm's fur yet. The karmic residue was coalescing nicely, but it wasn't quite there. It was muddying up that perfect luster. The crystal showed the phantasm twitched, its brow scrunched up a bit like it had just stepped outside after months in a dungeon.

  "Now, now my little dream crumb," Yaya's whispered before it crackled like thunder curling along a vast sea of clouds. "Your soul is all covered in karmic gunk. Let's get it all cleaned up."

  A tendril flitted through the dimension that held the shadows of all the stars, then through the one where the stars sang their eternal chorus of screams, then past the dimension where it brewed its private stock of wine and elixir, until it reached the storage planes. It wrapped around two vials: one of powdered brimstone, one of the blood of a rival crafting god who had been, well, less than cooperative.

  It sprinkled a pinch of brimstone across the fifth dimensional shadow of the cube, ensuring an even distribution over and under all the temporal and super spatial layers. It dried up all of that pesky karmic grime quite nicely, though the blue came out just a teensy bit too dark on account of the brimstone.

  Yayaboublyork'nthrop dunked the cube into the essence blood of Tychobraethton, self proclaimed Crafting Sovereign of the Echoing Valleys and Piercing Mountains. Audacious names that mean nothing, an embarrassment really, simultaneously below everyone and above everyone at the same time.

  The holy energy in that blood surged, grappling with the karmic-infused brimstone. The karmic tinge bound to the blood itself, and an awaiting tendril whisked the mixture off to the workshop's centrifuge. After the spin hit just triple the speed of light, the cube separated from the stain. One tendril filled a crystal with the karmic-blood and dropped it off in the temporal chambers to be made into an elixir a few thousand years ago. Then another tendril processed the cube some more.

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  The cube now hovered in place atop the face of the Celestial Black Bronze Anvil; the anvil itself had been part of a haul and Yaya had chosen to strategically transfer said equipment to an alternate location from its previous owner, a minor deity of forging thunder, was it? Regardless, that deity was currently indisposed, Yaya had tactfully rerouted the snarling beast into one of the logic paradoxes it had collected over the years. That little guy would be freed as soon as someone resolved that paradox, so it should be fine.

  "Now what does the little one want their soul to do?" Yaya spun the soul with one of its heart tentacles, momentarily setting it to be a 99 by 99 puzzle cube and solving it a few thousand times. After a moment of contemplation a glimmer of light flashed through the eldritch octopus. "Yaya knows! First, we'll give it a pinch of dimensional maneuverability just like Yaya's. Then it can have a spark of introspection... mmm, nice and chewy. And then... there, right there, a healthy bit of separation."

  It paused before enacting that change. "Yaya is sure you'll be able to wire them right back up in a few years, it'll do a world of good for you anyway, cinnamon roll."

  Tendrils slid a rusty hammer from an impossible rack of tools. With careful, rhythmic strikes that mirrored the fetal thrum, Yaya began to deform the cube into a perfect sphere. Each tap resonated across the layers of reality, knocking loose old truths and letting in new harmonies.

  Then it started up some of the more delicate work, hammering out a few defects in the higher-dimensional shadow. A sprinkle of time from a failing universe, Yaya made sure to give them a tutorial to wipe them out first so that it didn't feel too terribly sudden. A philosopher had a really good idea once, so Yaya took that out of her head and completely reverted the present level of technology on the outside world back a hundred thousand years.

  “Such a good baby. You didn’t even cry when Yaya hammered your perfect little soul into perfection,” the octopus beamed. “You’re gonna be the best little anomaly ever. Yaya guarantees it~”

  Yaya reached out one heart tentacle around the body of the baby blue phantasm and wrapped one heart tentacle around the spherical form of the beefed up soul, then Yaya's asynchronous pulses overlapped and became one with both connected rhythms.

  When the soul was being refined, that heartbeat had been the rhythm of their agony, but with every iteration, it became something that guided that cluster of form to something greater. Every stage had that same droning rhythm, it was a shared experience of sorts between this body and the lattice. Through the countless ages of agony they were subjected to, the souls had named the pulse Lu. And for a time, Lu was only a name, a rhythm, a beat among the fractured.

  The heartbeat synchronized with the forging of their form. The rhythm pulsed through the layers of their being, tempering them like the hammer upon steel, folding identities upon identities, compressing their collective history into something greater than the sum of its parts. It was a metallurgic process of soul-smithing, a relentless refinement where every spark of agony was a forging fire, where every loss and union of identity was akin to carbon binding with iron, creating something new, something enduring. The heat of experience burned away impurities, and the beat of the pulse hammered them into shape, over and over again.

  Through that beat, they had become something greater, and inside the originator of that beat, how far could they go? The ball of souls glided down the pulsing highway until it met the form.

  The phantasm had lived its whole infancy as nothing but a soulless body with its mind stuck in a dream. It heard countless whispers that expressed some deranged sort of love. It had watched untold horrors be inflicted upon the souls of a dying universe, but beyond that, it was nothing. A watcher has no need for an identity. Then a rhythmic current surged. It felt like it belonged. Its world had been nothing. The soulless dream it had been living in swallowed the soul. And then?

  Then, Lu was.