The Trifurcate Spirit technique was incomplete. Ethan only had the first half of the manual, the part most people would consider useless on its own. Still, that was the same portion Alaric had relied on to create his three avatars, so Ethan assumed learning it would not be too difficult. After studying it carefully, he realized that it was not just manageable but surprisingly straightforward.
Simple did not mean safe. One of the required steps involved splitting one's soul in two, tearing consciousness apart by force. The pain alone was enough to kill an ordinary person. Ethan only had to look at the guy outside, screaming uncontrollably from nothing more than soul needles piercing him, to understand what that process would feel like. Ethan's own soul had been damaged before, and that agony had never left him. The manual was asking him to slice his soul cleanly in half, which was close enough to suicide that the distinction hardly mattered.
