Soul-Seeds
Description: a oblong metal hollow tube with a large wooden button at one end. When pushed, a sharp needle is extended from the other end via a small spring (the process is neither blindingly fast nor painfully slow). The needle is enchanted with a minor preservation spell; any blood smeared on its surface (from, say, being jabbed into somebody’s flesh) will remain fresh and viable indefinitely.
Soul-Seeds are what you get when a mage makes the conceptual leap that human beings are unique individuals, all the way down to the blood and bone. Which means that, if a mage has a sample of a person’s blood, a new body can later be grown from that sample which would be identical to the original. At that point, it’s just a matter of dumping enough arcane power into the spell to make that work; and power itself is rarely the problem, for mages. The problem is figuring out what to safely do with that power.
Contrary to the name, Soul-Seeds do not actually hold souls. That’s a kind of aspirational title. But Soul-Seeds are still valuable magical items nonetheless. They act as a kind of foci for the body-creation process; the ritualized nature of the blood collection process actually helps facilitate later body creation spells, and unlike regular blood magic you can re-use a Soul-Seed afterward. Which is good, because they’re hard to make initially.
As noted above, Soul-Seeds only maintain the information needed to make a physical copy of the original blood donor. Memories and personality are not transferred; certainly the soul itself is not. However, mages quickly found that it’s very easy to body-swap a client into a copy of his or her own body (even if the new body was, say, twenty-five years old); and that it’s very hard to reverse that particular type of swap. Couple that with the way that swapping bodies using a Soul-Seed eliminates a whole host of nasty ethical conundrums and, well. Let’s just say that it’s much easier these days to get a licence to cast spells from that particular magical discipline.