[Liem listens soberly to Hayame's explanation, absorbing it with a quieting of his hands and a faint thinning of his mouth. Given the disquieting flashes of communion they'd gleaned from Manon, and how intrinsic shards clearly are to the being of any shard-bearer, he immediately distrusts the idea of any illicit service that might claim to provide such a thing.]

I was not aware that Lady Yima could make shards either. I thought those she produced were all pulled from other worlds, like we were.

[He's not certain that he's understanding Hayame correctly in this instance. Perhaps that is what she'd meant regardless. But whether Yima has such a power or not is ultimately immaterial to the matter of this temple service. He frowns, thinking hard.]

I don't… see how a shard could be stolen. They are supposed to be our souls, the cores of our beings, so to be repurposed for another would be… unconscionable, certainly. I can't imagine someone could survive having theirs taken, if it was even possible.

[Is that more likely or less than shards being created wholesale? He'd like to think that there's no way a soul could be stolen in that way, but that interpretation of what shards are might not be completely correct.]

Do you remember how fragile the other shards around Manon's were? I wonder if they might have been counterfeits, somehow. It must be incredibly difficult to make anything even approaching what our shards are capable of. That might explain why they were like that.