Here's a test for any world you're building. It doesn't matter if it's a film, a game, a novel, a VR experience. Ask this question: how do people deal with their dead?
If you don't have an answer, you don't have a world yet. You have a set.
In Vesper, there's no organized religion. Communities are small — fifty to three hundred people. Resources are scarce. And the ecosystem is engineered to break down every scrap of organic matter. Fungi, organisms, engineered parasites — nothing stays intact. The world is hungry.
So what do you do with a body?
Some communities give their dead to the river. The current carries the body downstream. The organisms in the water do the rest. You watch someone you love dissolve. The river was already the center of life. Now it's the center of death too. Same water.
Others compost their dead. Return the body directly to the soil that feeds the community. Within weeks, the fungi have done their work. The person becomes food. Their family eats what grows from that soil. It's not symbolic — it's literal.
Others burn. In a world where the ecosystem devours everything, burning a body is the only way to say no. The fire turns flesh to smoke. Nothing remains for the soil, the fungi, the cycle. The world doesn't get this one. In a world without organized religion, that defiance is the closest thing to spirituality.
Others preserve. Resin, dried organisms, sealed chambers. In some communities the preserved bodies line the walls of the common house. You eat dinner next to your grandmother. She's been dead for twelve years. She's part of the architecture now.
Same world. Same biology. Same scarcity. Four completely different civilizations — all from one question about the dead.
Next time you're building a world — skip the map. Skip the magic system. Start with this: someone has just died. What happens to the body?
