User blog comment:DYBAD/Character Sheet/@comment-24955665-20180330070013/@comment-4867780-20180402090142

An excellent question, and the setting's greatest mystery ^ ^

I guess the answer depends on our understanding of what truly makes a person.

On one hand, you could say the original human died during the merging (he literally disapppeared, absorbed into the shard), and his memories and personality traits were inherited by the entity born from it.

On the other hand, you could say the human's "soul" was infused into the shard (like a consciousness uploaded into an artificial body), and his perspective was refined by the complete understanding of his past.

As far as I can tell, both interpretations are technically true, and it depends on what we considers the most self-defining as a person : the form or the essence.