MC's Aether Core is the central MacGuffin and tragic irony of the entire game: she has been hunted across every lifetime because her body can regenerate endlessly, making her simultaneously the most powerful and most exploitable being on Earth. Each route reveals a different faction's interest: in Xavier's route, EVER and Philos loyalists want her back for the sacrifice cycle; in Zayne's route, the Protocore fragments in her heart are a consequence of the 2034 attack (consistent with Wanderer attack leaving Aether Core traces); in Sylus's route, Onychinus experiments with Aether Core energy are connected to his own non-human physiology; in Caleb's route, the Bloomshore explosion was EVER targeting her Aether Core access; in Rafayel's route, the Sea God ceremony across every past life has been extracting her Aether Core energy with her consent, and the Lemurian elder Amund continues to pressure Rafayel to allow this in subsequent lives. The Aether Core is the single structural element that unifies every route's antagonism.