Editing Heartless (section)

=== Body Thief ===
The heartless uses a ritual to remove the target from their body and then extracts their own heart to transfer it in.  Some practitioner families maintain farms or close associations with families that they have cultivated and encouraged to be optimal vessels.  Variants tend to play on what exactly is done with the hearts extracted from victims and the nature of the ritual conducted.  A more extreme variant involves using practice to swap bodies with others, willing or otherwise, with the other person (now in the practitioner’s old body) either left to live their life or killed after the fact.<ref name=":0" />