Souren Araya

Souren Araya (荒耶宗蓮) is a former Buddhist monk who has lived for around 300 years and a previous acquaintance of Touko Aozaki from the Mage's Association in London.

Background
Souren was a Buddhist monk hailing from Tamil Buddhism. He witnessed endless death, and this gave him the twisted purpose of finding a reason for human death.

He later entered the Mage's Association's Clock Tower with Touko Aozaki and Cornelius Alba. Souren Araya attempted to reach Akasha by tracing the roots of the soul, something that is there but not there, in order to reach a group consciousness.

Personality
Souren is a tragic figure. Originally a wandering monk, his inability to save the lives of so many gave way to depression. His faith in humanity nearly crushed, he made his goal to locate the Spiral of Origin so that he may see the ultimate end of humanity and find meaning for so many deaths. His imposing appearance is often described in the novels. Touko herself commenting that he was "a man of hell".

Whilst seemingly an insensitive man who is only concerned with using others towards his goal, his actions towards Fujino, Kirie, and Lio all seem to imply that he was acting out of genuine kindness and not just self-benefit.

Magecraft
Souren, while considered an average magus at face value, is highly skilled in the creation of Bounded Fields. The origin that he has is "Stillness".

Bounded field
He personally carries Rokudou Kyoukai (六道境界), a three layered bounded field that completely surrounds his person and hides his presence. All those who enter the perimeter of the outer field are completely frozen in place in accordance with his origin of "Stillness", and as it is mobile, something normally impossible to accomplish, he can freely use it as a weapon. It is constantly crumbling with the passage of time, and it takes a length of time for Souren to recreate it. He calls the names Fugu (不倶), Kongou (金剛), Dakatsu (蛇蝎), Taiten (戴天), Chougyou (頂経) and Ouken (王顕) when he uses it.

He has also constructed Hounouden Rokujyuyonshou (奉納殿六十四層), a bounded field that completely surrounds his workshop, Ogawa Apartment. The original architect was Aozaki, and it is a shrine for the Taikyokuzu, the diagram of the supreme ultimate. The building can be called the embodiment of his internal world, very similar to the concept of a Reality Marble, which gives him complete control over its internal workings. He has the ability to teleport though walls, send projections of his mind to different locations, and it also allow for regeneration after he is sliced by Shiki.

The building is a red, round, and symmetrical ten story building with five rooms on each side. It is used for Souren's experiments to find the meaning of death by watching the lives of the sixty-four families that take residence there. All of the collected families have life issues, including the family of Tomoe Enjou, and he drove them to suicide and murder with designs on the walls and floors. Afterward, he removed their brains and created identical puppet bodies for them to control. He began using them to create a “miniature world that concludes in a day”, where he would have all of the puppets act out their daily lives, with each day concluding by having them kill each other. Souren, hoping for their deaths to deviate from the previous days, revived the bodies by morning, where they would simply restart with the memories of the final day of their lives. The puppets live on one side, and the other side, hidden by a rotating elevator, is used to store their original corpses. He manages to hide the massive experiment, which would normally cause suspicions from even the smallest irregularity and the trail of information in modern society, by making it out to be a normal apartment.