Major spoilers through Volume 15. This article separates confirmed story information, author comments, scientific analogies, and speculation.
1. “It is a soul network” is not a satisfying final answer
It is easy to describe the Abyss with abstract phrases: a soul-processing network, a religious machine, a giant information system.
But a finale needs something more concrete.
What is physically there?
The strongest working theory here is:
The Abyss is a gigantic living structure that reads life, souls, wishes and value, converts them into bodies and matter, and over a long cycle produces something new.
In short: carnivorous plant + incubator + womb + spacetime anomaly.
That is far too many features for one hole, which is exactly why it feels like Made in Abyss.
2. Chapter 67 turns “souls” from religion into a system
Srajo describes the Abyssal soul not merely as a ghost but as an unknown signal that permeates living beings. It is associated with selection of life, transmission of intent, manifestation of curse and prayer, and—most ominously—“pre-processing.” [1]
If there is pre-processing, there should be a later process.
If a soul stores memory, unconscious information and relationships, then a human life may be a long data-acquisition phase.
A newborn soul begins nearly empty. Over decades it accumulates love, fear, loss, wishes and “Haku”—the irreplaceable thing.
Life starts to look like soul maturation.
Humanity has accidentally become barrel-aged whisky. Excellent.
3. Ozen’s runaway dinner meat may be an endgame experiment
The Curse-Warding Box did not truly cancel the Curse. Riko was stillborn, placed inside, and began moving. Ozen later put dinner meat into it; the meat moved too. Both the revived meat and Riko were described as trying to move toward the center of the Abyss. [2]
Originally this is just excellent horror comedy: the dinner escaped.
After the soul explanation, it becomes much stranger.
Ordinary native creatures do not all migrate downward. They live within their layers. Yet dead tissue restarted by the box moves toward the center.
Perhaps the box does not “resurrect” so much as inject an Abyss-derived life signal.
Death → signal disperses → box injects something → tissue restarts → it follows the source gradient.
That ridiculous slab of meat may be one of the earliest demonstrations of the direction in which the Abyssal life system flows.
4. The Curse may be body reprogramming, not poison
Real biology provides an interesting analogy. Many cells maintain membrane voltages, and bioelectric signals produced by ion channels and pumps help regulate proliferation, migration, differentiation and anatomical patterning during development and regeneration. [3]
No, electricity cannot turn you into Nanachi.
But as science fiction, one extra step is enough:
The force field reads biological/soul information → crossing it upward injects an abnormal signal → developmental or regenerative patterning is forcibly restarted → the body is rebuilt into another form.
Then “Narehate”—one who has become—sounds remarkably literal.
Bondrewd’s interest in the Blessing also makes sense. He was not simply trying to stop damage. He may have been trying to extract a successful redesign from a normally catastrophic process.
5. Iruburu looks suspiciously like a miniature Abyss
Iruburu is one of the strongest pieces of the puzzle.
A single living being, Irumyuui, becomes a place. Residents enter it and receive bodies shaped by desire. “Value” becomes tangible. The village itself balances losses. Desire, relationships, bodies and matter are translated into one another.
And at the end, the whole system produces a child: Faputa.
That is not merely “a weird village.” It is a model in which:
a living being becomes an environment, reads value inside itself, rewrites bodies and matter, and ultimately produces new life.
Scale that up and an uncomfortable possibility appears:
What if the Abyss itself is one enormous living organism or organ?
The force field becomes membrane/nervous system, native creatures become an internal ecosystem, the Curse becomes physiology, and the 2,000-year cycle becomes metabolism or reproduction.
6. As a pitcher plant, the Abyss is horrifyingly well designed
Carnivorous plants attract prey, admit it easily, make escape difficult, digest it and absorb the result.
The Abyss can be mapped the same way:
Relics, the Golden City, mystery and longing → bait.
Descending → comparatively easy entry.
Strains of Ascension → severe escape penalty.
Deep layers → bodies, souls and wishes are altered.
White Whistles, Narehate, Blessings → incoming life becomes something else.
The interface is basically:
“Entering is welcome. Leaving is not.”
A pitcher plant would receive full marks for UX design.
But if flesh were the only food, this system would be absurdly complicated. That suggests not simple predation but cultivation.
Perhaps people are allowed to live so their souls accumulate experience, love, desire and Haku before being harvested.
7. The 2,000-year cycle may be a manufacturing cycle
The Burial Tower contains praying skeletons from roughly 2,000 years ago, with older groups around 4,000 and 6,000 years ago beneath them. [4]
The story also repeatedly points toward the “next 2,000 years.”
A famous theory says the surface sinks and becomes a new layer every 2,000 years. But a simple one-layer-per-cycle model has difficulties, including repeated burial layers in the same region and geographical continuity across eras.
Another possibility is more interesting:
2,000 years is how long the Abyss needs to accumulate enough life, soul-information and value for one major processing event.
Grow → harvest → transform → produce.
In that model, “breathing” does not mean thermal ventilation. It means a huge exchange cycle: take in, process, release.
8. What does it produce? Relics and Reg begin to look like compressed value
This is the most entertaining and least proven part.
White Whistles already demonstrate a key rule: a human life and an intense relationship can become a physical object.
So on a larger scale, perhaps:
huge amounts of accumulated life-value → high-grade relics.
Then there is Reg.
He resists the Curse, crosses layers, is extraordinarily durable, and the Incinerator can interfere with rules of the Abyss itself. He looks less like an ordinary robot and more like a product optimized for Abyssal physics.
Saying “one Reg is manufactured every 2,000 years” would be wild speculation.
But this weaker version is plausible:
Reg-class beings may be one type of high-density product made from value accumulated in the Abyss.
Still, Iruburu did not ultimately produce a useful machine. It produced a child.
So the true 2,000-year product may be something far larger than Reg.
9. “Made in Abyss” increasingly applies to the cast themselves
The title was not originally announced as a grand final-answer clue; the early title was Hello Abyss. [5]
Yet the phrase has become disturbingly appropriate.
Riko: stillborn, restarted by an Abyssal relic.
Nanachi: current body created through Curse/Blessing.
Prushka: transformed from human into White Whistle.
Faputa: born from Irumyuui, wishes and village value.
Reg: a mysterious deep-layer being.
Their present forms are, to different degrees, impossible without the Abyss.
“Made in Abyss” may ultimately describe life, not merely artifacts.
10. A simple giant animal cannot explain heat, pressure and time
Tsukushi has explicitly said the world is roughly a spherical planet with the Abyss on an island, and that ordinary deep excavation should create enormous geothermal and pressure problems—questions the story is expected to address. [6]
So “it is fantasy, therefore room temperature” is probably not the intended full answer.
Chapter 70 makes the problem worse: roughly 100 years in the Sixth Layer corresponds to at least 3,000 years on the surface. [7]
Real gravitational time dilation exists, but near Earth it is tiny. NIST notes that a 1 km elevation difference produces only a few seconds of difference over a million years. [8]
The Abyssal ratio is not ordinary underground gravity.
Something about spacetime itself is abnormal.
11. Wormhole theory is not confirmed, but “different spacetime geometry” is powerful
Wormholes are theoretical structures studied in general relativity that connect separated spacetime regions through a throat. There is no evidence for traversable macroscopic wormholes, and standard models face exotic-energy requirements. [9]
So “the Abyss is literally a wormhole” is too strong.
But a broader proposal works well:
Inside the Abyss, distance, time and gravity are related differently from ordinary planetary crust.
That could unify:
- impossible geothermal conditions,
- survival of a gigantic cavity,
- extreme depth-dependent time dilation,
- the recurring imagery of vortices and spirals near the deepest layers.
The “bottom” may therefore be not a floor but a throat or boundary.
The party keeps moving “down,” yet after crossing that boundary, the global meaning of down may change.
The final revelation could literally be: there was never a conventional bottom.
12. The author’s “gimmick picture book” comment makes a physical twist more likely
Tsukushi said that the project began as an unusual gimmick picture book, and that explaining the gimmick would reveal later story developments. [5]
That strongly suggests the secret can be represented physically, not only through lore exposition.
One existing pre-2010 picture-book mechanism is especially interesting: Ann Jonas’s Round Trip (1983), published in Japan in 1984 as Hikari no Tabi, Kage no Tabi. [10][11]
Its mechanism is simple:
Read to the end → turn the book 180 degrees → the same images become different scenes → the return journey begins.
There is no evidence that this book directly inspired Tsukushi.
But it proves that a “reach the end, invert the whole world, continue through the same structure” picture-book form was available in Japan long before Made in Abyss.
Older tunnel/peepshow books also represent depth by layering cutout scenes behind an opening.
A hypothetical original gimmick combining deeper and deeper layers + inversion at the deepest point fits the available author comment surprisingly well.
13. So what is physically at the bottom?
Four broad candidates remain.
A. A central organ
A heart, brain, egg or womb: an image that instantly confirms the giant-life theory.
B. An incubation chamber
If Iruburu is the model, the Abyss may be gathering 2,000 years of souls and value to create one new being.
C. A spacetime throat
The “bottom” is a boundary leading elsewhere, explaining time, heat, pressure and inversion.
D. B and C are the same thing
The most Made in Abyss answer:
the reproductive organ of the giant living structure is itself a spacetime throat.
At this point that sentence somehow sounds normal.
14. The strongest current model
Putting the pieces together:
- The Abyss is not a normal cave but a huge living structure.
- The force field acts like membrane, sensor and circulation network.
- Souls are individual-information signals that the Abyss can read.
- Life accumulates memory, love, desire and Haku into those signals.
- Curse and Blessing are body-redesign processes using that information.
- Iruburu is a miniature demonstration of the same architecture.
- Every ~2,000 years, soul/value undergoes large-scale collection and transformation.
- The output may include relics, Reg-class beings, or a larger “child.”
- Deep layers occupy strongly distorted spacetime rather than ordinary crust.
- At the deepest boundary, the meaning of “down” changes and the full shape of the Abyss becomes visible.
This does not prove the theory.
It simply explains more clues with fewer unrelated mechanisms than many alternatives.
15. Why we still cannot say “this is it”
Unlike a mystery about identities and timelines, Made in Abyss still hides the laws of its world.
The 2,000-year cycle could still be harvesting, reproduction, renewal, selection, manufacture or spatial change.
So the goal is not to declare victory early. It is to find the model that compresses the most mysteries into the fewest rules.
The current best image is therefore:
The Abyss is not a giant pitcher plant.
It is a pitcher plant upgraded with soul processing, body recompilation, 2,000-year maturation, relic manufacturing, spacetime distortion and childbirth.
Which is, admittedly, much worse.
If the deepest layer eventually reveals one enormous physical object or structure and the reader instantly thinks, “Oh. That is why everything worked that way,” then the answer to Made in Abyss will probably be simple enough to draw—and horrifying enough to justify every clue.
Sources
- 第67話内容の二次整理。スラージョによる「魂＝正体不明の信号」「下処理」等の説明。原作確認を優先しつつ、オンライン照合用。 newsinfomation.net
- アニメ第7〜8話の二次整理。呪い除けの籠、死産したリコ、晩飯の肉、アビス中心へ向かう描写の照合。 ameblo.jp
- Levin M. et al. Bioelectric signaling and tissue patterning review. 細胞膜電位・イオン流・発生/再生時の形態形成との関係。 pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- 2000年周期とお祈り骸骨の二次整理。2000年・4000年・6000年前の埋葬群の照合。 nika100th.com
- ねとらぼ, 2017-08-04, つくしあきひと初インタビュー。仕掛け絵本が原型で、その仕掛けを説明すると後の展開そのものになる旨、初期タイトルや制作背景。 nlab.itmedia.co.jp
- TBS NEWS DIG / 山陰放送, 2023-04-26. 作者が「地球のように丸い星」「孤島」「深部なら本来地熱・気圧が問題になる」「深く潜るほど時間がずれる初期案」について説明。 newsdig.tbs.co.jp
- Made in Abyss Wiki, Chapter 070 summary. 六層約100年が地上で少なくとも3000年以上という説明の照合。 madeinabyss.fandom.com
- NIST, “Relativity and Optical Clocks.” 地球近傍での重力時間遅延の実測と、1km高度差で百万年あたり数秒程度という例。 nist.gov
- Review of stable traversable wormholes in modified gravity; standard Einstein gravityでのexotic matter問題を整理。ワームホールは理論研究であり実在確認ではない。 mdpi.com
- 評論社『光の旅 かげの旅』。最後まで読んだ後、本を逆さまにすると同じ絵が別の景色になる仕掛け。日本版1984年。 hyoronsha.co.jp
- 国立国会図書館『光の旅かげの旅』書誌。1984年4月刊、上下両方から見る仕掛け絵本として確認。 ndlsearch.ndl.go.jp
