We learned with Hildegard that it was possible to put the witch-soul at the core of the grief seed to sleep, and with Aurora confirmed that that was done by simply removing all the grief from the seed. With Oriko as a guinea pig we learned that even as a quiescent seed, Hildy was capable of cleansing a soul gem, and since it was truly empty to start with could do so many more times than a fresh-from-the-witch seed. These are all promising properties.
Downside: Normal grief seeds will cleanse quiescent ones, and considering just how much grief the quiescent ones can hold, this can encourage the normal seed to sprout in considerably less than the normal 24 hour timeframe.
Research topics:
- How long does a quiescent seed stay quiescent if it's allowed to hold onto grief?
- Does it depend on how much grief is in the seed? For example, can you completely fill a quiescent seed without causing it to become active?
- How does Kyubey react to a quiescent or once-quiescent grief seed? Mostly important because accidents can and will happen, and he's far more likely to be in a position to clean things up before uberwitch (that is why nobody thinks letting witches rehatch and then killing them again is a good idea, right?) than Sabrina.
Empty grief seeds are far more useful as trade incentives than merely fresh seeds, although if adding grief wakes them up you still have the problem of normal meguka being unable to tell how many cleanses are remaining for a partially used seed. Plus, if you keep all of your supposedly quiescent seeds together, the first one that wakes up will promptly cleanse all the others it's stored with; your courier probably won't enjoy that.
As a nice side benefit, empty seeds are visually distinct from seeds with grief in them.
