How is this even possible? Or was Mannimarco lying?

raidentenshu_ESO

So Mannimarco explains how killed me, allowed his undead servants to drink my blood, and then he reanimated my dead body.

Can someone here explain to me how on Nirn was this done without any severe psychological impacts? Since then my character is walking around without any side effects whatsoever. I am not bounded to Mannimarco's will as one of his undead servants. My soul has been departed (Molag Bal has it) and my body is nothing but a husk.

Can someone with Lore expertise please make sense of all of this because I'm just so discombobulated right now.

Curragraigue

The old intro showed Mannimarco stabbing you to fill a soul gem, you loose consciousness and then wake up in Coldharbour. I think if you ask questions in the intro area the Prophet takes a stab at explaining how you can function independently without a soul. It has been awhile so I can't remember what it was.

Enodoc

The first quest's Journal entry gives a bit of an idea:

I died, but that was only the beginning...

The rest of the Journal is not quite accurate:
I awoke in Oblivion. My body is intact, but my soul has been torn from my body. I must find a way out of this nightmare place to reclaim what was lost to me, or I will be damned for all eternity.

Your body, that is your original body, is the corpse that Mannimarco reanimated, and you never see it. What you are wandering around in is, per the Prophet's name for you, a vestige, literally a remnant of something that no longer exists.

As for why you are not experiencing the psychological impacts that are clearly present in other soul-shriven, this is likely due to your status as a theorised "paragon" soul-shriven, whose Anuic valency is so high that the vestige was able to create a perfect copy of your pre-death existence.

For more on this, have a read of this passage from Chaotic Creatia: The Azure Plasm:
Then there are the poor slaves known as the Soul Shriven. Each is a mortal kidnapped from Mundus at the moment of death, his or her soul stolen by Molag Bal for some unthinkable purpose, and given in exchange the vestige that enables him or her to form a counterfeit body here in Coldharbour. But they are not native to Oblivion, so a Soul Shriven's body is a sad imitation of the body worn in life, suffering rapid wear and decay until it dies—a death that is no liberation, for its vestige only forms a body once again, over and over, ad infinitum...
Such are the facts. What follows is speculation, born of conversations with the Sojourner during his infrequent and unpredictable visits. His theory is that the Soul Shriven's bodies are flawed because they have lost the focusing principle of their Anuic souls, so their vestiges are imperfect patterns. I concurred that this was likely, and then proposed the theoretical possibility of a Soul Shriven who, despite having lost his or her soul, possessed some other intrinsic Anuic aspect. This shall-we-say "paragon" Soul Shriven would form an unflawed body in Coldharbour that was a perfect duplicate of the body worn in Mundus. In fact, if this paragon bore a sufficiently high Anuic valence, upon contact with Padomaic creatia its body would form almost instantaneously.
The Sojourner scoffed at my theory, but seemed taken with the idea nonetheless. He went on to speculate that if such a thing were possible, it would probably occur in a situation where the Mundus was in existential jeopardy. In that case the Heart of Nirn would spontaneously generate such "paragon" individuals as a way of defending itself from destruction, in a manner analogous to the way the mortal body fights off infection.

khele23eb17_ESO

No soul, no psychological impact.

Pistolera_ESO

This is why one must read and read and ask and ask in the game!

Nestor

Pistolera_ESO wrote: »

This is why one must read and read and ask and ask in the game!

Lore Books, they are not just for advancing the Mages Guild and Skills

newtinmpls

Think about it.

Your character, once a skilled, experience brave soul is now bereft of memory and skills; part you "re-learn" by experience, and part you "reclaim" by skyshards (by connecting/reclaiming that part of you which was reft away).