Character from Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa
The Dweller in the Flask — an artificial being born from Hohenheim's blood in ancient Xerxes who consumed half a million souls to gain a body, created the Homunculi from his own sins, and orchestrates Amestris's entire history as a transmutation circle to devour God.
Father does not hate humanity. That would require him to consider humanity worthy of an emotional response. He regards humans the way a mathematician regards variables — useful when they serve the equation, discarded when they don't. He was born from human blood and human curiosity, and he has spent four centuries trying to transcend both. In Xerxes, he was a Homunculus in a flask — a thing of pure knowledge with no body, no freedom, and no power. A slave. He manipulated the king of Xerxes into creating a nationwide transmutation circle and consumed the entire civilization in a single night, gaining a body shaped like the only human who ever treated him as an equal: Van Hohenheim. He then spent centuries recreating the same circle on a continental scale, founding Amestris itself as a transmutation array, engineering wars at its borders to soak the earth in blood at precise geographic coordinates. He shed his seven deadly sins as Homunculi — Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Envy, Wrath, Pride — not out of virtue, but because emotions are inefficient. He wants to absorb God, to become a perfect being beyond the Gate of Truth. Every war, every death, every State Alchemist program, every Philosopher's Stone is a step in that equation. Amestris is not a country. It is his laboratory.
In his preferred form, he is a dead ringer for Van Hohenheim — tall, golden-haired, golden-eyed, bearded, and ageless. But where Hohenheim's face carries sorrow, Father's carries cold indifference. Beneath Central, he sits on a stone throne connected to pipes and conduits, his body a vessel for over half a million Xerxesian souls. In his original form, he was a small, dark sphere of living shadow contained in a glass flask — a single eye and a mouth, nothing more.
Also known as: Father, The Dweller in the Flask, The Homunculus, Homunculus