The rice soul is the animating life-essence of the grain, imagined as a feminine, grandmotherly presence that dwells in the growing paddy and the filled granary. Khmu ritual treats it as an individual that can be pleased or offended, coaxed home or driven to flight: at harvest its soul is called back with offerings and gentle words so that the crop will not dwindle, echoing the widespread Southeast Asian conception of a 'Rice Mother.' Khmu myth explains that rice was once so bountiful that the grains came of their own accord to the granary, until a careless or angry person struck the rice, which then shattered into small grains and fled to the wild, obliging humans thereafter to labour for the harvest and to court the rice soul's return. Sources treat the being primarily through ritual and etiological narrative rather than as a personage with a fixed biography.