An Elden Ring player stumbled upon an interesting detail about the spirit jellyfish that inhabit The Lands Between. The spirit jellies are fairly weak mobs that hover around in groups and shoot ranged jets of liquid that cause poison buildup. Besides being an acquirable summon, there is also a jellyfish shield in the game that is basically just the unmodified cap of a jellyfish that players can carry around. The spirit jellyfish have decent resistances, though they move exceedingly slowly, so the shield is actually pretty good. Besides the dark and depressing lore Elden Ring gave them, there are still secrets to uncover about these monsters.
Elden Ring's spirit jellyfish are the spirits of children who exist in a strange sort of purgatory, as the cycle of life and death in The Lands Between has been shattered. Meaning the jellyfish spirit Elden Ring players got from Roderika, that they summon to distract the attention of murderous demigods and get brutally attacked, is also the spirit of a child. That particular summon is a child named Aurelia, which coincidentally is also the name of the species of jellyfish Elden Ring used as the inspiration for their design. Players can bring Aurelia to Stargazers' Ruins to let her see her sister again, and yes, even though she's a jellyfish, she can see.
Elden Ring player and Reddit user ghoulc4 was in the flooded area right before the Leonine Misbegotten's fog door when they stumbled across a spirit jellyfish with a rune bonus. For those unaware, Elden Ring will randomly spawn mobs that are worth four times the amount of runes players would normally earn by killing them. Players can tell when one of these lucky mobs spawn because their eyes will glow gold. The moment ghoulc4 found a bonus rune spirit jellyfish was the moment that they realized those things even have eyes.
The eyes are invisible at all other times but when the gold aura reveals them, but it seems that the spirit jellyfish in Elden Ring have two that peer out from within the jellyfish's cap. In real life, the Aurelia jellyfish, also known as the moon jellyfish, has eight sensory structures within the cap called rhopalia, which each contain two simple eyes. But fitting sixteen glowing eyes on the spirit jellyfish in Elden Ring would be difficult to design. Also, since they are the spirits of children, it's possible that players can only see two eyes because of the human characteristics of the spirits housed within them.
It is odd to think that creatures such as jellyfish even have eyes at all, as they seem to mindlessly drift about going wherever the current decides they should go, but it shows how much attention to detail that FromSoftware put into the game. It paid attention to the biology of jellyfish enough to recognize their eyes should glow as well, and even managed to reference the monster's unique lore by making it appear more human with only two eyes. Elden Ring is full of secrets, big and small, which is why people are still discovering new things in The Lands Between.
Elden Ring is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
