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The concept behind Avatars reaches back to the Apostle of Evolution, who set out to copy the immortal Shadow Army that the Monarch of Shadows had used to devastate many Apostles during the Outer God War. Coming to Earth, the Apostle studied humans in search of a way to reproduce those soldiers, but true creation lay within the power of a god, leaving him able only to imitate it. His efforts yielded humanoid weapons rather than living people, since he could never replicate a soul.

His later subjects, numbered 41 through 47, could reason and speak and healed themselves with the same vigor as the Shadow Army, yet the soul still eluded him. Failing at that, he turned toward immortality instead, building a vessel to hold his own divine form. Suho eventually plundered this work and reshaped it, crafting physical bodies meant to be steered from a distance through the Game Capsules of Ahjin Soft within an expanded game server.

The bodies are extraordinarily tough and knit themselves back together no matter how badly they are damaged. Their original design let them think and talk, but without a soul they amounted to artificial minds wearing flesh. After the early attempts to mirror the Shadows fell short, the Apostle reworked them into hollow, soulless containers sturdy enough to host an entity like himself, a quality Suho repurposed so that they could temporarily carry a Hunter's soul into another dimension by way of the Capsule.

Suho's path to the Avatars begins after he defeats the Apostle of Paradise and starts dismantling the Elvenwood hidden in North Korea. The Apostle of Evolution then tries to win his favor by offering No. 47, a humanoid doll meant as a companion, but Suho sees through the bribe and has Beru swallow a Starpiece relic to trace the Apostle to his laboratory. Once the Apostle falls, No. 47 dissolves into pink cells, and study of her remains reveals she was built from Elvenwood pollen.

Recognizing that the Apostle's method resembled the creation of Heavenly Soldiers rather than the Shadow Army, Suho has Arsha's insects gather the pollen and sets Beru and Harmakan to continue the research. From this grows the plan to make vessels that hold Hunters' souls and send users into a real alternate dimension through Game Capsules. Jinho grasps the full scope: even non-Awakened people could become genuine Hunters, raiding real dungeons and potentially fighting in the Outer God War, with the new game Solo Leveling: Ragnarok serving the ultimate goal of making all of humanity into Hunters.