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had a strange idea for a magic system…

general idea is that there’s two approaches to doing magic, one is heavily technical and mathy, maybe using my interlocking knot theory magic system idea. the other is, while technically based on that, much more intuitive, people train little magical wisps by pushing magic into them when they do the thing that they want.

now, people can absorb and regenerate magical constructs, including these wisps. so people can duplicate them, at least to some degree of accuracy, imperfect copying and selection means evolutionary processes apply. generally speaking the more mathy approach produces simple enough constructs that they can be perfectly reproduced, and also simple enough that it’s easy to manipulate them as a distinct pieces, rather than as an amorphus mass.

both constructs and wisps require magic to persist, and magic appears to only be generated by living things. so people don’t really consider the wisps alive, though some do display significant intelligence.

so people have been passing these constructs and wisps around through the ages, and things are really starting to take off, both in the realm of sophisticated techincal constructs and in engineering wisps. it’s now understood that wisps are just extremely complex constructs, that are somehow resilliant enough to mutation to be passed from person to person. the limit of what can be passed without mutation in technical constructs has been reached ages ago, and methods have been devised to duplicate complicated constructs using other constructs or highly regular crystaline structures or something.