Hi guys I am Inotia King a youtuber, redditor and gamer who likes theorizing about the story. I actually cobbled together a list of some of my more important theories with respect to the game Genshin Impact and Star Rail that I have been basing all of my newer theories on. I'll be putting more of those up on Hive along with new stuff but if you're impatient I also archived all my theories here. I hope some of you guys are game theorists too. Let's try to figure out these great games together!

So it seems there's some confusion as to what exactly is going on with the lore of miHoYo's game universe. There are those who have been playing since Honkai Gakuen and believe it's a single universe and then there's Genshin players who have no idea what miHoYo was smoking when it came up with this Imaginary Tree and Sea of Quanta business and then you have the Honkai Impact players in between. So what is actually happening? I wasn't planning on it but I did talk about the tree and sea over in Genshin so I think I'll give it my best shot. Let's try unraveling this mess.

The oldest potential origin story I've been hearing for the Honkai Universe is the one told by the lore of Thanatos in Honkai Gakuen. The story goes that there was a mysterious being the Lord of Myriad Realms who saw a primordial world devoid of direction and decided to give them finality, finality in the form of Thanatos the concept of death. Eventually this Thanatos kills Zeus and from the accumulated energy in the god king the Honkai Universe is supposedly formed. Or at least that's the common interpretation. Zeus then became miHoYo's Imaginary Tree with each leaf representing either a planet or a star system in a singular universe traversed through in the Sea of Quanta that is essentially space.

This actually wouldn't be a bad interpretation. The current idea of our universe is that there were denser pockets of matter in the singularity that exploded as the Big Bang that allowed for gravitationally bound groups of galaxies. Each group is isolated with what scientists are calling Dark Energy acting as an unknown force pushing them further and further apart. Eventually each group will be too far apart for even lightspeed travel to traverse. This has been theorized as the reason why intergalactic travel in Star Rail is so difficult and requires the fictional Imaginary Energy to accomplish. In this interpretation the leaves represent these gravitationally bound groups while the Sea of Quanta would represent space with its properties representing Dark Energy.

Here's the problem:

The Lord of Myriad Realms itself comes from outside of the supposed Honkai Universe. The description of the world it arrives in is a chaotic realm where the gods represent concepts and endlessly conflict. Ultimately with the creation of Thanatos, Zeus manipulates her to kill the other gods and absorbs their concepts into herself but after she's absorbed them all Thanatos then kills her. This is literally the Big Bang even described in the lore as Zeus exploding as a singularity. In other words all we're seeing is the origins of the Gakuen Universe itself and not the greater Hoyoverse or Honkai Universe.

The next time we have any information on the Imaginary Tree or Sea of Quanta we're already in Honkai Impact 3rd. And in this version there's definitely a multiverse. With respect to the story established in Honkai Gakuen this new game diverges in many details. Kiana Kaslana for example is no longer a normal girl but rather a clone of another girl and the Herrscher of the Void Sirin. The girl she was cloned from was then altered into a blonde named Bianka or the Valkyrie Durandal. In this universe Bianka was the original Kiana Kaslana. A divergence like this is an aspect of a few multiverse theories.

Star Rail itself provides even more information to support the specific multiverse approach to interpreting the tree and sea. Both Star Rail and Honkai Impact are sci-fi games with lore inspired by real world science. And in this new game the characters wield weapons called Light Cones. This is actually a concept in quantum mechanics. To explain it I have to first talk about World Lines. World Lines are you. Each time you do anything you change your position across space and time and that's what the World Line represents. Now there's a hard limit to how far you can ever move in space and time because we as macroscopic beings can never reach the speed of light. And that's what the Light Cone is the hard limit for any possible place you could ever find yourself at any point in time. All of your World Lines have to fall within the Light Cone. Interpreted another way the Light Cone weapons are all the possible Paths their wielders can ever take. Each of these Light Cones is a book detailing one of the characters and they also bear a Path.

Then we have the Superimposition mechanic which is just a way to use up copies of these weapons and enhance their in-game abilities. But superimposition is a real word. It means laying identical images on top of themselves. Laying images on top of each other? You mean like this?

The above gif comes from Marvel's Antman. It's the pseudo-villain Ghost and she's going to help me further define the miHoYo multiverse. She's afflicted with what the MCU called "molecular disequilibrium" but what it actually is given the major theme of the Antman movies is a barely controlled quantum superposition.

What is a quantum superposition?

I think most of us have heard this story before. There's a dude. He has a cat. He puts the cat in a box with a vial of poison. There's a chance this vial will break and kill the cat. But does it break or doesn't it? The only way for the dude to tell is when he opens the box and observes the healthy cat or poisoned cat. Before he opens the box quantum physicists suggest that the cat is both and this state of being both is the quantum superposition. And just like all your possible World Lines bound by the Light Cone these positions are separate lines sometimes called wave functions. Once the cat is observed a single World Line is selected and the wave function collapses.

This idea of a Light Cone creating a quantum superposition that then collapses into a single observed reality actually happened over in Genshin. In Inazuma we played a Character Quest for the Archon Ei. During the events Ei explains that she remembers a time when there wasn't a Sacred Sakura. When she returned from Khaenri'ah it was just there. Even more confusing, all of Inazuma believed that the tree had always been there. We later learned that this was caused by interference from the shining shade Istaroth who was central to a time travel plot that confused many players. I talked about this back when it happened but I don't think it cleared things up. So here's another go at it. The reason why Ei would remember a time before the tree was planted is because her superposition collapsed into the role of being the one who planted the tree. As such the version of her we get throughout the game is the one who would eventually be caught in Makoto's realm of consciousness and do battle against the Shogun across time through the use of Istaroth's power. This sends her back to her past which was a time before the planting of the Sacred Sakura which she then becomes the one to plant it. Once she does the superposition of the Sakura collapses into its existence. Time then flows normally despite the observed inconsistencies. I'll get more into this later in the topic.

But what if the wave function doesn't collapse? Let's hop back to Honkai Impact. Recently the game wrapped up the story of the Captainverse. There are certain characters in that part of the game that are developed stories for some of the battlesuits used by the characters in the main story. For example there's Bronie the Haxxor Bunny Battlesuit used by Bronya Zaychik. Bronie just like K-423 has a very different history compared to Bronya. And at the same time another character Magical Girl Bronya has a story totally unrelated to both. We also have Magical Girl Sirin unrelated to the Sirin who caused the Second Eruption and someone called the Ferryman who is another version of our own player character the Captain.

Yes I think it's pretty safe to say that the Hoyoverse is a multiverse specifically a quantum multiverse or Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics where each possible deviation in universal events plays out in its own universe. If the wave function of a specific event collapses we get something like Ei's experience in Genshin. If it doesn't we get all of the expies we've seen across miHoYo's games. Ei herself is Genshin's version of Mei from Honkai who in Gakuen became the doomed opponent to Kiana the Herrscher of the End and in Honkai Impact the Herrscher of Origin and partner to its Kiana the Herrscher of Finality. (it's still the End in Chinese)

Where Science and Religion Mix

A while ago I brought up that despite the scientific basis for Star Rail there's also likely a religious inspiration to the game. This is because of the theme of journeying and self-discovery. Not only our player character but even the Aeons themselves seem to be following on the Paths they represent. In Buddhism the ultimate goal is Nirvana or enlightenment, reaching beyond the self. In Genshin there's also a concept of enlightenment but based on Gnosticism and the gnosis which is attained through personal knowledge and experiences. So how could we take this very religious idea and apply it to the quantum science of a sci-fi game? Well what if you could surpass the boundaries of the Light Cones and Paths in your World Lines?

How right? The answer is time travel but in a quantum mechanics interpretation. Remember Ei? She and her sister were allowed to change the course of time for their region through help from a higher power that being the shining shade Istaroth. Istaroth is currently known as the God of Time but is that all she really is? In v2.5 Genshin had the major event Three Realms Gateway Offering. The event was based in the subarea of Inazuma called Enkanomiya that was founded by Istaroth's intervention. She is their patron deity. During the event we're sent to collect sigils but we collect similar sigils in all the other regions normally. These sigils correspond to the element of their Archon so it stands to reason that Istaroth's Enkanomiya sigils should too right? But they aren't Time Sigils. Instead they're Light Sigils which I think links the two. And quantum mechanics would agree.

This theory on how to achieve time travel follows David Deutsch's model where a person can travel back to an earlier point of their own World Line and then select to experience another one. Now how does that work? We already know about the Light Cone which sets the limit on everything you could possibly do. But if we manipulate spacetime it's believed we could tilt these Light Cones. To manipulate spacetime we need gravity. Black holes for example have the highest known gravitational fields because they are composed of a massive amount of matter compressed into a singularity. Even light isn't able to escape from them but there's a boundary where a balance can be achieved and prevent light from just falling into the black hole. That would be the event horizon. The closer we can get to that the more the Light Cone can be tilted and if it tips enough there will be some area within it where our World Line could point back down the time axis.

It's a little difficult to explain so look at that picture showing a version of this using a Tipler cylinder instead. Don't worry too much about what that is. It's using the same properties: excessive gravity with a rotation that allows for an event horizon so light doesn't just fall straight into it.

Ok great so light and time travel right? But Star Rail doesn't have a God of Time so how could it work in that game? Let's talk about Stellarons. A Stellaron is actually known as a star core in Chinese and the black holes we'd be using to tilt our Light Cones would also necessarily need to come from incredibly massive stars. You could actually just think of a black hole as a star core whose gravity is so powerful none of the light it produces can escape so it appears dark. And Stellarons are known to cause a strange phenomenon right? The Fragmentum which in Chinese is 裂界 or fractured reality is a pocket of reality created by the Stellaron's presence in the area. Inside of it people and creatures are said to behave oddly. They've been pushed into a different path.

So Stellarons allow for quantum time travel along a person's World Line. And who has a Stellaron inside of them? The Trailblazer. Who has adopted multiple Paths directly from their Aeons? The Trailblazer.

I think the Trailblazer will attain nirvana at the end of Star Rail by traveling across all possible Paths of their World Lines and seeing each of them through to conclusion. But if they're traveling back in time this much and existing across the various Paths why don't we see any of it? It's similar to what we saw with Ei in Genshin but instead of Schrödinger's model which focuses on an observer we have Feynman's Scheme of the multiverse theory which suggests that all possible paths have already been taken by a version of us but ultimately the wave function collapses by combining together and being interpreted in the most likely path. All of the other characters see this outcome but the Trailblazer will consciously experience all of them.

From a Buddhism perspective this would be how the Buddha can remember his past lives. Speaking of lives it might be interesting to note that both times so far that the Trailblazer's awoken to a new Path they've taken a mortal hit. Nanook's Destruction Path unlocked when the Trailblazer stepped in to take a hit for March and Qlipoth's Abundance Path unlocked when the Trailblazer reenacted a well known scene from Final Fantasy VIII. You could see it as the Trailblazer dying and being reincarnated into a new Path along a different one of their World Lines.

Definitions

There's still more. Back over to Honkai Impact the actual translation for the Imaginary Tree or 虚数之树 would be the Imaginary Number Tree. According to some physicists imaginary numbers are necessary to define our reality. Why though? An imaginary number is just a representation of the square root of a negative number which is normally impossible. For example 4 is the square of 2 or -2 so what is -4? Since multiplying two negative numbers cancels out the negatives and makes the result positive there is no normal way to root a negative number. Now that's just math right? How would you actually apply this to the real world? When would you actually need to calculate for a negative squared number? For our purposes that answer is never. But throw in those wave functions these physicists work with and that all changes.

Because reality works under three spatial dimensions and the temporal dimension of time there needs to be a way to calculate for changes to wave functions in all of these ways. Normal math works on those spatial dimensions but to calculate for time's effect physicists require imaginary numbers. Now not all quantum physicists believe this. There are some who ignore equations that result in imaginary answers and there are others who separate out between equations using only normal numbers and the ones that use imaginary numbers. But for our purposes at least the scientists of China's own Southern University of Science and Technology and University of Science and Technology of China do believe in them. It stands to reason miHoYo would adopt something for their game universe that their local scientists support. To compare when M-Theory was concocted the DC universe adopted it as fact for their lore.

Ok so that's the Imaginary Tree. What about the Sea of Quanta? Well the sea is a little less interesting. It's name is literally just Quantum Sea. But I think that doesn't really define it properly. Based on the description we have about it what the sea actually is is much better defined by a faction in Honkai Impact that opposes it. I'm talking about Anti-Entropy because the sea is really just a depiction of what a pure entropic state of existence would be. Entropy is defined by thermodynamics and means a state where there isn't enough available energy to do anything with. This is one of the current theories on how our universe will end namely Heat Death. But through Heat Death we get a little more detail about this. As the theory goes one day all particles of the universe will spread out in the vastness of empty space and share an equivalent amount of the total energy in the universe. They'll spread out evenly and be spaced apart enough that no two particles will ever be able to come into contact again which prevents any changes to them. In other words it's total uniformity but it isn't the loss of any of the energy that was in the universe. Because of that if there was ever something that could push these particles together again it could cause some kind of change which could kick start the universe again.

Guess what kind of something could do that? Principles of quantum mechanics like random spontaneous quantum tunneling. What was the lore behind how the Imaginary Tree started according to Honkai Impact? Right it spontaneously appeared one day and expanded. But since this Imaginary Tree is the only one we know of so far this random quantum tunneling event to counteract entropy could be a loophole miHoYo could use if they ever wanted to write a story about the ultimate death of the Hoyoverse. They could just loop it back around to the spontaneous generation of the next Imaginary Tree and we'd start the whole process all over again. Sorry Sea of Quanta. Your struggle is inevitable. (that would actually shift the Hoyoverse from the Heat Death theory to the Big Bounce theory) Speaking of inevitable fates the name I chose to give to my Teyvat interpretation of the Imaginary Tree is the Primordial Greek Goddess Ananke who is the Goddess of Inevitability.

And there's still a little more. In Star Rail they actually have another name for the Imaginary Tree. At this point I think I've shown that the Hoyoverse is definitely a quantum multiverse right? Well there's a term that surpasses the quantum multiverse: The Omniverse. It's more just a glamorous term and doesn't really mean anything more than the multiverse already does but just to make a point Star Rail calls the Imaginary Tree the Tree of Existence (存在之树) and this is a term that goes along with the Omniverse. The term tries to resolve any possible loopholes to the quantum multiverse like say the Bubble Universes that don't all follow the same creation method of normal Imaginary Tree universes.

And finally if we go back to Honkai Gakuen and the idea that when Zeus exploded she became the Imaginary Tree in a singular universe, you know that interpretation I defined through groups of galaxies being pushed further and further away by Dark Energy? That's actually part of a theory called the Quilted Multiverse so even that's still a multiverse not a universe. The idea is that while it could be interpreted as a single universe, space in this situation is defined as endless and with so much space separating the galaxy clusters of individual gravitationally bound pockets they might themselves qualify as individual universes.

Side Note: Much of what I brought up about the quantum multiverse model seems to revolve around time right? And traditionally time travel doesn't relate to multiple universes. And so far I've only pointed at one Big Bang the accepted start to any single universe. But in quantum mechanics time is everything. Think about it like this. As soon as the Big Bang started you could plot it on a timeline. So an instant after that we could already have an infinite amount of different universes based around this one Big Bang. Where are the denser pockets of matter? How do they separate? Which particles generate first? All of these variables would have to be taken into account under the quantum model and the possible universes they generate might as well have started from their own separate Big Bangs. And in this way universes like the Genshin one would be further removed from the Honkai (and eventually Zenless) ones while the Honkai branded ones are much closer with fairly related versions of the same character.

Maybe it's just bad writing

Ok but there's another side of the discussion that's less to do with any of this crazy sciencing and more to do with storytelling. Some players just believe that miHoYo's pulling this stuff out of their butts. That's not necessarily wrong either but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing. All of the stuff I just talked about is part of quantum mechanics but all of quantum mechanics is part of a branch of science called theoretical physics. It's theoretical not practical. All theoretical physics really is is math. That stuff about imaginary numbers? It makes the equations the scientists are using make sense. Light cones, tipping them over, spacetime warping, Dark Energy, Schrödinger's cat and observed reality or Feynman's Scheme and combined reality, all of these things were calculated through mathematical models. Most of this stuff we have never actually witnessed so changes to the accepted model happen all the time as soon as new information is discovered. That stuff about imaginary numbers? That was 2021.

So any time you guys see the lore of Honkai or Genshin or Star Rail being retconned it could just be miHoYo adapting to the updated information. I don't know about you guys but I actually find that commendable. It's better than for example comic book companies like DC still using just the M-Theory model and explaining phasing as being caused by vibrating through particles. Or the typical portrayals of time travel across fiction which are either selective like in many instances in the Zelda franchise or poorly portrayed like in Marvel's Endgame.

Side Note: Speaking of Zelda the old timeline is also a quantum multiverse. And actually it's because of that that Nintendo's ultimate announcement about BOTW saying it was just some kind convergence in the far futures of each of the existing timelines doesn't make sense. As I pointed out earlier quantum multiverses start from the Big Bang and continue to separate across all possible World Lines. That means that there isn't just three timelines in Zelda there's just three that have games and if there really was some kind of convergence it would have to account for all of them. Converging World Lines in the quantum model is just about impossible. You'd have to somehow have every single divergent path find their way to that single outcome.

Ok summary: (I think we all need it for this one haha)

• The Hoyoverse or Honkai Universe or miHoYo's connected universe is a quantum multiverse. Why?
• In Honkai Gakuen Thanatos was created by the Lord of Myriad Realms as the Gakuen world's concept of death. She eventually kills Zeus who had become a singularity by collecting all of the other god concepts and upon death exploded. This is the Gakuen Universe's Big Bang event. (Compare that to the recent Primordial Sea creation lore of Genshin.)
• The lord came from outside of the Gakuen Universe which is the Sea of Quanta an abtract concept of true entropy bound only by quantum mechanics.
• Out of the Sea the Imaginary Tree spontaneously formed. It is an abstract concept of creation using quantum tunneling and vacuum fluctuations to make use of the energy potential of the Sea of Quanta.
• In Genshin which is less educated in modern scientific theory the tree and sea might be interpreted as the Ancient Greek Primordial Gods Ananke, Goddess of Inevitability and Chaos, God of the Void.
• In Star Rail the weapons are called Light Cones which are quantum mechanical concepts defining all possible positions of all beings in any universe.
• It is possible to travel backwards in time by manipulating Light Cones with intense gravity like that found in the densest star cores that collapse into black holes.
• Stellarons are star cores which cause the phenomenon Fragmentum a fracturing of reality in a localized area similar to this type of time travel.
• In this interpretation a person travels back in time but along their own World Lines which are all the possible Paths they have within the Light Cone.
• The Trailblazer possesses a Stellaron inside of them and has already been shown to adopt new Paths. This can also simultaneously be interpreted through a religious lens as the Trailblazer on the path towards attaining nirvana under Buddhist beliefs.
• From the outside observers would not see the myriad of Paths taken by the Trailblazer because they collapse into a singular common sense path according to Richard Feynman.
• On the other hand Genshin follows Erwin Schrödinger where an observer selects for the common sense interpretation of reality across the many World Lines. In Ei's Second Character Quest she alone remembers a time without the Sacred Sakura tree because she exists on a World Line that goes back in time to plant the tree. Observers on the other hand collapse the different World Lines so that only the path where the Sacred Sakura always existed remains.
• Time travel was made possible in Genshin by the God of Time Istaroth but she might actually have the Light Element and therefore time travel remains consistent with the gravity manipulation of Light Cones found in Star Rail.
• In multiverse theory the World Lines could all exist in parallel. In Honkai Impact this is shown through the Captainverse where characters from the main story like Bronya Zaychik exists in alternate lives like Bronie and Magical Girl Bronya. Extended to Star Rail she also exists as Bronya Rand. These are separate World Lines for Bronya across the separate Universal World Lines of the games.
• These Honkai universes diverged at a more recent point compared to Genshin and Zenless.
• Quantum mechanics is a part of theoretical physics and therefore not observed in practical reality. As such it is subject to change and different interpretations and a fictionalized version of it will likewise be flawed and incomplete. But miHoYo seems to be keeping their Hoyoverse up to date with new discoveries like the importance of imaginary numbers in defining reality.

I hope this topic helps to clarify this issue for the community. The Hoyoverse depiction of multiverse theory is a very good one in my opinion and with miHoYo still hard at work developing its lore I think it'll stay that way for years to come.

Topic originally created on September 24th, 2023.