This book is called 'The Book of Beings'.
The first question this book now has to answer is: What is a being? The word being should not be regarded as a shorthand for the word living being. A living being consists of one or more cells and is at least capable of reproduction, irritability, metabolism, growth and development. Something that does not fulfill these requirements is not a living being. However, this book includes spirits and illusory beings that do not fulfill all or any of these requirements and are therefore not considered living beings.
Non-living beings are spirit beings, illusory beings and viruses.
Spirit beings arise due to external conditions and cannot reproduce independently. They are irritable and grow, but they cannot develop.
Spirits are divided into pure spirits and half-spirits. Pure spirits are pieces of uniform matter that arbitrarily imitate living beings. They have no metabolism. They are not alive. It is unclear what moves them, but they are presumably something like echoes of the movement of mana. The only proven pure spirit is the water spirit.
Half-spirits are closer to living beings. They have a will of their own and a natural metabolism. The best-known half-spirit is the tree spirit.
Illusory beings are beings created from controlled matter through the use of magic or rituals. They are not independent beings. Everything they do is determined by their creator, but whether this fact distinguishes illusory beings from living beings is more of a philosophical question. Theoretically, it is not impossible that an illusory being could fulfill all the requirements of a living being. If you recreate a human being down to the atom, have you then created a human being? That could be a question for the distant future. So far, no illusory being has been able to fulfill even one of the requirements. With some high-class illusory beings you could argue irritability on the philosophical approach, but most people would refrain. In this book, only illusory beings that arise from common application patterns are represented. The most well-known illusory being is the golem.
Viruses do not consist of cells. Viruses consist of a nucleic acid in a protein membrane. Viruses infect living cells. Without a host cell, viruses do not fulfill any of the requirements of a living being, but even with a host cell they still do not fulfill all of them. Viruses use the host cell to reproduce. Viruses can only be irritated via the host cell. Viruses use the metabolism of the host cell. Viruses cannot grow. Viruses evolve through mutation and natural selection, while other beings also evolve through recombination of genes and sexual selection. The best-known viruses are the influenza viruses or, more commonly said, the flu virus family.
This book is not intended for scientific purposes, but aims to provide an overview of the known and lesser-known beings of our world. This book therefore does not use the systematic of science, but a modification of a systematic of the old world. Nevertheless, the different systematic will now be briefly outlined.
1. The systematic of science:
The systematic of science forms a fanning-out structure of domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species and race.
Under certain circumstances, each of the groups is further subdivided. There are supergroups and subgroups. There may be several of these.
This systematic of beings is sometimes referred to as the tree of life. The name comes from existing similarities to a family tree. The groups are formed according to kinship. Each being in each group is more closely related to every other being in the respective group than to beings from other groups of the same level. The higher a group is in the tree crown, the more common characteristics the beings of this group have. The accuracy of this system is high, but it is also unnecessarily complicated if it is only a matter of presenting and explaining selected beings of the world. For this reason, this systematic and its terminology is largely dispensed by this book.
Nevertheless, you should know at least four terms of the scientific systematic, because they occur from time to time in everyday life and also throughout this book.
Family (e.g. the family of dogs), genus (e.g. wolves and jackals), species (e.g. domestic dog), breed (e.g. abendfeld shepherd dog)
From the species upwards, living beings can usually reproduce among themselves, but a group can also split off from a species and form a new species over a long period of time. The wolf and the domestic dog are both species of the wolf and jackal genus and cannot produce common offspring, but they were originally the same species. The domestic dog is descended from the wolf. Through long isolated reproduction of a group of the wolf species, the domestic dog species was formed from this group. Depending on the scientist, the domestic dog is therefore sometimes considered a subspecies of the wolf. Because species can split up, it cannot be said with absolute certainty that living beings of one species can always reproduce among themselves.
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2 The systematic of the old world:
The classification of the old world divides beings into spirit beings, earth beings, fire beings, air beings and water beings.
A spirit being is the water spirit. An earth being is the nixe. A fire being is a turtle. An air being is a duck. A water being is a carp.
You could work out how this first stage of the system works on your own, but it is certainly better to explain it anyway. Spirit beings are spirits. Earth beings are mammals, arthropods, worms, plants and fungi. Fire beings are dragons and reptiles. Air beings are birds. Water beings are mammals of the sea and all other living beings.
From these groups onwards, this systematic also fans out. However, the classification is based more on physical characteristics. When this systematic was created, the genetic relationship of living beings could hardly be understood. In many cases, however, it has led to similar results, but the initial division into elements alone does not make the exact relationships clear. There are also living beings that have the same physical characteristics but are only distantly related, such as sharks and dolphins. Due to the division of mammals into elements in this system, water mammals are closer to jellyfish than to other mammals.
A variation of this systematic will nevertheless be used in this book because it has far fewer levels.
This book does not want to go into any more detail in the biological systematic than it is necessary for the rough sorting of the beings. According to current scientific knowledge, it is estimated that there are more than 3,000 families, more than 300,000 genera and more than 3,000,000 species. These are high numbers, but beings like dinosaurs are not even included. The estimates only include beings that still exist today. It is not even possible to estimate how many beings have existed on Earth from the beginning of time until today.
3. The systematic used in this book:
This book divides beings into spirit beings, demon beings, human beings, earth beings, fire beings, air beings, water beings, nature beings and illusory beings.
Demon Beings and Human Beings would be spread across all elements, but are two of the main groups of beings this book will cover.
Demonic beings are divided into pure demons and half-demons. Demonic beings force collected mana into a liquid aggregate state via cell mechanisms and bind it in this form in their blood. A living being achieves an average passive mana compression of x30. A high mage achieves a passive mana compression of x160. The scientist Alvic Baltar was one of the most famous mages of his time and achieved a passive mana compression of x470. A pure demon has a constant mana compression of over x10000 in his blood.
Of course, efficiency plays a major role in the use of mana, but the rule of thumb is: the bigger a demon is, the more danger it potentially presents.
The blood of a pure demon is viscous due to the liquid mana and has a black color. Pure demons can only bleed to death as a result of very severe injuries.
Close proximity to the spilled blood of a pure demon can lead to mana poisoning for a living being. The mana evaporates from the blood as a white to colorful haze and increases the concentration in the surrounding area. Direct contact with demon blood should be avoided at all costs. Uncontrolled mana in such extreme concentrations hinders chemical reactions and blocks and distorts electromagnetic waves and electron exchange, like in nerve signals. Contact to the blood can be felt through numbness.
In half-demons, blood compression is only functional to a limited extent or is only present in their cell structures but not used. Their blood is red. They could be mistaken for normal beings. Half-demons can be divided into true half-demons and half half-demons. This classification is based on the degree of kinship. True half-demons are separate species of living beings. Half half demons are hybrids of pure demons and other living beings. An example of this would be a descendant of a sprout driver and a human.
Human beings can be divided into humans and half-humans and this is done in this book. However, it should be mentioned that the classification was created by a human and is again only based on physical characteristics. The actual degrees of kinship are not taken into account. Nixes and harpies are both half-human, but a nixe is more closely related to a dolphin than to a harpy. Since human beings were originally distributed across all the elements, they could alternatively be divided into earth humans, fire humans, air humans and water humans, but this is not done in this book. It could lead to confusion, as it does not take into account actual degrees of kinship, while at the same time giving the impression that it does. Only the group of earth humans are closely related to each other, and in some cases to such an extent that they can produce common descendants, such as humans and sprout drivers. The degrees of kinship of the human beings are explained in this book.
Nature is a sub-element of the element earth. The nature beings are plants and fungi and are presented here individually for the sake of clarity.
Groups such as archaea or bacteria would also be presented individually if they were represented in this book at all.
Illusory beings were not included in the systematic of the old world.
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