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!
This topic is about how the Hoyoverse might be structured. For my attempt at explaining how miHoYo designed it and the scientific basis they employed, please refer to this topic.
Time and time again we've been told that the Imaginary Tree isn't really a tree and it's just easier to explain by using tree imagery. In fact one of the earliest explanations we got about the tree didn't use the idea of a tree at all. As seen in the above image, HI3's Einstein (Lieseri Einstein, pretty much a younger alternate reality version of Einstein's real daughter who died in infancy of scarlet fever) used cups filled with water and lined up in a grid instead. However I think a tree is perfectly fine, specifically a phylogenetic tree.
In biology scientists try to map out species in terms of common ancestors and when they diverged. The more recent the divergence the closer the species are evolutionarily related. The same can be applied to the universes of the Imaginary Tree. We can plot this out by using the story direction and the characters that appear. The most obvious ones are Gakuen and HI3 because HI3 was essentially a direct sequel to Gakuen in terms of development. The two share the same story with HI3 expanding on details established by Gakuen. Many characters are directly lifted from the older game while a major twist in HI3 was that the main character, Kiana Kaslana was actually a clone of the real Kiana in her timeline and the real Kiana was mutated into becoming someone else.
Further removed would be Honkai: Star Rail which shares almost nothing with the story and elements of the other Honkai games but does share many characters in drastically different but relatable roles. This actually reflects another game mode of HI3 called the Captain's Bizarre Adventures (affectionately known as the Captainverse by fans) which tells the stories of many alternate universes running parallel to the HI3 universe just like Star Rail's. Star Rail itself dipped its toe into this with the character of Acheron, a Raiden Mei from a universe parallel to the main Star Rail universe but also separate from any other known universes.
Then we leave that branch of the tree. All of these games took place on just one major branch. Now you have Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero. These are other very distinct branches of the tree. In Genshin we do still see characters that look like Honkai branch characters. Raiden Mei and Raiden Ei are basically the same person at the surface level. However it helps to know that "Mei" and "Ei" are names that are worlds apart. Mei is 芽依 while Ei is 影. The former reflects Mei's personality, a reliable person but also a "sprout" in that she was once emotionally weak and manipulated by her Herrscher persona and then matured by taking her fate into her own hands. Ei on other hand has a name meaning shadow which reflects her hidden insecurities as a false Archon. She was always meant to be the blunt instrument of the true Archon. In fact that's literally what her predecessor's name was, 真 Makoto for truth. Likewise both Genshin and Zenless have their own "Kianas." Genshin's takes the form of Kiana's Herrscher of the Void form as Asmoday and Zenless has Kiana's Void Drifter battlesuit for Yixuan but also called out HOV's move of descending down steps generated out of her own power. I also have a theory that we'll see the Zenless version of "Fu Hua" in a revived Yijiang by the end of Season 2.
How do we reconcile characters that seem to be related yet share nothing but an aesthetic? To make sense of this we have to backtrack a little to what a multiverse actually is. Most examples simplify it a little too much by presenting the breakfast scenario. You wake up and have a choice between two different kinds of breakfast options and you will select each option in different universes. Each universe's you is still you just one that made a different decision. Bronya in Gakuen is still the Bronya of HI3 and the Bronya of Star Rail. However that's the least of it. To paraphrase from an explanation in HI3, quantum universes aren't just related to personal decisions but also cosmic ones. If we look at that phylogenetic tree again, that little tab on the far left could be considered a "base world" where all of the possible information then spreads out in different ways starting all the way from their respective Big Bangs. Therefore Kiana on any of the Honkai branches will be Kiana but a "Kiana" on more distant branches like those of the Genshin or Zenless branch could have developed entirely differently though the base information of someone that looks like her might remain the same. They could even share story elements but that would be something akin to the dolphin and ophthalmosaurus, convergent evolution of unrelated lineages. For instance, Anby in Zenless is part of a series of clones and theories have pointed to Yixuan as the base. This would relate to HI3's Kiana being clone K-423 of the original Kiana but all the details involved are different.
The Imaginary Tree
The story doesn't end there. When Star Rail released there was an idea in the community that Star Rail depicted the entire Hoyoverse. Each planet was one of the universes and travel between planets took place in the Sea of Quanta that was space in the Hoyoverse. However that idea is easily disproven by Star Rail's direct predecessor and its Captainverse. It was further disproven by HI3 in its current story arc which centers around space travel to neighboring Mars, a type of interplanetary travel that is distinct from travel through the Sea of Quanta as seen in the Captainverse. Genshin joined this party even more recently with the revelation that Skirk is also an extraterrestrial who traversed space to arrive on Teyvat. Her master Surtalogi has been traveling through the Genshin universe's space for some time.
The reason for this misunderstanding comes from an NPC in Star Rail. We recently met the character Zandar One Kuwabara who had come up with a theory long ago on how the universe works. In this topic so far we've gone over the quantum multiverse as it relates to the Hoyoverse as a whole but actually within each of these universes there is another form of MWI. Unlike the previous section, Zandar's theory reflects something more like Feynman's path integrals and that breakfast scenario brought up earlier. Within the confines of each universe there are many possible routes it can take and all of them exist simultaneously in what's called a superposition. Consciously though all of the people existing within these universes only experience the "classical probability" of an event. This is something I brought up before about ++the Paths in Star Rail.++
In Genshin we saw this with Inazuma. When did the Sacred Sakura start to exist? For most of the people, it's always existed. However for Ei, she is the one who planted it. She planted it in her future when she was taken back into the past to plant the seed. Therefore from her perspective, there was a timeline in which the tree didn't exist and Inazuma nearly succumbed to the Abyss during the Cataclysm. Then because she planted the tree the timeline was altered such that it collected enough of the corruption to keep Inazuma safe. But how did she know to plant the tree where she did? Because that's where it was located in the altered timeline that she also lived through. Chicken or the egg? Both.
I have an ++ongoing theory about Zenless++ that will fit with this as well. Based around the name of the game's major city, New Eridu, that it is the last bastion of humanity in the game's universe and a word that flashed across the screen during an early cutscene I believe that a future plot point for the game will be traveling across Zandar's theorized "tree branches" in order to save the Zenless universe in a similar way to Ei's planting of the Sacred Sakura.
In HI3 there's actually a meta take on this. In order to come up with a solution to the dilemma faced by her universe - the creation of the Herrscher of the End who would destroy the world and cause it to reset - Ai Lambda designed a game to process the many possibilities of the HI3 universe. This game is the HI3 game that our world's players are playing and given there are dialogue options and the ability to choose playable parties and which attacks they'll use, each player's playthrough of HI3 will necessarily be slightly different. Therefore we players of HI3 are affecting the details of events in these virtual HI3 universes which then aided in producing the singular solution to the actual HI3 universe seen in-game.
So what is the difference between these multiverses? Why is one reflected in a single outcome and universe while another spreads out into many universes? The difference is construction. In the Hoyoverse itself what's been happening is that there is an Imaginary Tree that is siphoning the potential for creation out of the Sea of Quanta. Within each of the universes on this tree however, the predominant motivator is its Imaginary element. As Zandar proposed in his theory, space is composed of Imaginary Energy and it is this energy that separates planets and makes interstellar travel nigh impossible. This actually doesn't have anything to do with the multiverse. In our real world, the same thing applies too only instead of calling it Imaginary Energy we've come to call it Dark Energy, some as yet unidentified force that's accelerating celestial bodies away from each other. Most of the universe is no longer accessible to us even if we were to develop lightspeed travel. Or to put it in terms of Zandar's theory: "Dark Energy isolates star clusters from each other and even light cannot pass through it." (the reason why in our real world though is that light has a hard limit on how fast it can travel and Dark Energy has already pushed galaxies and galaxy clusters so far apart that it would take even light an obscenely long time to cross the distance) The ability then to harness "Imaginary Energy" like the Aeons and their Emanators is Star Rail's solution to this. Ours is a little more complicated.
The Sea of Quanta
So we just covered what the Hoyoverse looks like between the Imaginary Tree and the Sea of Quanta. We then covered what the tree's universes look like within it. What's left is to see what the sea looks like from within.
A while ago I made a seemingly unrelated topic for Genshin but it was fortunate enough to draw the attention of an actual grad student studying quantum magnetism. As we discussed the topic based on his expertise, he brought up an interesting idea about the Sea of Quanta. A part of the current understanding of reality is quantum field theory. A predecessor to this theory is the Dirac Sea which is what the Sea of Quanta's name drew his attention to but I think the modern quantum field theory works just as well.
Unlike the tree which has stable universes of varying degrees of success, the sea is a chaotic realm of Bubble Universes popping in and out of existence amidst the nothingness of pure entropy. The way these universes are described is almost exactly how another aspect of quantum mechanics, quantum foam is described. Basically space-time is a mess of spontaneously generating virtual particle pairs that annihilate each other. However sometimes these virtual particles can become real particles by absorbing enough energy to reach the threshold of its excited state. In terms of the Sea of Quanta, there are ways to sustain a Bubble Universe. You can flood honkai (aka Imaginary Energy) into an Ether Anchor for example.
HI3 added another wrinkle to this idea with Part 2. On Mars, the world was already destroyed and left Mars barren. However it would turn out that the Martian civilization survived by creating a Bubble Universe out of its major city of Oxia. The question is how they might sustain this universe. Instead of just creating the Bubble Universe of Oxia, the Martians actually created two cities. Oxia would be the stable and safe Bubble Universe to allow Martian civilization to survive and continue to develop in the Sea of Quanta while the true Mars was left barren but Langqiu was a third layer that generated a power through human fear called Shadows. This Shadow power was then flooded into an Ether Anchor bridging the two cities and was able to provide the same effect as Imaginary Energy. In quantum field theory, there is also a "shadow" layer. In order to transfer energy from one quantum field to another you need a bosonic field to mediate.
Finally if we can give the Imaginary Tree some representative Imaginary Energy that's related to our real world's Dark Energy, it's only fair if the sea gets its own as well right? Before Zenless Zone Zero even released, I pointed out the similarities between the tree and the sea and proposed that Ether would be no different than the honkai, again Imaginary Energy. Ether as it turns out was already linked to the Sea of Quanta in peripheral information for HI3. Iron Mask once described the Sea of Quanta as an ether bathtub where it's possible that the ether could froth and bring into existence Bubble Universes. You know, like quantum foam. And as it turns out, Ether might even be a name we could assign to those quantum fields. Once upon a time when quantum mechanics, relativity and Einstein had yet to be born, classical physicists like Newton believed that space (space-time wasn't a term yet) was filled with some kind of substrate they called luminiferous ether. Light traversed this substrate, hence the name. As it turns out it is also photons (light particles) that are creating "bubbles" of excited virtual particles in quantum field theory so while it isn't the case, you could suggest that ether be the name of the quantum field.
Side Note 1: Luminiferous ether had been used in early theories about Genshin because of the names of the main characters, Lumine and Aether.
Side Note 2: Paul Dirac, the physicist that came up with the Dirac Sea also suggested that the quantum foam could be likened to ether.
The Void of Time
So far we've just talked about quantum mechanics. However quantum foam actually brings up another talking point about modern physics and its ultimate goal, a unifying theory that can explain all four fundamental forces together. Quantum mechanics can't account for gravity so one attempt at this is string theory and the Hoyoverse uses this as well. It's been mostly explained through HI3 but we know miHoYo is still intent on using it because we have artifacts of string theory as recently as Genshin's Fontaine only a little over a year ago.
The region's first Weekly Boss - which I affectionately nickname the space whale - provides the three drops you see above. Lightless Eye of the Maelstrom is easy to identify. It's a black hole. If you read the description, it's even more obviously a black hole. (how you can keep it in your inventory without serious consequences is another story) This drop and the boss itself are mostly related to how at the time miHoYo was using Fontaine to promote Star Rail but if we're going to talk about gravity, black holes are definitely part of the conversation. Next we have Lightless Mass which is just dark matter. The key difference between normal matter and dark matter is that dark matter doesn't interact with light but does interact with gravity. So finally we get to Lightless Silk String and that is a literal string proposed by string theory. (which is likely not going to get caught on a sword) Anyway a variation on string theory called M-theory (m for membrane) suggests that the universe consists of not three dimensions (plus time) but eleven. One proposal for dark matter then is a "dark dimension" that aligns with observed dark matter and dark energy interactions if it was a certain size. (All of these additional dimensions are extremely small and unnoticeable at our regular scale. They aren't the sci-fi idea of higher layers of existence.)
In terms of the Hoyoverse the 11D structure was used in a theory by HI3 Previous Era character Dr. MEI. She proposed that honkai was controlled by "energy beings" evolved from alien civilizations that use higher dimensions as tools for assimilating universal potential as a power source for travel across universes. This theory would be proven true in Honkai Gakuen as the Outer Gods and then again late into HI3's story as the Cocoon of Finality. However I think that based on this we can extend it to the other higher powers we've seen in Genshin, the Descenders. (and if that's the case maybe string theory strings could get caught on a Descender's sword)
Side Note: I'm not sure yet if the Aeons of Star Rail qualify. They seem to be more like rule defining entities which would then relate them to the level of Herrschers. I have a feeling it'll eventually be revealed that there's another layer on top of the Aeons just like Celestia is a layer of higher gods above the Archons in Genshin.
Besides just being able to better categorize these mysterious beings, the dimensions themselves seem to have come into play too. I brought up a while ago that Genshin's Venti might have used the power of Time to send the Mare Jivari into a void between universes that existed across time. Time in string theory is its own dimension. As reinforced by the same World Quest, not only the forces of the Imaginary Tree but the Sea of Quanta also have power over time. It stands to reason time could be a borderlands of sorts between the two, maybe even the quantum field that allows the transfer of energy from the sea to the tree in the first place.
Another dimension might be HI3's Stigmata World or Soul World as it's referred to in Gakuen. Stigma are marks on living individuals that connect them to the memories of their ancestors. A person with a Stigma can either generate their own Stigma Space or enter into the Stigmata World. As this world is composed of memories, it is important to consider compatibility between the Stigma and host. If they are too unrelated, the memories transmitted by the Stigma can overtake the host's own memories thus replacing their "soul" with that of the Stigma's which was the major concern when Theresa was given Sakura's Stigma in the Gratitude Arc manhua of HI3. The power of memories has been explored in both Genshin and Star Rail. In Genshin there is knowledge that can be obtained through the use of memory storing devices like the Crown of Insight, Artifacts and Knowledge Capsules. In Star Rail it's the Light Cones, instances of someone's Path.
The Hoyoverse in a nutshell:
- The Imaginary Tree generates universes by absorbing potential from the Sea of Quanta. From this base spreads out an infinite amount of variations. This can be visualized like a phylogenetic tree. The games with stories or elements that are more closely related are grouped closer together and extend from a "common ancestor" split-off point while distant ones have their own branches.
- Within the Imaginary Tree itself, all universes are composed primarily of Imaginary Energy. Contained within these universes is a different interpretation of quantum mechanics that essentially takes the sum total of all possible "universes" and creates a singular observed result. Space travel as defined in the Hoyoverse revolves around being able to harness Imaginary Energy as the universe is so filled with it that direct travel is impossible even at lightspeed. (we call this dark energy in the real world)
- Within the Sea of Quanta itself, the untapped energy potential is Ether. Ether is a turbulent quantized field where universes can spontaneously come into existence but just as quickly fizzle out. You can sustain these universes by applying Imaginary Energy to them. There is also a catalytic layer that can facilitate this energy transfer through the power of Shadows.
- M-Theory is used in the Hoyoverse as well and defines both the Sea of Quanta and Imaginary Tree as 11 Dimensional constructs. One dimension would be time and the Imaginary Tree, the Sea of Quanta and their agents have shown the ability to manipulate time. It is possible that time itself is a borderland between the two, perhaps even the quantum field that facilitates Ether transfer and conversion from the sea into the Imaginary Energy of the tree. Another dimension is Stigma or the Soul World. It is a dimension for memories and can also facilitate individuals to harness Imaginary Energy.
Topic originally created on August 31st, 2025.