I think that is the point. They can sense the difference between a "good" bacteria and stuff like viruses, maybe because of their life force/soul. The story also said that he searched for the ones that weren't meant to be there, so maybe they have advanced sciences. The wizard had just discovered immortality at the end, which is how they would turn the tide of the war.

By the sounds of they are actually sacrificing the time they have left in this world

And after doing some researching a single bacteria cell lives approximately 12 hours

Now if there are millions if not billions of individual cells then yes in this world you could become immortal

Once immortality is achieved you could essentially become a GOD being able to take and give life

Heck with that much lifespan power whos to say you can't effectively resurrect the dead(to their previous living conditions) if their brain is still intact.

Sorry for bad punctuation im not quite a writer

dude, a wizard did it

>I wonder why they couldn’t just sacrifice individual cells if it works like that. How does the power scaling work here? Is it one second of bacteria equals one second of human life? Millions of bacteria seconds would absolutely blow everything else out of proportion. (Which to be fair does seem to happen a bit, but not as much as I would expect if it was a 1:1 ratio)

Maybe they didn't think of it before, or thought that there was something special about an animal/human that powered the sacrifice?

1 million seconds is 11 days, and I dont think each one is worth 1 second. Also, unless you plan on actually shitting bricks, I wouldn't suggest killing your gut bacteria.

I think that’s because the bacteria are individuals and the cells of our body work as a whole to form an individual and that the sacrifice magic targets the individual.

Maybe it works by trading lifetime for lifetime on a cell by cell basis, so if a human sacrifices a day they take a day off every cell in their body to give to new cells in the injured. The power scaling wouldn't quit work out for the rejuvenation at the end, but bacterial cells are a lot smaller than human cells, so it would give you something in the same order of magnitude at least and would have some internal logic

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Maybe they're able to do that too and they just haven't tried. If the spells were based on intent then sacrificing a person is not the same as sacrificing all of their cells. This doesn't fit well with real-world physically-based processes, but magic is often not physically-based and instead based on intent, emotion, etc.

There are good real-world analogies though. For example, is it cheaper to ship a few things together in one big package, or as separate packages? The individual cost of separate packages adds up to more than the cost of shipping everything together at once. In the end, the result is the same because everything ends up at the destination, but in one case it costs more.

Similarly, the life force gained from sacrificing individual cells adds up to more than sacrificing the conglomerate being made up of those cells. And similarly, the result is the same: it's dead either way, but one method gives you more life force.

In the end the rules are obviously lopsided, which we don't see a lot in real life physical processes. Maybe there's a rigid explanation. For example, maybe most of the magic comes from the intent to drain anything's life force, so by sacrificing millions of cells you gain most of your magic from the "overhead" of so much intent on individual lives — similar to the additional cost incurred from shipping overhead when shipping multiple package. You can imagine how shipping millions of individual packages for knick knacks would cost significantly more than just stuffing them in a big box!