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SpitFire92 t1_ixiy1sp wrote

Reply to comment by PriorSolid in [WP] The ritual calls for 100 sacrifices, but after reading it carefully you realize that it never specified they had to be human. Deciding to be the smartass that you are, you got a petri dish full of bacteria and sacrificed them instead. by Prompt_Dude

Depends how you kill the human, If it's a big magic circle that just kills/absorbs all life in it you'd also kill the bacteria. Unless the circle would just kill what the creator of the circle would offer as sacrifice in which case my previous comment would still be valid.

If you kill the humans by cutting their throat, for example, you'd probably also kill some microorganisms while doing that.

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NeVMiku t1_iy38jrk wrote

What does sacrificing do? If it erases the body mass which holds consciousness then sacrificing a human (body) should not remove all living organisms and other parasites like bacteria or lice.

If sacrificing means erasure of consciousness (about the same as death) then we should also assume there is no loss of mass. If consciousness is the determining factor of how strong a magic is, how should we quantify it? The number of consciousness from different bodies? The intelligence of the consciousness? The summation of the consciousness as a whole?

If we're talking about the number of consciousness, would this be consciousness that only the caster is aware of? Or all consciousness in a specific magic circle? For ease of argument say both is true.

That would allow a caster, who is only connscious of consciousness within a specific area to know how much and what would be sacrificed. Taking all lives being equal, we can take the number of consciousness to be sacrificed the determining factor of a magic's strength.

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