The mana that tamers manipulated.
The physical reality of beasts and their existence.
Laws governing how elements interacted.
All of it depended on the Crystal functioning appropriately in ways most people didn't even know existed.
It wasn't a metaphor. It wasn't religion or philosophy or ancient belief systems preserved through tradition.
It was a world wide infrastructure.
Like water pipes beneath a city, invisible to residents going about their daily lives but absolutely essential to everything functioning. Remove the pipes and the city dies within days. Most residents never think about the pipes, never see them and never consider their existence until something goes wrong.
The Crystal was the pipes, the mana was the water and tamers were, at best, people who'd learned to adjust individual valves without understanding the larger network.
