in the pareidolia version of the world, there is another form of energy present in all living things called anda. this energy is a strong driver of the perception, self awareness/sense of self and consciousness of said beings, and could be referred to as the "magic" of this world as it is what drives most "magical" phenomena in pareidolia. magic in pareidolia is therefore usually restricted to outwardly influencing what an organism percieves, however, internally, it has more general abilities as well and can drive biological processes in a much broader way by altering behaviours on a microscopic level. for example, anda cannot be used to set things on fire, however, if an organism adapts to concentrate a potent amount of anda, it can use it to generate heat or glow, but this is obviously limited to its biology. it is also what brings about sapience in organisms, and organisms that are sapient will normally have evolved to produce and utilise anda more efficiently than organisms that do not. however, nonsapient organisms can also have evolved to utilise anda as well, it's just that this anda utilisation is not as well distributed to their cognitive systems.

a keystone species in pareidolia is the irrbloss, or shroom/wisplight, which is a fungus and one of those nonsapients that have managed to evolve a use for anda. it is believed that it first evolved such an ability to ward off potential predators, utilising progressively more and more complex light displays when sensing potential threats to scare them away. this is effective on some, however, this also made the fungus a more attractive food item, as more concentration of anda = more calorie dense = if an animal is not deterred by the light displays, it increases their fitness. it happened to be that intelligence was one of the factors that contributed to several species evolving to ignore the light displays, which kind of goes hand in hand with the anda/perception/consciousness correlation. this kind of started an evolutionary armsrace where a byproduct of the anda concentration in the fungus was a similar perception altering effect to some animals (such as basilisks), where the fungus exudes an amount of anda that would twist how other organisms see the area around them, simply put, "hiding" areas where a large enough congregation of shroomlight grew by altering how they percieve it.

and so, some of the organisms that had adapted to pursuing shroomlight would eventually evolve an immunity to this illusion. as a byproduct, there are several large "zones" where shroomlight has a tendency to congregate, which has created unique "shroomlight ecosystems". most nonhumans in pareidolia are among these creatures as they have evolved alongside shroomlight for a long time while humans themselves did not, and thus cannot naturally see through shroomlight zone illusions. to humans, if they were to try to walk through a shrouded zone, they would percieve it as if they were walking straight through, but in actuality, the illusion would lead them on some route around the affected zone.

so yes, this means that our familiar landmasses in pareidolia look slightly different and are often a bit bigger than in the real world (see below). at the point of the story, this is not really widely known about in human society, but there are probably a bunch of scientists/geographers who have noticed inconsistancies/problems when trying to map the world etc...

SHROOMLIGHT TECH