Inspiration of Your Supernatural Elements, What are their origins

Yet another curiosity I've been interested in is the inspiration of the supernatural forces for the settings of everyone on the board since at least everyone has magic in them. I wonder what influences and inspirations everyone got their ideas for magic from. I also wonder the same for any non-magic supernatural elements in everyone's setting that has stuff like ki and psychic powers.

I'll list the influences and inspirations for those of Phantasia to give everyone an idea of what I mean by this:

-Magic: Initially during the start of the reboot, the term "magic" was a pretty thin excuse for my setting to have superpowered characters for the most part that has no deep explanation for it due to it mostly being influences by Touhou's rather vague magic originally. However, as my setting evolved and has been retconned over the years, it has become something more complex thanks to the inspirations and influences from stuff like the Nasuverse, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Slayers and some Japanese mythology in general.

To be more brief, magic in my setting started out as a thin excuse for superpowers to becoming a complex metaphysical force that transcends the physical in which mages use magecraft to manipulate... and yes, I want to make it clear once again that magic and magecraft are actually distinguishable in my setting.

-Ki: I started utilizing this concept somewhere a bit later after the start of Phantasia's reboot when I wanted to have more variety with superpowers, starting with Amielle to make a bit more distinctions. Ki initially started out in Phantasia more akin to the very generic ki systems that nearly every shounen goes for with generics such as energy blasts and reinforcements. Outside of having little depth, it was more based on the modern Chinese interpertation of ki being a bio-energy force rather than the ancient interpretation of ki being a spiritual force.

Once my setting gotten more complex and established, ki has evolved as well in my setting and the last one to finally to fully evolve. Right now, ki in my setting is also a complex metaphysical force that transcends the physical in which taoists manipulate. Most of the influence that cause ki to evolve in my setting comes from me researching chinese philosophy in greater depth to find inspiration from the ancient interpretation of ki being a spiritual force as well as its feng shui system... more shounen should utilize feng shui for their ki systems in fact. Finally, ki now only references to the so-called "energy" utilized by the forces of tao and practice of taoism.

-Psionics: Similar case for ki, except for distinguishing Amarylis much like it was done for Amielle. Also, much like ki, it was based off the very generic comic book and science fiction interpretation of psychic powers with the classic catagories that are hardly ever innovated upon as well. This also included it originating from brain power in my initial reboot.

Thanks to influences inspired from things such as To Aru and some other things I can't seem to recall, psionics has been remade into an entirely spiritual force and can be harnessed by espers using their souls (instead of their brain like most fictional depictions of psychic powers). Much like magic and ki, psionics also evolved into a metaphysical force that transcends the physical.

Screw it, I'm gonna reply despite this being mostly dead.

Physical and magical abilities both come mainly from the RPGs I play, particularly Final Fantasy (where there's a spell for just about everything you need) and Persona (which introduced me to the idea of using HP as a cost for physical abilities). Probably because they're so commonly seen, I really don't think it was too hard to pin anything down for these.

I'll admit that ki and psionics would have not even been considered by me, were it not for the conversations on how they were different. It's not that I thought they were all the same, but rather that I didn't see a lot of either. Downside of being mostly interested in so specific a genre I suppose.

Ki was originally just supposed to cover nonoffensive abilities like buff/debuff techniques, since a lot of my stuff uses a standard RPG model (makes things easier for me). However, after reading Amp's definitions, I began thinking of some other ways to make ki more of a unique ability. I took the idea of it controlling flows and decide to make it so that it normally dealt with the flow of life, which means that it also gained use as a set of healing techniques. At the very least, this gave it a much more useful purpose than just being there because shit's different.

I'll be honest, psionics aren't something I think of. At all. So this was even more heavily based off of Amp's setting than the last one. I'm still not 100% happy with the definition of that, so this'll probably have to be updated when I get around to fixing the abilities. However, right now, I'll have to suffice with saying that psionics have the initial main usage of mimicking physical feats - important for the Sylph that use them, since they lack humanoid arms and feet and so needed some form of compensation (probably more than a little lazy of me... <_>) - and also as a source for defensive abilities, such as barriers and status effects.

Few elements of my stories are purely magical. It usually stems from natural or unnatural abilities.

So, to out it briefly, comic books and Resident Evil.

Well more mutations than zombies...

But yeah I've totally had zombie characters.