{Plant}

The People of the Sun, as they like to call themselves. Most directly evolved from carnivorous plants, their main bodies still tend to take that shape, usually either a pitcher or a flytrap in shape. However, many, almost always the rich, may mostly look like a flower, as their wealth allows them the resources to retain that structure, and their offspring to hold that shape as well. Though not fully anthropomorphized, the plant people have some similar structures, moving on roots or leaves as if legs, having a center of mass that can be referred to as a body, with the trap or flower forming a head. Similarly, eyes have evolved from fenestrae, and are clustered on the head. The plant people have a near-instinctive knack for finding mining sources, given enough time, being able to taste the soil for precious or useful minerals. When genetic alchemy was discovered, it simply put a name to what the plant people had already been doing for time immemorial. Plant genetics are already more loosely structured than what animals had to work with, and extending that to manipulation outside their bodies was an easy task for their societies. The plant people grew task-specific workers even before the advent of the gear, and now augment their genetic manipulation with tools and machines to build grand structures.   With that, the empire of the plants has many of the same highs and lows of a human industrial revolution society. The people evolved from carnivorous plants, with the aid of the background magic of the setting. While not fully anthropomorphic, they took on some traits that could be analogous to human form (the carnivorous leaves or flowers taking the position of heads, enough roots or leaves becoming strong enough to manipulate objects, etc). As they developed enough to push out from their boggy homeland, they were able to start forming something of a monopoly over mining sites. Being able to taste soil differences allowed them to claim mineral deposits before other societies. With their mines established, the aristocracy could glut themselves with riches.   Their other societal advantage also comes from their biology, but was kickstarted by human scientific methods. Plants have a much looser relationship with genetics than animal cells; many plants in the real world can form hybrids from unrelated pollens, and two of the same species of plants might not have the same genome, or even the same number of chromosomes.