Light and Relic — Official Style Reference Set (Version 2.0)

This document defines the official stylistic, visual, and semantic framework of the **Light andRelic** project. Version 2.0 is an *operational revision*: the conceptual foundation remains intact,while the visual specification has been rewritten as a hard generation directive to counter thealgorithmic flattening observed in AI-generated images based on earlier versions.The need for v2.0 emerged from a documented pattern: image-generation systems given theprevious specification tended to *smooth* the relic into a cool, monochromatic, science-fictionaesthetic — substituting glowing tech motifs for real forge fire, and replacing the prescribedwarm–cool duality with cold blue tonality. This drift was traced to **lexical leaks** within theconceptual vocabulary itself ("fingerprint," "cryptographic," "data," "DNA," "biometric"), whichactivated unwanted aesthetic clusters in generative models even when those terms were used todescribe purely archival processes.Version 2.0 therefore separates **conceptual language** (preserved for human readers, archives,curators, and academic citation) from **visual generation language** (rewritten to be directive,anti-cliché, and physically anchored). The Living Provenance philosophy is unchanged. Theinstruction layer has been reforged.