High Humans were many times stronger than ordinary humans. This was not a subtle difference or a matter of degree. It was a categorical gap, one that expressed itself across every relevant metric from physical capability to mana capacity to the ceiling of what they could ultimately achieve.
This was precisely why in the wider universe one's race could determine one's standing as much as one's personal strength could. A person did not choose the body they were born into, but that body set the baseline for everything that came after.
The Starborn were perhaps the clearest example of this principle taken to its extreme. A human variant race by classification, they were not an impressive sight on paper. Their bodies were physically weak even by the standards of other human variants, and their lifespans were short, again even in comparison to races that were themselves not particularly long-lived. By those two metrics alone, most would have dismissed them as unremarkable.
