DEX [1]
Used to be, people assumed that ‘reality shard’ was just Infinity, Unlimited’s way of saying “something weird and tangible that we can’t really explain.” Then it turned out that when you broke a reality shard — which was at first assumed to be almost impossible, until field teams started doing so on a regular basis* — you were usually left with about a couple dozen bits of crystallized… reality? Luck? Potential? Whatever it was, the bits could themselves be implanted in mundane items, to be used up later.
This revelation significantly changed Infinity’s cost-benefit analyses on when destroying reality shards were justified.