That's fair on the spoiler thing! The note about them being preexisting was more to do with the possibility of regaining them in the future without a canon update.

One follow-up question though! In the movies it's... unclear whether the rings are single-use or not, but seems to be suggested that's the case. It's implied they're a pretty commonplace thing (outside of earth at least) which would make sense if they're single-use, and a plot point in the first movie is that Sonic's bag of rings accidently gets dropped through a ring portal to another city, requiring him to travel there the long way to get it back. Would this apply to the ring regain for Knuckles here, or would it just be one of those kinda handwaved things where he can reuse the same one because Kaisou magic or only just has one that works at a time?

ty for the fast reply though! And sorry again for the giant pile of questions