Quote Originally Posted by Unregistered View Post
The equipment/manyu-like things are exactly what that sounds like: manyu for equipment. They're among your equipment, not in character slots. The petals, as well as birds and elixirs, are for characters' second evolutions. They require 2 birds matching the girl's element, 2 petals matching her nation and an elixir of her rarity. The wiki's Evolution page goes into more detail.
I'm ok with being called dense...so...to clarify...in DMM you can level up equipment by using the eq manyus OR lower level equipment like in Nutaku then?