i's irreducible simply because it's a unit-sized basis vector for how much of a quantity is in the "i direction". It's just something to hang a coefficient on so that it doesn't mix with the real part. We could just as well invent a similar thing for the reals, and call it g. Then your result is 6i + 8g. Or we could use tuples. It doesn't matter, as long as you do proper bookkeeping of the real and imaginary parts.
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i's irreducible simply because it's a unit-sized basis vector for how much of a quantity is in the "i direction". It's just something to hang a coefficient on so that it doesn't mix with the real part. We could just as well invent a similar thing for the reals, and call it g. Then your result is 6i + 8g. Or we could use tuples. It doesn't matter, as long as you do proper bookkeeping of the real and imaginary parts.