A finite collection of disjoint splitting spheres of a knot encodes a connected sum of knots. Cut along every sphere and fill each spherical boundary with a three-ball containing a straight arc joining its two marked endpoints. The resulting oriented knots are the factors. The system is complete when its nontrivial factors are prime knots.
In a complete decomposing sphere system for a knot, a disk inside a prime-factor ball that meets the knotted arc once cuts its factor into a connected sum of knots. One side must be an unknot. Replacing the ball by the side carrying the prime factor therefore preserves the unordered factor list. A disk missing the arc cuts off an empty ball and gives the same conclusion. After a small transverse perturbation, such a replacement removes an innermost intersection circle with another sphere system. If a chosen innermost disk contains both marked points, another innermost disk, or its complementary disk when it is the only intersection, contains neither. Iterating produces a prime-factor ball disjoint from both systems. The replacement changes only the location of a joining arc in the intervening punctured ball; capping the other boundaries still recovers the same oriented factors.
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