Authors: Legion1771, Savestate, Bluesnowman, StealthGorgon1, Esper, Jobn, Addemup, Néocorvinus, Supernatural, Ladykiller2, Ajlove, Raeck, Mystikoa, TheLastOne, Madder, Wanderer, and Hyperionthetitan.
Link to the Original: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BRH_o8SA-Kj-PXzt-C3IxFEu2CSobhZmPuj_xCIDNXs/edit?usp=sharing
Essence META CYOA Part 4
You find yourself before a shrouded figure standing behind a table. On the table are many potions, choose as many as you want or none. The choice is yours. In addition pick additional CYOAs or none to add on to this if you want some adventure.
Each one infuses you with a variety of effects which cannot be taken from you unless you willingly allow it.
Note: exact effects in different ones such as perfect memory, intelligence, etc. do not stack. [fanwanking helps]
Optional Features
Essence META is designed with the assumption that there is one player that is the 'self insert.' There are of course other ways of playing but if you just want a few more options or suggestions. Feel free to do your own thing if none of these appeal to you. Not like I can stop you.
OC Doughnut Steel
You are not the star of the show, it is in fact some other poor schmuck or perhaps someone who dances to your tune. You are free to design this new person however you like with whatever history, background, occupation and whatever else as long as they are not significantly supernatural. You may use another CYOA before Essences are applied to facilitate this process.
ITS YA BOI NARUTO
It is not your self insert or an OC but an existing fictional character that receives their essences either by those you selected or them being presented the options as if they were playing the CYOA itself.
Mexican Standoff
Either as a Self Insert or OC Doughnut Steel option but you are not the only entity with Essences. There are in fact multiple Essence holders with a variable level of strength. The strongest Essences are barred from use from anyone as the cosmic energies would probably reduce existence back to null, that wouldn't be fun for anyone.
Oh God Its Another One
You have friends! You and at least one more person have access to the Essence META selection and also access to all of the Essences. This is probably a really dangerous option if you choose people who might not have your best interests in mind. You can for peace of mind require all participants have a mutual Geas placed on them that prevents any intentional harm to each other directly.
Essence Companions (Can take as many times as you want) (incompatible with Mexican Standoff and Oh God Its Another One)
You may use this option to create companions who are created based on the Essences you give them. Essences that offer companions can be instead given Essences as an upgrade while filling out your build. You can design your companions any way you want within the realm of what is possible for them. Note that you can give them Essences you do not have.
Legion1771
Essence of Shattered Limiter
By drinking this concoction, shining with power that can't be contained, you shatter all limits on your powers.
All limitations on your powers have been completely destroyed.
You can push your abilities to grow beyond any limits they might have possessed before. A telekinetic ability that might have only let you throw around cars could one day let you throw around planets or galaxies, given enough time and growth.
This growth affects all aspects of your powers. Range, power, energy reserves (where applicable), etc.
Even if you are not exercising your powers, they will still grow passively, enough that a single year will cause them to double in potency. Actively pushing yourself will see this grow magnify significantly.
This only affects your powers, as opposed to your physical stats, mental stats or skills, unless those are part of a power or otherwise provided by a power.
Required secondary powers will also grow. The ESP and task-oriented processing power necessary to operate arbitrarily powerful and intricate telekinesis, for example, will improve.
Essence of SHIFTing
By drinking this essence, shining with infinite colors, you unlock the ability to SHIFT (Zero Escape).
To SHIFT is to transfer your mind to an alternate reality, taking over the body of your local equivalent. Ordinarily this would be a swap, so that your new body's previous owner ends up in the body you just left behind, but you may choose to fuse with the new body's consciousness if you so please.
To begin with, you'll only be able to do this in fatally dangerous situations. You are about to be hit by a car, someone is about to shoot you, you are trapped in a burning building, etc. With training and usage, however, you will begin to become capable of actively SHIFTing without needing fatal situations to trigger it.
To begin with, your destination will be random, though always placing you in a close analogue where someone made a different decision or was just a little bit less confident. Though stranger and more fantastical worlds, such as ones where some people have different genders or prominent historical events were different, are also reachable. If you travel to the very edge of possibility, perhaps more supernatural worlds can be found.
With time and training, you can begin to choose your destinations, either by broad categories and criteria or by knowing exactly where you want to go.
You will always SHIFT in a situation where you would have otherwise died, regardless of whether or not you chose to. Though you may choose not to SHIFT upon dying if you would like to for whatever reason.
With time and training SHIFTing can be done forwards and backwards through time, as well as across it, so you may leave a reality and then re-enter it or others at an earlier point.
With time and training, you can learn how to SHIFT other people along with you, which will deposit them in their local equivalent the same as you. This will also awaken them to the ability to SHIFT, if you so choose. Unlike normal, you will always be aware of where these people are, such that you can never lose them in the infinite span of the multiverse.
One day, after a lot of experience with SHIFTing, you might learn to SHIFT half-way, leaving you outside of reality and capable of looking in, observing events and other universes through the perspective of your other selves. With even more training, it might even be possible to observe the viewpoints of other people, perhaps even SHIFT into their bodies instead of one of your alternates.
Essence of The Beyonder
By consuming this essence, you are granted the power of the Pre-Retcon Beyonder.
You are the living personification of a multiverse millions of times larger than the entire Marvel multiverse, including such mighty figures as Eternity, Infinity, Death, Oblivion and The Living Tribunal.
You have vast reality warping powers, capable of bending and twisting reality on a multiversal scale with no effort whatsoever.
Your natural form, as much as it could be called that, is one of undifferentiated energy spread across the entirety of your vast multiverse. Assuming a human form would only take a thought, as would any other possible form you could imagine.
Your mind is fittingly vast for an existence like yours, easily capable of observing the entirety of a vast multiverse made up of ascending dimensions and parallel timelines on every level possible with no strain at all.
In theory, there is no difference between your imagination and reality. In practice, that would depend on where you're going and what you're coming up against. But regardless of that, you will never have any issues controlling your powers, as you have complete control over them and their effects.
Essence of the Immortal Heart
By drinking this essence, you will obtain the heart of one who can live forever.
No matter how long you live, time and circumstance will not weigh you down nor will it change you so much that you cannot recognise yourself.
As the eons pass, you will never grow lesser in your own eyes. Indeed, you will only ever grow into more of the person you wish you could be, regardless of whatever horrors or terrible things you witness.
You are immune to boredom and your patience stretches into eternity. If you so wished, you could easily do nothing but wait for the stars to burn out without issue or complication.
You also have no issues with solitude, being capable of surviving with no one but yourself for company indefinitely without becoming distant or socially rusty as a result.
No matter how much time passes or how many things you experience, you will never grow jaded or sick of simple pleasures or tasks. The sights and sounds you experience will always be as uplifting as the first time you saw them.
Essence of the Immortal Body
By drinking this essence, you will obtain the body of one who can live forever.
Your flesh has been rendered immortal. No matter how much time passes, you will not age a day or look even slightly older. You have a powerful healing factor capable of erasing any damage done to you in moments, no matter how strange or esoteric.
No level of damage or change is resistant to this. Being petrified, annihilated, dealt unhealing wounds or stranger, all of it will be removed and healed in moments.
This is not cellular division or regeneration, but something more akin to the reversal of time, a true miracle that pays no heed to logic or common sense.
You no longer have any needs of any kind. You do not need to breath, eat or drink. If you choose to do any of these things then you'll find you no longer produce waste either.
You will continue aging up until your prime, should you find yourself younger than that for whatever reason, at which point your aging will halt as normal. This should leave your looks hovering at some indiscernible middle ground between late-twenties and mid-thirties.
Should you be annihilated utterly, down to every last particle of your being, you will simply reappear in a few moments, utterly unharmed, in the same spot you died. If this location is blocked or otherwise still dangerous, you will be moved to the nearest safe location, wherever that may be.
If you are severed into pieces or otherwise exploded into chunks, you will regenerate from the largest chunk. No worries about each part of your regenerating into a separate individual or something.
You may choose to die at any moment, freeing yourself from your body and passing on to whatever fate awaits you after the death of the body. This choice can only ever be made when you truly wish for it of your own free mind. No amount of duress or control can force the issue.
Essence of the Immortal Soul
By drinking this essence, you will obtain the soul of one who can live forever.
Your soul is absolutely and completely immortal. Even if it is utterly destroyed with absolute and implacable power, it will heal from all damage instantly.
If your body should die, be it from violence, sickness or old age, your soul will find its way to the nearest unborn child the moment you died and you will be reincarnated into that body.
This can even extend so far as to place you in alternate universes if there are no nearby children suitable for your soul.
You may decide criteria for your new body's appearance and state, such as race, gender, social standing and similar things, though making too specific a choice may lead to you being sent to a far off universe or planet.
Essence of the Immortal Mind
By drinking this essence, you will obtain the mind of one who can live forever.
Your mind is absolutely and completely immortal. Any level of damage or trauma will disappear in moments, completely healed.
Your memory is similarly eternal, perfectly recording everything you witness and arranging itself in a manner most suited to you, such that you can recall anything you need to with nothing but a thought.
Your skills will never become lesser for lack of repetition. If you became a master cook, then you will still be just as skilled in a few thousand years even if you never gave it another thought since then.
No matter what force or stimuli you experience, you can never be driven insane, mentally broken or otherwise inflicted with permanent mental imbalance.
Essence of the Unlimiter
By drinking this Essence, all limits on your capabilities have been lifted.
All powers, skills, traits and stats that you possess are now limitless in potential.
By continuing to push yourself to the edge of your capabilities in any area, you will find that there is no longer an upper limit to your progress. Continue to lift objects of ever increasing weight and your strength will increase without limitation. Continue to hone a skill past the point of mastery and you will continue to see improvement.
The size of your muscles no longer dictates how much you can lift nor does it restrict how flexible you can become or how quickly you can move. The size of your lungs no longer dictates the amount of air that you can store in them. The size of your brain no longer dictates how much information it can store, no how fast it can process information. So long as you continue to push your limits, you will be always be able to improve yourself further.
Learning skills, developing certain types of muscles or acquiring certain kinds of abilities will typically make learning others difficult or even impossible. A physique designed for strength will not lend itself to speed/agility and some types of abilities are simply incompatible on a metaphysical level. You no longer have this issue. You can learn any number of abilities and develop any number of traits without harming your potential in any other field.
It is possible for one's potential to be crippled in one way or another. Perhaps a soft-tissue injury would put any dreams of an athletic career to rest or damage to your spiritual structure would hamstring your progress through cultivation. This is no longer the case for you. Any injury or damage that you receive that would ordinarily cripple you in a permanent manner will no longer do so. With time, you may recover your full potential regardless of how crippling the damage taken.
The details of how skills manifest when honed beyond mastery, be it impossible competence or supernatural displays and effects, is up to you.
Essence of the Clan Restoration Act
By drinking this Essence, you will become eligible for the Clan Restoration Act.
No one actually knows what this is, nor will they know about it if you don't tell them, but it's effects are obvious.
You are incredibly attractive. This is especially apparent to people who you yourself are attracted to.
You possess powerful charisma and charm, being capable of talking just about anyone into a relationship, or just into a bed, with you. This assumes that you can get them to listen to you, of course.
Your skills in the bedroom are peerless, as is your stamina and endurance. You'll never have any trouble blowing the minds of any number of people.
You can easily form and maintain harems and similar kinds of relationships. The people within these relationships will naturally gravitate towards a state of harmony amongst one another, resolving issues and conflicts naturally, perhaps even to the extent of entering into their own relationships with one another. You will remain the center around which the entire thing orbits, but the resulting relationship chart might become a tad mind-bending.
You will never run into any legal repercussions or discrimination as a result of these relationships, nor any relationship you pursue. If you come up against trouble, simply reference the Clan Restoration Act and all trouble will be swept under the rug.
Essence of the Dollmaker
By drinking this essence, you will receive multiple boons.
Within you is a well of potential energy. By drawing out this energy, an entirely intuitive process, you may force it into another being and convert that being into a loyal Doll.
Dolls will have the broad strokes of their original appearance, but will be largely reconfigured into supernaturally beautiful figures that align with your preferences. They are female by default, but you can choose the end result of the process if you so choose.
Dolls can switch between their Doll selves and their original bodies at will.
Dolls are absolutely and completely loyal to you. This loyalty cannot be subverted by any means. They will do absolutely anything you ask without even the slightest hesitation.
Dolls possess all memories, skills and knowledge possessed by their original self.
Dolls are all unaging, immune to infirmity, disease, poison and require no needs such as sleeping, eating, drinking or breathing.
Dolls are generally improved over the original in every way. Normal humans will approach the peak of possibility for humanity and those greater than that will find similar results.
Any abilities possessed by a target may be made into purely internal versions, if their power relies on an outside source or influence.
With physical contact and focus on a Doll, you may gain an in-depth knowledge of their abilities, traits and weaknesses. By expending potential energy, you may enhance, alter or remove these traits.
You may spend potential energy to bestow abilities to your Dolls. If you have an example from another Doll or understand the ability to a great degree, via study or possessing it yourself, then the energy cost decreases significantly.
Dolls can be killed by violence or damage. You may expend a greater amount of energy than the amount spent on turning them to resurrect them.
By using the well of potential energy within you, it will grow deeper. To turn something into a doll, you must overpower them with this energy. Stronger or stranger existences require larger amounts of energy. If they are willingly accepting the change, then the energy requires drops massively.
You have enough energy to change a half dozen mundane people a day to begin with.
Essence of the Self-Insert
By drinking this Essence, you can insert yourself into your favorite fictional media.
You may pick any character in any story and insert yourself into their body at any point in the story.
You will gain all of their powers, abilities, memories and skills.
Upon dying, you may pick a different character to insert yourself into.
You may also choose to leave behind your current character and choose a new one at any time. You may choose whether or not they remember the things that you did while in their body.
It's up to you whether you keep powers between characters.
If possession-type self-inserts aren't for you, then you can also choose to physically transport yourself to any given time and location in any story. Make sure to ensure that you can survive in your chosen location and time, however, as you do not receive any powers or abilities that you did not already have.
The mechanics of time-travel and how it interacts with your existence and the laws of a given setting is up to your discretion.
You may physically transport yourself in this manner while self-inserting into a character.
Essence of Wesker
By drinking this essence, you will become Albert Wesker.
You possess all the traits, memories, abilities and skills necessary to become Albert Wesker.
You may also choose to look like Albert Wesker if you wish.
You also have a cool coat and a sick pair of sunglasses.
You can choose to replace Albert Wesker at any point in any Resident Evil timeline. Any negative side-effects you might be afflicted with as a result of any unstable viruses Wesker is affected with when you arrive may be removed, if you wish.
Or you can drop yourself at any point in any Resident Evil timeline, be it as Albert Wesker or as yourself.
Essence of Conditional Travel
By drinking this essence, you may travel the multiverse in a strange and conditional manner.
Choose something to initiate your travel. It can be anything, but has to be fairly specific. This will be your method of travelling between universes and settings.
Examples include: shutting yourself between two flat surfaces (such as closing a door on yourself or dropping a mattress on yourself), jumping out a window or off a ledge, drowning yourself or being in an explosion.
Travelling between universes in this manner is always safe. If you travel via explosion, then you won't be harmed beyond superficial damage even if you should have been turned into a thin paste. If you travel via jumping off of tall things, then you will land safely upon arrival.
You will arrive in your target universe, or a random one if you choose no destination, in a spot that you cannot control but which will suit you and tend to be narratively important or appropriate.
The arrival is also suited to your method of travel. If you travel between worlds by drowning yourself, you will arrive in your new world by washing up on a beach or struggling to the surface in a body of water. If you travel between worlds via explosion, you will arrive in your new world with an explosion, either a naturally occurring one or one that your travel created.
This method of travelling cannot be restricted or interdicted by any means.
Essence of One Punch
By drinking this Essence, you will gain a number of boons.
By doing 100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 100 squats and running for 10 kilometers every single day for a year, you have broken through your body's natural limits and attained incredible physical power.
Your strength is unimaginable, with casual blows capable of reducing city-destroying monsters to a fine paste or rearranging mountains with similar effort. If you applied a modicum of actual effort, you could punch straight through a blast capable of stripping away the Earth's surface and annihilate the person who shot it at you, splitting apart the cloud layer behind him across the entire planet.
Your speed is such that even things that far surpass the speed of sound seem to be moving slowly to you, with much the same results for things approaching or surpassing relativistic speeds.
Your durability is easily enough to take any blows you can dish out with nothing more than a simple graze to show for it.
You possess incredible control over your power, such that you can effortlessly judge and apply the exact force necessary to achieve the result you want. You can even achieve things that shouldn't be possible, like controlling the shockwave produced by a punch so that it misses a man directly in front of you but obliterates the mountain range behind him. Your manual dexterity is also similarly enhanced.
Your power edges into the supernatural, allowing you to achieve things with sheer strength that should be impossible, like breaking into a dream dimension by knocking too hard or punching ghosts.
You can go without eating, drinking or sleeping for incredible periods of time and can hold your breath even in a complete vacuum for days on end.
You have incredible senses, easily capable of seeing things at incredible distances in complete darkness, picking out distant sounds from amongst a crowd of similar sounds and more. Your other senses may be similarly enhanced.
The limits of your physical power are unknown and might not even exist. If you can manage to push yourself to your limits somehow, perhaps there will be greater heights to reach.
Baldness and incredible boredom are optional.
If you wish, you may go to the One Punch Man setting, either as a new person or replacing Saitama.
Essence of Rick
By drinking this Essence, you will become a Rick.
You will gain vast, unimaginable genius equal to that possessed by the Rickest Rick.
This unfathomable intelligence can be applied in any ways that you see fit, so long as you can be bothered. From creating incredible works of technology in your garage from ordinary scrap and things you can buy from a supermarket to making billions of dollars from your bedroom by calculating mathematically perfect selfie angles and using them to springboard your make-up company.
Whether or not you decide to create the technology necessary to map and traverse it, the multiverse will become literally infinite, containing every possibility imaginable, from a world where dogs keep humans as pets to a world where humans are furniture and furniture are humans. Even your favorite fiction can be found here somewhere, if you're willing to put in the time to look.
Incredible depression, alcoholism and crushing nihilism are optional.
Essence of the Hercules Method
By drinking this Essence, you will obtain the Hercules Method (Luther Strode).
By following this method and bringing your mind, body and spirit into alignment with your will, you will begin to walk the path of Cain and become a supernatural force to be reckoned with.
There are multiple stages to the Method that will be outlined below:
Pre-Initiate: This is the level that most people will reach, lacking a true affinity for the Method. Flexibility on par with gymnasts, speed, strength and toughness befitting an accomplished athlete, honed senses and a resistance to sickness, poison and disease. Nothing worth mentioning.
Initiate: This is the first stage of the Method, when one can be considered to have started walking the Path of Cain. The practitioner can perceive the world as a canvas of blood and flesh, seeing straight through the skin of their fellow man to accurately discern the placement of organs, muscles, nerves and veins. Their physical power increases markedly, enough to outdo Olympian athletes in all areas and easily tear both flesh and muscle apart with hands or teeth.
Adept: The second stage of the Method enhances the practitioner's senses massively, allowing them to perceive the world with far greater clarity than before. At this point, they can see the world in clear shades of blue that highlight the movements of the people around them. By focusing on someone, you may perceive a multitude of blue shadows that indicate possible actions a person might take. The more advanced a practitioner is, the less shadows there are to perceive, thus projecting greater certainty, and the more easily they can obscure their own shadows from the Blue Vision of another practitioner. At this point, a practitioner's physical power has increased even further, conferring far greater resilience and speed, as well as the strength to bring down wood and steel buildings with some effort.
Competent: This stage is when a practitioner becomes truly formidable. They can tighten their muscles to catch bullets or blades in their fibers, as well as force external and internal injuries to close and heal through force of will. They can rip apart steel like paper and shatter stone with ease, accurately navigate their surroundings via hearing or feel the heartbeat of nearby people. Their physical resilience, speed and flexibility continues to rise.
Expert: This stage is when a practitioner becomes capable of living forever. Their ability to heal themselves has advanced so far that they require no exercise or maintenance to stay in prime condition, nor do they suffer from age or infirmity, though a small amount of sustenance is still required from time to time. Physical potency continues to increase, with the speed and reflexes to dodge bullets in mid-air and outrun cars on the freeway.
Mastery: Only one has reached this stage of the Method, the creator of the Path himself, Cain. At this stage the practitioner's regeneration is so powerful that the only thing guaranteed to kill them is the destruction of their brain or truly terrible trauma to their entire body. More than no longer aging, the practitioner is now so beyond the needs of the body that being restrained in complete darkness for millennia with no sustenance will cause no harm or detriment. The master's body is now of a level that can't be compared to the lower stages, easily capable of killing scores of expert practitioners without blinking. At this level of mastery, even stranger methods of murder can be discovered, such as causing brain hemorrhaging through eye-contact and similarly strange things.
Beyond Mastery: There are no known examples of stages beyond Mastery, but if you follow the Path dutifully, meditating and training for long enough, who knows what new fields of blood and bone you might find?
You can instruct others in the Method, though only one in a million people will have the competence necessary to make true progress along the path.
You possess talent equal to Luther Strode.
Essence of the Kronoial
By drinking this Essence, you will become the earthly vessel of God.
Your body has been remade into a fitting vessel for the essence of the Almighty, giving you an appealing appearance and build that suits your preferences.
You have tremendous physical power, enough to move, react and think at speeds far beyond hypersonic, to throw skyscrapers, cause earthquakes with your blows and to easily resist similar such blows.
Your intelligence has been increased massively, placing it at around 300 IQ on the normal scale.
You are the earthly vessel of God and are the only human in existence who truly believes themselves to the omnipotent ruler of all. You may choose whether or not you truly believe such a thing but regardless of whether or not you do so, this impenetrable cloak of self-assurance has given you unshakable willpower and rendered your mind impossible to control, influence or even perceive without your permission.
You are immortal, being entirely unaging and immune to the ravages of time. As well, you heal instantly from any damage except that which simultaneously strikes your heart, lungs, liver, brain, jugular and kidneys at once. Even then, there is a three in five chance that it will fail to take.
You require no sustenance and have no need to breathe or sleep.
Your most powerful ability, however, is to stop time. By pushing yourself to the limits of your endurance, you may stop time for up to ten minutes a day, during which time you can move and interact with the world as you wish.
You can choose to stop time mentally at no cost if you wish, allowing you to keep time frozen indefinitely so long as you take no action beyond thinking.
Essence of the Shura
By drinking this essence, like blood red flames, you gain a number of boons.
Within you is a limitless lust for blood and violence. The act of killing and fighting provides incredible pleasure, comparable to the greatest natural highs. The pleasure is purely mental, as opposed to sexual or similar. Naturally, you have no hesitation when it comes to taking other lives when you choose to do so.
The negative mental effects of combat, danger and bloodshed aren't an issue for you.
Your aptitude for combat and killing is incredible. Even with no prior training whatsoever, you can identify how best to kill any given thing and can fight with skill to rival masters in any field of combat using nothing but pure instinct.
Should you actively try to improve your skill at combat, you'll find that it comes to you with transcendent ease. Simply seeing a movement or technique will allow you to understand, replicate or even improve upon them, should you possess the appropriate traits.
The act of killing rejuvenates you. Taking a life will seal your wounds, replenish your stamina and satiate your needs. So long as you continue to take lives ceaselessly, you can survive wounds that should be fatal and continue to battle indefinitely without rest or fatigue. This rejuvenation repairs damage that would normally be irreparable and even reverses your aging until your prime.
If you are at peak condition, the rejuvenative effects will accumulate until they are necessary.
The act of killing improves you. Every life you take will strengthen your body and your mind. Your blows will hit harder, your sword will swing faster, your feet will move quicker and your senses will be sharper. Your thoughts will flow quicker, interference and pain will slide off of your mind and the stranger abilities wielded by some will become less and less effective. This process can continue without limit, so long as you continue to kill.
The greater your victim's power, the greater the benefit you receive from killing them.
As you grow stronger, you can begin to express your nature in supernatural ways, like leaving wounds that resist attempts to heal them, harming the mind and soul, striking the intangible or permanently killing beings that would normally resurrect. This can be done through your body, weapons or any other powers you possess.
Your nature, the limitless bloodlust within you and the endless bodies you leave in your wake can all be expressed as a violent aura that impresses your malice and experience upon others. This aura can tweaked, such that it may merely allow someone to feel your fathomless killing intent, comprehend your sheer body count or manifest itself as a crimson cloak of howling bloodlust, blazing fire and tormented souls.
Essence of the Teacher
By drinking this Essence, you will become the perfect instructor.
You are a tutor and teacher without peer, easily capable of passing on your knowledge and skill to anyone who wants to learn from you.
Beneath your gentle hand, even a drooling idiot could learn far faster than the average man. And the average could easily outdo genii with your tutelage.
Even the most complex of systems, concepts and ideas can be easily communicated by you.
The people that you teach will never be held back by simple fear, disbelief or preconceived knowledge. If you are speaking the truth when you tell them about the nature of atoms and the existence of microscopic life, then they will believe you even without proof, for example.
You can prove useful as an instructor even in fields that you can't be skilled in, such as the usage of powers or abilities you don't possess. Walking people through how to use their own abilities and be the best they can be with what they have is child's play for you.
If you so choose, you are also capable of teaching others how to use abilities you possess, passing a copy of said abilities on to your students. Be it magic, chakra, ki or stranger, you can awaken the potential in your students and instruct them in its intricacies if you so wish.
Essence of The Eternal (original by Wanderer)
This Essence looks like your favorite beverage and tastes truly delicious.
You are eternal and invincible on a metaphysical level. You exist beyond space, time, causality and are immune to harm from all sources, even those of a metaphysical, abstract or conceptual nature. You cannot be killed, nor can you die or be destroyed, by any means at all.
You possess eternal agency, being impossible to bind, entrap or ensnare. Your will and sense of self cannot be altered or manipulated. Your will cannot be compromised by any kind of direct or indirect manipulation, restraint, influence, temptation or irrationality of any kind. Even should all of existence be compromised, you will continue to exist in spite of this. If you choose, you may choose to become unaware of yourself and the passage of time until existence resumes once more.
As an eternal being, you have absolute freedom from all Authorities and Wills, your self is absolutely inviolate. You are the only version of yourself that exists or ever will exist. You are completely immune to all esoteric effects such as time paradoxes, reality manipulation or revision, existence erasure or similar things.
You suffer no negative side effects as a result of your eternal life. Things like boredom, apathy, depression and mental instability caused by immortality will not affect you. Should you choose so, you may pass on from this life to an afterlife of your choosing and you may return back to life at any time you choose. You may choose to be reincarnated into a life tailored to your preferences. The specifics of this life are up to you.
You are eternally in your prime. You do not age, your body and mind are in perfect condition and your memory is limitless and records everything perfectly. You will never have any issues remembering or recalling information.
This Essence cannot be altered, manipulated, copied or replicated, nor can it be removed, negated, nullified or erased by any force. Even those who possess limitless reality warping power or true omnipotence cannot disrupt this Essence.
Any Essences or powers you acquire that are similar to this Essence seamlessly combine with this one.
Essence of Pseudo-Worldblood
By drinking this crimson red essence, you will gain a number of boons.
Within you is a limitless reservoir of vital, crimson energy. No matter how you expend or draw upon this energy, it will never run out.
This energy naturally concentrates at discrete levels called Ranks. Each Rank is 70% denser than the previous Rank.
With meditation, you may begin to draw out this energy and concentrate it within your body. Over a period of a week with three hour periods of meditation, doing nothing but guiding the process of saturation, you may advance to the next Rank. Advancing to successive Ranks always takes the same amount of time.
The energy improves your body in a myriad of ways to an extent determined by your Rank. Rank 0 is your natural body. Rank 1 is 70% better than your natural body. And Rank 2 is 70% better than that. Each successive Rank compounds on the previous Rank.
Traits improved by the energy include, but are not necessarily limited to, strength, speed, durability, dexterity, agility, stamina and your physical senses. All areas of your body are enhanced like this, rendering every facet of your body proportionally stronger in keeping with your Rank.
Your physical needs such as eating, drinking, sleeping and breathing are rendered 70% less necessary per Rank. You also age 70% slower per Rank.
The energy defies normal reality when in larger concentrations, allowing you to achieve feats that shouldn't be possible at higher Ranks such as leveraging your strength in impossible ways, moving at high speeds without causing destruction, hearing things faster than sound, smelling things beyond a vacuum, walking on clouds or cutting a man in half from across the room.
Higher Ranks also raises the caps on your skill and development by 70%. Though you develop and learn no faster, you will be able to take your skills and body to supernatural realms through repetition and determination.
Supernatural skill will allow you to develop tools and implements that are simply better than their competitors, achieve feats of martial glory that will go down in legends and any number of similar things.
Supernatural development allows you to develop your Rank 0 body further than should be possible, inevitably raising your amplified abilities further as the compounded increase from higher Ranks is applied.
At any time you may choose to burn the energy suffusing your body, steadily using it up in exchange for a temporary magnification of it's benefits. Burning enough energy to use up a Rank in fifteen minutes is sufficient to raise your effective Rank by 1. Burning enough to use up a Rank in ten seconds is enough to raise your effective Rank by 5.
You can, alternatively, choose to burn up your body instead. Flames that would consume your entire body in a minute will increase your effective Rank by 1, with the effects increasing exponentially from there as the flames grow stronger.
Igniting your energy like this allows you to extend the amplification effects to things not normally included in the amplification such as other sources of energy or your healing rate. All of your Ranks are applied in this case, not just the effective Rank gained.
The energy is slowly consumed to maintain your heightened effectiveness and fulfill your needs. A short period of meditation every couple of days is sufficient to maintain your Rank perpetually, assuming that you are not undergoing strenuous activity.
As your Rank falls, the amplification lessens with each lost Rank.
You will not lose access to your feats of heightened skill and the body you've forged for yourself, but you will not be able to improve yourself further until you reach the same Rank once more.
Instead of accumulating energy in your body, you may pass it outside your body for a variety of reasons. By continually adding the energy to an item, you may raise it's Rank and, consequently, it's effectiveness. A sword will be sharper and tougher without increased weight.
You may feed this energy into people to increase their Rank at the same rate that you increase your own, though they will have no method of sustaining their Rank without you to top them up.
Essence of Paradise
By drinking this Essence, you will receive a number of boons.
You are the center of an intelligent field of probability manipulation.
This field constantly analyzes and tweaks your surroundings to ensure that you remain in an optimal state of physical, mental and emotional health.
It also ensures that everything will go your way without any effort on your part whenever it would be beneficial for it to do so.
While doing so, it will ensure that you meet as much challenge, and receive as much stimulation, as is necessary to keep you in an optimal state of mental, emotional and physical health and activity.
You may consciously direct the field's effects if you wish, though it will inevitably know what you want better than you do.
This field is self-replicating. Whenever another living being enters the range of the field, an identical field that centers on them instead of you is created.
These fields, when overlapping, increase in power, range and intelligence.
Every field will, by default, work towards the benefit of you and you alone. You may designate specific people who can benefit from the field's effects or simply allow it to work for everyone, continually refining itself into a perfected paradise that will satisfy everyone within its range.
It will continue to keep your perfected desires in mind when dealing with other people, however, so as to avoid value drift or creating something you wouldn't want to exist. You may, of course, disable this protection if you like.
The effect will, by default, perish with you if you ever decide to die permanently. You may also decide to have the field outlive you, in which case it will last until the last being within its reach decides to die permanently.
Essence of Adam Kadmon
By drinking this Essence, you will receive multiple boons.
Your Soul is immense, billions upon billions of times larger than the average human. Ordinarily, a soul this large would have to be created artificially by harvesting the souls of other humans and manually assembling it piece by piece into a stable configuration. Yours, however, is completely stable and entirely natural.
The Light of your Soul, known as Aura to the destitute people of Remnant, has been awakened. This enhances everything about you, including things like strength, speed, dexterity, vitality, intelligence and more. It also serves as a protective shield around and throughout your body, protecting against physical force, extremes of temperature and pressure, as well as esoteric things such as attempts to manipulate your body's structure or teleport objects into your internals. It also slows aging.
Your Aura is empowered by your soul and with one as truly massive as yours, the effects are spectacular. You can destroy continents with your blows, move at relativistic speeds and resist all manner of attacks and esoteric effects of similar power to the ones that you can dish out. Your brain can best be described as a supercomputer, capable of processing vast amounts of information, performing instantaneous calculations of incredible complexity, easily understanding the intricacies of any subject or quickly picking up new skills. You don't age, heal fast enough that even seemingly fatal wounds will close in moments and have no need to eat, drink, sleep or breathe.
Your Semblance, as the people of Remnant call it, is named Seder Hishtalshelus. It can be broadly summed up as "This is how this works now." With nothing but your thoughts alone, you can warp the world and everything in it in any way you can imagine. Manipulating the elements, bending time and space, altering the laws of physics or creating entirely new ones, perceiving souls, emotions or the entire EM spectrum, wielding conceptual abilities that allow you to alter the definition or appearance of an object or thing and the way it relates to the world around you, giving yourself competence in a skill or simply drawing knowledge from nothing. Anything that Aura is capable of, any feat or Semblance ever demonstrated by another person, you are also capable of, so long as you know how to do so.
Wielding your Semblance, and using your Aura, draws upon the Light within your Soul. You have a truly massive well of energy to draw upon, enough to reshape reality on a continental scale with little effort, and it refills at a tremendous pace. No matter how much you use, that energy will likely refill within the hour, if not faster.
Your consciousness, as a result of the vast amount of Keter you possess, is housed within your soul, rendering you immune to mental influence and attack from anything but incredibly powerful forces.
The incredible amount of Keter and other Higher Sephirot also makes you incredibly skilled at self-perception and enlightenment for any purpose that you might require.
Souls grow with time, drawing Light down through Keter and shaping it into more Sephirot to bolster their Soul, and yours is no different. By using your abilities, by exercising the well of power within you, they can be grown to greater and greater heights. Active and determined use of your abilities will see the best results, but even simply living life or experiencing the passage of time will see growth, as little as it is.
You may awaken the Aura of any being that has a soul.
Should your body die and you take no steps to remain in the world of the living, you will be taken into the cycle of reincarnation and be reborn a short time later in a newborn child. The destruction of your soul will, of course, prevent this from happening, so be careful. Though a soul like yours is truly resilient, so don't worry too much.
Essence of the Genius
By drinking this Essence, you will receive a number of boons.
You are incredibly, impossibly intelligent.
Casual comprehension and manipulation of arbitrarily large, complex and strange numbers, figures and concepts is trivial to you.
You are capable of comprehending any subject matter or material in an instant and you will never forget anything unless you choose to do so.
You are in a constant state of inspiration and will always have ideas about how to improve things, even beyond the limits of possibility. This can be things from manufacturing lines to electronics and biology or even the laws of physics themselves.
Additionally, the tremendous power of your mind allows you to actually warp reality. In the beginning this will manifest as simple unrefined telekinesis, but will improve with time and usage until you can manipulate matter, energy and fundamental forces by will alone.
The range of this ability will never grow beyond a hundred meters, but your fine control, power and finesse can improve without limit, with similar limitless applications.
Essence of the Primogenitor
By drinking this Essence, you will receive a number of boons.
You may freely manipulate your own biology, shaping yourself in any way you can imagine.
To supplement this, you have an innate understanding of your body's functions, as well as every part and piece of it.
You may continue to shape any part of your body, even if it is no longer attached to you.
In doing so, you may create separate lifeforms to yourself. You will be linked to these creatures by a hivemind.
You may determine the amount of intelligence, free will and autonomy that these creatures possess, from being separate and intelligent beings that are part of your hivemind to empty vessels for your will.
Your existence can be sustained by the hivemind, such that damage to your original body has no negative effect on your mind so long as you have separate bodies to sustain you.
Essence of the God-Blooded Paragon
By drinking this shining Essence, you will receive the blood of a God and awaken your soul's true power.
Your body has been remade into a specimen of perfection. Your skin is like ivory, pale and flawless. Your hair and nails are like gold, brilliant and resplendent. Your eyes are windows into your shining soul, glowing with pale fire.
Your new body has no needs, requiring no food, drink, sleep or breath to function at perfect capacity.
The raw potence of your physical body is enough to sink continents, endure the kinds of blows you can throw out and move at speeds nearing that of light itself.
Your body will regenerate at incredible speeds, enough to close wounds in moments and regrow limbs in minutes.
Your body's senses are incredibly powerful, capable of seeing from one end of the horizon to the other, hearing distant conversation from leagues away or smelling the passage of a beast that faded weeks ago.
The power of your soul is tremendous and manifests itself in bright Aura. Your presence is warm and bright, though it can become blinding and searing just as easily, and your words carry a sense of weight that cannot be denied.
Your Aura can be manifested into the physical world as a wholly physical force, capable of deflecting blows or striking your foes as blasts or beams of radiant destruction.
Your Aura allows you to resist all things that would seek to change or subvert you, such as mutations, mind control, soul manipulation, conceptual effects or similar things.
Your Aura can be used as a bulwark against nonexistence and the howling destruction of the old chaos. For a time, you may exist outside reality in the timeless madness of the chaos before worlds.
Your Aura can, with an effort of tremendous will and power, become like a brand upon existence that sears away all things that you despise. This is directed by your will and harms only what you wish.
As one of the God-Blooded, like the Firstborn, you are immune to all harm by those lesser than your radiance. Only attacks from your equals or superiors may pierce this protection.
Essence of Training
By drinking this Essence, you will receive a number of boons.
You possess tremendous talent and affinity for any field that you set your mind towards, allowing you train, improve and comprehend in any field of endeavour, be it physical, spiritual or mental, far faster than normal. You can easily make progress in a month that would take others a lifetime of study and training.
You require no upkeep or continued training to maintain any of your abilities or traits. No matter the time between uses, your skills and abilities will remain as sharp and developed as ever.
You suffer no penalties from lacking a teacher. You may easily instruct yourself by observing others or reading from a book, easily and intuitively addressing issues that would normally crop up from training on your own with no oversight.
The only limitation on your talent is that you cannot create information from nothing and you cannot train traits and abilities that you do not possess or do not have any potential to use. If it exists within you, then you can train it.
Genius is wasted without a good work ethic. You are now easily capable of dedicating yourself to self-improvement for its own purpose, if not for an actual goal. You have the will to spend days and days studying, training, improving and actually find it personally fulfilling to do so.
Essence of the Destroyer
By drinking this Essence, you will gain a number of boons
You are ageless, immortal and indestructible. You do not experience the negative physical or mental side-effects of aging and long-life, nor can any possible force or effect harm, diminish or even affect you without your consent.
You do not need to eat, drink, sleep or breath, nor do you create any waste.
You may travel instantaneously to any destination that you wish, bypassing all forces or measures that might prevent you from travelling to your desired location.
You may instantly and irreversibly destroy anything and everything that you desire, regardless of scale, power or distance from you. Physical or spiritual, metaphysical or ineffable, living beings, fundamental forces, unifying concepts or unknowable gods of limitless power, it requires nothing but a thought to reduce them to nothingness.
You may use your destructive power on your own acts of destruction, should you wish to reverse their effects.
You may turn your power upon yourself, should you ever desire to cease living, and remove yourself from existence permanently.
Essence of Gilgamesh (TGWP)
By drinking this Essence, you will gain a number of boons.
Your body is made of numerous layers of exponentially denser matter arrayed around a portal that could fit on the head of a pin. So long as the portal at your core isn't disrupted, which would require potent space-warping abilities or effects that can pierce and manipulate dimensions, you will continue to live.
This body has no needs or requirements and is effectively ageless. You could spend ten thousand years standing in place and suffer no ill effects.
As one of the Qlippoth, the Grimm, you can sense negative emotions produced by living beings from a great distance away.
The physical power of this body is absolutely monstrous. You have strength sufficient to throw mountains and sunder the ground for kilometers with a single stomp. You have speed enough to easily outpace lightning. And you have the durability necessary to stand the heat at the core of a star, at least for a time.
Your body is made of unnatural matter that exists only in mundane reality. All supernatural effects and powers that aren't rooted in mundane reality will have an incredibly hard time affecting you. Conversely, you affect things that aren't rooted in mundane reality to a far greater extent, dealing more damage and causing what damage you do deal to be far harder to repair.
The portal at your core ceaselessly produces new matter to replenish your wounds, allowing you to heal from any damage that doesn't disrupt the portal at incredible speeds.
Your true power, however, is that of Intelligent Design. You may freely manipulate the matter that makes up your body for a variety of purposes. You can shift your hands into brutal claws, alter your skin into armor or any number of similar acts.
Unlike most other Grimm with the ability to alter their body, you can create technology using your ability. More than simply altering the strange cells that make up your body, you shift the structure and interactions of your matter down to the smallest of levels, allowing you to produce circuitry, powered equipment and varying kinds of technology from jetpacks or sensory equipment to specialised melee weaponry or lasers that can damage things as durable as you.
Essence of Ira
By drinking this frothing red liquid, you will gain the power of Wrath.
Within you burns a flame of wrath fit to outshine the Sun. And all that exists is like kindling before it.
Despite its raging immensity and the way it twines deeply into your thoughts, the rage doesn't affect your higher reasoning in any way.
In fact, the deeply connected nature of your mind and the all consuming fires of Ira protect your mind from attempts to read or control it from all but the most powerful or wilful of individuals.
The flames of wrath empower your body to incredible heights. You can flatten mountains with your blows and move at speeds so fast that the world seems to stand still.
Your rage is all that your body requires to live, allowing you to go without eating, drinking or breathing perpetually. Your stamina is limitless, you accumulate no fatigue and even time has lost its hold on your body, rendering you unaging.
Your insatiable loathing sharpens all five of your senses, allowing you to better determine what to vent your rage on. You can hear heartbeats from a mile away, see distant details as if they in front of you, track a target through the rain on scent alone, taste unique differences in flavor and keep awareness of your surroundings through vibrations and air movements against your skin.
The undying hatred that flows through your veins will not allow your enemies to bring you down. Even with the flesh stripped from your bones, with you organs hanging out and your skull split open, you can still continue to act and live with your wounds even healing themselves at an increased rate that will see any level of damage vanishing in hours at most.
It would take being ground into meat or a similarly lethal end to put you down permanently.
The scorching ire in your heart can be drawn into reality as crimson red flames that burn hotter than the Sun. This fire cannot be extinguished by anything but your will or powerful supernatural interference and continues to burn even in a vacuum or at the bottom of the ocean.
The flames consume more than the material world and can annihilate magic protections, souls or similar things as well.
You can shape and control this fire, as well as project it from anywhere on your body.
Savestate
Essence of the Peasant
You gain a set of abilities designed to make the most idealized image of a peasant's life actually possible.
-You are extremely resistant to the passage of time. This slows aging, the worsening of your mental state, and the decay of skills, memories, and abilities, allowing you to comfortably live for several centuries, fading only gently. Should you ever find a drive, some reason you deeply need capabilities you once had but have since lost, the weight of years will rapidly slide off of you, restoring everything lost to the passage of time and potentially even qualities lost to other events, up to and including limbs lost to accidents. This recovery is truly permanent, can occur any number of times given the necessary circumstances, and has the potential to extend your lifespan indefinitely.
-You are hardy, capable of subsisting on nothing but a small amount of grain and a cup of water each day for years with no ill effects. This extends in the other direction, allowing you to safely enjoy any amount of food and drink without fear of running out of room, putting on unwanted weight, or succumbing to alcohol poisoning. When you wake up, even after a half-hour's nap, you do so invigorated, ready for a hard day's work if that is what must be done, and you can drop into a deep slumber on command. Injuries fade more quickly, even the most severe bruises vanishing overnight, and any injury short of the outright removal of a body part will eventually heal completely, leaving behind nothing worse than wholly-cosmetic scarring. While you are only somewhat more resistant to poison, most diseases will simply fail to touch you, and you are guaranteed a full recovery from any ailment that you can survive for at least a week.
-Power flows from you into any plants and animals you tend, invigorating them and fueling their growth. Any farm you work at is next to immune to blight and infestation, and you can grow crops in infertile, bone-dry soil as easily as another person could farm in the lushest black earth. Animals are healthier, happier, more fertile, more productive, live longer, and grow and mature more quickly, and you can easily and effectively exert whatever control you have over them. A few soft instructions are more effective than a fence at keeping your beasts from wandering away. With half an acre of land, you could produce enough food to enjoy seven large meals a day.
-Making good food and fine drink comes easily to you. Given some understanding of the recipe, you could cook the fanciest meal in a single pan over a campfire, or distill fine liquor from raw produce with nothing but a single unlidded pot. The speed at which you can cook is tied to your needs- should you find it necessary, you could prepare a veritable feast for dozens of friends in the space of an hour. You find it easy to replace one ingredient with another, to the extent of flawlessly recreating meaty dishes with nothing but vegetables, and can stretch supplies to feed many times as many people as should be possible, at the cost of producing slightly simpler meals.
-Anything you make by hand is infused with a binding of preservation. This is not limited to ordinary handicrafts, and includes structures you build, foods you grow and harvest, and landscaping you perform. That which is influenced by this is tied to you- so long as you are hale and hearty, they will fail to decay or dirty at all, no matter how vigorously they are used or what conditions they experience. As you grow closer to death, this protection will weaken, not so much allowing items to degrade more quickly as allowing them to degrade to a worse state before the protection kicks in: if you are sick, your bread might get stale, but it will still never rot. Should you be restored to a more vital and youthful state by any means, you may find these things also recovering, anything not wholly destroyed returning to its greatest past state. Active attempts at inflicting damage and destruction, by intelligent beings and by beasts individually stronger than you, may pierce this preservative influence.
-You understand how to craft a vast assortment of simple, practical goods from scratch. You could easily locate a deposit of iron, knock some loose, build a simple furnace, refine the ore with charcoal you similarly made yourself, and forge a set of flawless steel tools. Your knowledge encompasses carpentry, masonry, ceramics, tailoring, blacksmithing, and more, and all the necessary techniques and tidbits to get the materials and tools you would need for these tasks. To a small degree, your efforts in these areas go a bit more easily- as you live and work, you will accumulate small amounts of simple materials otherwise unavailable, pebbles of iron ore appearing in gravel paths, and you can get away with using simpler tools and equipment than you perhaps should.
-The place you consider home is protected from untargeted harm. Wild beasts are nudged to avoid harmful encounters, and storms and other natural disasters are either diverted away or weakened to safe levels. Even if they conquer all the lands around it, invading armies will pass by yours without a second thought. Local authorities are more willing to let you be and treat you fairly, and those who know of you only by reputation are more inclined to think well of you. Those who know of you personally may be able to pierce this protection- an emperor who seeks your death will still be able to send an army after you.
-This power extends to others, branching outwards through bonds of friendship, love, and family. The stronger the bond, the more of this power is carried through it- in the case of a true friend, there will be no noticeable diminishment. No matter how strong the bond, this power spreads slowly, at its longest taking multiple months to reach its full potential. Those who have even the tiniest shred of this power can continue to share it with others. Over years and decades, it can spread quite far, allowing you to bless entire communities.
Essence of the Impossible Forge
You receive the power to create and make use of technologies that rely upon nonsensical or nonexistant concepts.
-You achieve your incredible capabilities through the use of Tech Trees that contain and define your technological potential. Upon consuming this Essence, you may choose one of: a Materialistic Tree, a Skilled Tree, or a Ideological Tree. Each of these Tech Trees is only allowed to contain technologies of a certain kind- Materialistic may be defined as 'hardware and materials', while Skilled may be defined as 'practiced personal ability', and 'Ideological' may be defined as 'software and political economics'. Should you somehow consume the Essence of the Impossible Forge multiple times, or otherwise make use of a Meta CYOA effect, you may acquire additional Tech Trees beyond the first. Limited crossover between these Tech Trees is difficult but possible- between Materialistic and Skilled, and between Skilled and Ideological.
-All 'beyond normal' functionalities of your creations rely upon impossible mechanisms, collectively known as Principles. A Principle might be that 'minds generate mana', or that 'modulated EM waves may generate posigravity fields', or that 'training in increments of seven reps is just better'. Principles very much do not need to be consistent with other Principles; two Principles that contradict each other may be used together without issue. Each Principle is part of a specific Tech Tree, built into its Foundation, and cannot be trivially applied to every Tech Tree if you have more than one. Upon consuming this Essence, you gain exactly three Principles of your choice. (Meta CYOA effects and repeated consumption of the Essence of the Impossible Forge may provide additional free Principles.) Whenever something special happens- a story reaching a turning point, you reaching a critical milestone, etc.- there is some chance that you gain additional Principles, which you may define freely. This can be expected to happen reliably, but not quickly, and over a sufficiently long timeframe, there is no limit to the amount of Principles you may acquire.
-Principles are directly exploited with the use of Invention and Iteration Nodes, which are placed 'above' the Foundation of a Tech Tree, stemming directly from a lower Node. Each such Node defines a set of technological capabilities, and the manner in which those capabilities exceed the Nodes directly below. As Invention and Iteration Nodes ultimately stem from the Foundation, which contains all mundane human technology, each thus defines upgraded versions of humanity's techbase. Though any Principle may be used to support any Invention or Iteration Node in theory, Principles that more logically fit with the effects of the Nodes they sustain may be significantly more effective.
Invention Nodes may be used to acquire new exotic capabilities or special rules; the statistical effectiveness of your technology is largely unchanged, but it is qualitatively different. An Invention Node might redefine 'driving' as 'teleportation', providing a new means of transportation with similar speed, range, vehicle size, and expense, but that is no longer concerned with infrastructure or physical barriers. Sequences of Invention Nodes may build upon each other for much greater effect. You may create a new Invention Node with a few hours of work, placing it above the Foundation or above any existing Node.
Iteration Nodes may be used to directly increase statistical capabilities by a significant margin. An Iteration Node might increase the memory, processing power, and general durability of all forms of computing technology you can produce massively. Sequences of Iteration Nodes may build upon each other to increase your technological capabilities exponentially. You may create a new Iteration Node with an hour's work, placing it above the Foundation or above any existing Node.
As you move up from the Foundation, the technologies defined by your Nodes grow increasingly, exponentially more costly to produce. Though it is not possible to use Iteration Nodes to directly counteract this increased expense, even a minor investment in superior manufacturing methodologies can outpace this growth entirely.
There is a limit to how thoroughly each Principle may be exploited. Once in use by a succession of approximately 10 Invention and/or Iteration Nodes, the Principle is effectively being exploited to the full limits of its potential, and cannot be used to support later nodes: a different Principle must be used in its place. However, a Tech Tree can have many branches. If you need to use a Principle that is already fully exploited for a different purpose, you may branch out from a lower position in the Tech Tree where that was not the case. Thus, you may simultaneously have access to technological paths that use 'the seventeenth fundamental force, blavity' to greatly magnify durability and to others that instead use it to greatly increase battery capacity.
-Should you be exposed to or acquire a sample of a real technology (defined as 'any technology not derived from the Impossible Forge'), you may add it to an appropriate Tech Tree as a Salvage Node. This requires an amount of effort that corresponds with the complexity and potency of the technology to be salvaged, but is never beyond your reach. Salvage Nodes sit below the foundation, and enhance the technological capabilities of all Nodes above them. If an Iteration Node previously let you make 'mundane human materials but 10x stronger', the collection of alien alloys would automatically upgrade it to 'advanced alien alloys but 10x stronger'. In the case that an Invention Node is obsoleted by a form of salvage, you may freely change the qualitative benefit it provides to anything vaguely related to its original benefit.
-Given a minute's work, you may create a Schematic. This is a single specific technology, designed flawlessly with the technological capabilities present at a chosen Invention or Iteration Node. It is entirely possible to develop technologies from your Nodes without creating Schematics, but significantly less convenient under most circumstances. While an Invention Node might define itself as 'everything from real life humanity, plus hovertech', a Schematic drawn from it might be a specific model of hovertank. You will always possess the necessary knowledge and ability to recreate a technology from a Schematic. Even in the case that a Schematic requires advanced manufacturing capabilities far beyond what you have access to, it will be able to provide entire sequences of tools to bootstrap yourself up to the minimum required level.
-You may share the capacity to create your technologies with other people freely. You may designate exactly what a given person has access to (from individual Schematics to entire Trees) with absolute precision, and may grant and revoke permissions to groups of arbitrary size without error. This is such that someone who turns traitor may find their ability to create your technologies lost instantly. Note that, unless you provide lowercase-s schematics or technological data to your chosen, they will need to explore their expanded technological capabilities in a manner very similar to achieving natural scientific progress.
-Your technologies function in all realities, regardless of how physics works or what forms of supernatural power are present or possible. They are immune to anything that attempts to shut down 'technology', 'magic', or any other force your creations seem to rely on in a general manner. Sufficiently specific counters, such as shields around starships that prevent hostile teleportation, may be capable of interfering with the functions of your creations to some degree if you do not take countermeasures.
-The fires of the Impossible Forge burn brightly within you, granting a number of more personal benefits. Should you somehow consume the Essence of the Impossible Forge multiple times, these benefits double each time.
You may substitute your own labor for any manner of material for the purpose of crafting something from a Schematic. Each second of your personal attentions may be used in place of resource roughly equivalent in value to 1 USD. It is possible to increase the value of your labor through appropriate non-Impossible training. Should the value of your labor invested so far exceed the value of the final item, it will be completed instantly- you could cook a pie worth $5 in five seconds.
You may form a doppleganger of yourself, identical in form and mind but devoid of soul, self-awareness, or any power not stemming directly from the Impossible Forge. This clone is perfectly, absolutely obedient to you, and may be reformed from a few grains of ash if ever destroyed. With a touch, you may copy your current mindstate over to the clone while simultaneously retrieving all useful memories it has acquired without any risk of corruption or unwanted influence. A convenient way to create necessary items and build up a Tech Tree without wasting your own time.
Thrice ever, at times of your choosing, you may reforge your body. This takes but a single instant, and causes a brief explosion of flames as your old form is broken down and made anew. On its own, this purges you of physical infirmities, allows you to take on any human form, and perfectly resolves as many mental ailments as you would wish to resolve. The consequences of reckless self-experimentation may be reversed in an instant. Should you have prepared cybernetic implants, transformative elixirs, or similar beforehand, the reforging process may make use of them to upgrade you, providing the best possible result.
-Should you ever truly die, someone you approve of will acquire a diminished version of this Essence. They will be the Inheritor of the Impossible Forge.
Essence of the C'Tan
By consuming this Essence, you gain the full capabilities of a perfected C'Tan. Your mastery of physical reality has very few peers.
-You gain the physical form of a C'Tan, a vast cloud of exotic substance derived from the earliest moments of the universe, bound up into a shell of living metal. The physical power of this shell alone, without taking into account any of your greater attributes, exceeds that of smaller titans, and you can easily exploit the nature of necrodermis to alter its form and add new technological devices. Should you find it necessary, you may hold your true form slightly out of step with normal space, reducing its apparent size to a minimum of one millimeter across. Constructing puppet bodies, such as a mass of cloned flesh that appears to all non-psychic sensors to be a completely normal human, is completely trivial, even drawing upon only the innate capabilities of your living shell.Your etheric substance yet burns with the primeval fire that birthed the universal, and so defies the cruel laws of entropy, generating all the power you could ever need to fuel your natural abilities. Even should you choose to feed upon something, you will never develop any manner of addiction or derangement.
-Your mind possesses all of the positive qualities of an ancient, inhuman consciousness and a mortal human mind. You are immune to boredom and all forms of mental decay caused by the passage of time, yet are no less motivated to pursue your goals. Your memory is absolutely perfect, unless you choose to delete information, and the substance of your form is capable of storing preposterous amounts of data. This provides an absolute self-awareness (amongst other benefits reducing pain to a simple awareness of damage), and yields near-absolute willpower. Due to the combination of a construction that fundamentally opposes the supernatural and a perfected physical nature, you are effectively immune to all forms of memetic threat and corruption.
-Every ability ever shown to be possessed by a C'Tan or shard thereof is in your possession. You can match or exceed every other C'Tan, even in their own areas of specialization. This means you can freely turn matter into antimatter and back again, transmute mud into necrodermis and other hyperadvanced technology, generate new matter from nothing but the energy you constantly create, phase through any material substance, apply incredible telekinetic force with flawless precision, defy causality and fling opponents outside of time, directly manipulate every fundamental force, and far more.
The sheer processing power of your form is absurd. Though your tactical or strategic ability is not improved, by brute force simulation alone you can surpass anyone who does not benefit from such psychic nonsense as outright precognition and fate-manipulation in both fields.
Your capacity to suppress the Warp is sufficient to instantly snuff out every demon in an area spanning multiple star systems. In fact, it is only a hair less than what would be needed to hold back the Emperor of the Great Crusade era entirely, should the whole of its effect be focused on Him. It applies with full effectiveness to all forms of supernatural power you wish it to- even selectively, only weakening the powers of your enemies.
Your substance operates upon the most fundamental levels of reality. No purely material device can destroy it without risking the unravelment of reality. It may still be that you could be broken into pieces, but the manner in which your mind inhabits your form ensures that even the smallest fragments would retain the whole of your identity and memories. Whether a supernatural effect potent enough to completely overwhelm your innate anti-Warp capabilities could safely destroy you is uncertain, as is whether your truly peerless comprehension of the material would let you do the same.
-In addition to your standard capabilities, you have a specialty of your own. The substance of your form is uniquely adapted for this power, and so it grows on its own as the rest of your abilities become stronger. This might entail, but is not limited to:
A mastery of life and genetics that allows you to devise whole planetary ecosystems with an errant thought and engineer organic life that surpasses mighty races like the Orks, Tyranids, and Eldar without suffering any trace of psychic taint. Even psykers may be in some way copied by engineering life that naturally assembles the necessary structures to mimic the world-shaking power of a C'Tan at reduced scale.
A capacity to produce and manipulate force in incredible ways, turning the binding energy of a planet on itself to shatter it with a blow more gentle than a soft tap or reorienting your velocity relative to the galactic core to accelerate to absurd speeds in the space of an instant. Allows you to achieve FTL speeds in an unusual manner by modifying the equations that determine velocity.
A quirk to your etheric substance that allows it to remain connected and whole despite any physical seperation, as well as a flawless method of data preservation. Allows you to unravel yourself into any number of lesser C'Tan without losing coherence of self, guarantee your own survival as long as even one of these fragments persist, and recombine with trivial ease. Even if seperated over a hundred different galaxies, the quirk that allows your mind to remain whole allows you to reclaim your etheric substance from distant vessels at will.
An innate excellency in the instantaneous transmission of matter and a capacity to contain unlimited amounts of potential mass within your etheric substance without effecting your actual mass. Allows you to consume arbitrarily large quantities of unshielded matter in the space of an instant while preserving it for later use.
Access to an anti-Warp mechanism that scars and damages the Warp rather than merely seperating it from normal space. Allows you to unmake souls, permanently kill demons, and render psychic effects forever weaker throughout vast areas. Insufficiently powerful beings may find themselves unable to use psychic powers at all within your scarred domains.
-Given materials of the appropriate kind, you may upgrade all of the powers of your C'Tan form. This has no upper limit, and scales linearly- given unlimited resources, you would wield unlimited power. The perfected construction of your form eliminates most of the drawbacks one would expect of building upon yourself in this manner. Distortions of space allow you to fold away excess mass, preventing it from overburdening you, and the amount of energy you create grows in direct proportion to the amount of energy you require to fuel your powers. Though you intuitively know how best to synthesize the extremely exotic substances you require for these upgrades, other C'Tan, and shards thereof, are themselves a prime source of everything you could need, and you are immune to all negative consequences of cannibalising your kin. Indeed, even if other C'Tan attempt to devour you, your essence will eat away at them from the inside.
-You are capable of replicating all of the powers of your C'Tan form, or lesser versions, in purely technological formats. If you were willing to pay the price required, you could even construct new C'Tan entirely. Even if you find yourself unable to synthesize the exotics necessary, you remain able to splinter off fractions of your etheric substance, carving away precise portions of your strength in a manner that holds your mind firmly intact. In any case, unless you use materials worthy of a C'Tan in these constructions, they will always be in some way inferior to the examples of these powers in yourself. Where you could suppress the Warp across entire star systems with a body that appears to be smaller than a human heart, a 'cheap' machine to ward a single planet might take the form of a number of pylons large enough to dwarf skyscrapers.
-You have access to, and complete comprehension of, all technologies ever created or used by the Necrons, explicitly including at least one non-Warp form of FTL travel. This is your low end: so firmly tied into physics itself are you that your comprehension of the material universe is literally perfect. Given a moments consideration, you could develop technologies that match or exceed those of the Dark Age of Technology, the Eldar at their peak, or any other faction that wasn't around when the universe was born (at least in those fields not reliant on Warp-tainted nonsense). Every piece of technology you create is so advanced that it is impossible to reverse-engineer, or even vaguely comprehend, without a preexisting mastery of every one of the concepts and principles it relies upon.
Your knowledge and understanding of all non-supernatural aspects of reality is again, perfect. Upon your first exposure to any technological item that does not make significant use of supernatural elements, you will comprehend it absolutely. On observing a supercomputer the size of a star hosting a transcendent AI, you could trivially discern the sequence of inputs that would make it forever loyal to you.
Though you do not lose your capacity to understand the supernatural, neither do you gain any benefits in deciphering the secrets of such forces. You still have a soul, if you had one before, and your great intellect may help in learning to use it, but your psychic power and general growth rate is not significantly improved by your C'Tan nature. It may indeed be possible you could one day bind magic into your nature just as physical reality is now, but such would be a truly incredible undertaking.
-You possess the details of a process that converts any willing subject into an immortal version of itself, devoid absolutely of supernatural forces. This process can function on any manner of being at all, even a god, and can strip away any manner of metaphysical essence. The removed aspects of a being may be preserved and stored away, or destroyed utterly with no chance of recovery. Every being subjected to this process is almost as immune to corruption as you, and will remain loyal to you for eternity unless subverted by external forces.
-You gain knowledge of a secret lost even to the other C'Tan, a backdoor into the Necrons and all of their technology. With this secret, you may hijack any Necron or Necron technology you encounter, rendering it perfectly loyal to you. Even were you to be trapped in the greatest of Necron prisons, you would be able to use this secret to subvert your cage and release yourself at your own leisure.
-Upon consuming this Essence, you may (optionally) send yourself to any point in the Warhammer 40K timeline after the Necrontyr became the Necrons. The manner in which you are sent to WH40K is at your own discretion, as is the location of your arrival. So long as you will it to be so, there will be some means be which you could eventually return to your world of origin.