Essence of the Immortal
By consuming the Essence of the Immortal, the quintessence of the desire to live forever, you gain the following boons:
●Your aging halts when you reach the prime of life, the exact moment when the body stops maturing and starts dying. If your body is already past the prime of life, it reverts to that point.
●A healing factor that maintains you in perfect health and lets you rapidly recover from any injury, disease, or poison short of the total destruction of your body. You can easily block out pain if you want to while still retaining an awareness of injury.
●Perfect memory with infinite storage and data recovery. Even if your memories are somehow erased, they will eventually return. Death of identity is just another form of death, and you can never truly die.
●Skills, stats, and abilities never degrade due to lack of training or the passage of time. Reincarnating into a new body does mean you have to physically condition that new body from scratch, but 'muscle memory' is actually in the mind and so carries over just fine.
●An indestructible mind, that is highly resistant to insanity and which will eventually recover from any amount of mental trauma or destruction even if crushed or obliterated by overwhelming force. Barring other powers or abilities you can still potentially be negatively affected by horrible events, boredom, sensory deprivation, etc., but you will never be permanently lost inside your own head.
●An eternal soul, that cannot be trapped, bound, owned, permanently harmed, or eliminated by any power short of the Supreme Being. If you are ever destroyed by any means, up to and including being retroactively erased from having ever existed, you will reincarnate somewhere else and regain your memories and abilities in early childhood. Barring other factors you will reincarnate on the inhabitable world closest to where you 'died' as a healthy newborn of the closest equivalent to the race you 'died' as, usually the same one in both cases. If the entire universe is unavailable to reincarnate in then you will reincarnate in a nearby universe.
●The ability to voluntarily 'die' and trigger your next reincarnation. Intended for use in situations such as being trapped in an inescapable void, buried underneath a collapsed mountain, being devoured alive for eternity in an Elder God's stomach, locked in temporal stasis, trapped in an inescapable time loop, etc. This ability will never activate under any circumstances unless you genuinely and of your own free will want it to, but can be activated 'subconsciously' regardless of how incapacitated you are.
●The ability to petition the Supreme Being to end your immortality and allow you to move on to what comes next, but only if you while entirely in your right mind and with the utmost sincerity want to.
Essence of the Cultivator
By consuming this essence you become as ridiculously overpowered and blessed with potential and luck as the greatest of xianxia main characters. Which, if you know xianxia, is pretty damn ridiculous.
●You gain the ability to 'cultivate' your 'internal energy', allowing you access to increasing tiers of effects and powers in-theme for wuxia and/or xianxia, the exact nature and power level of these effects depending on what degree have cultivated it to. You may use an existing cultivation system from any xianxia novel or create your own.
●You may grant this ability to cultivate to others and teach them your system, but they are limited to their own willpower, comprehensive abilities, and talents when it comes to success. You may still use external means, such as alchemy or creating and sharing secret techniques, to help them.
●Cultivating your internal energy slows down your aging, eventually making you truly unaging. Likewise, you may eventually transcend mortal needs such as sustenance, normal rest, or needing to breathe. Your mind and soul will be adjusted so as to be able to endure immortality.
●Your talent for cultivation and speed and ease of learning at all things related to cultivation (including martial arts, alchemy, and creating artifacts) is beyond ludicrous. Your aptitude is raised to the maximum possible allowable in existence and perhaps slightly beyond even that. You can choose to slow this down when you need to or when you wish to avoid attracting attention.
●This includes your ability to make use of external cultivation aids, such as parts from mystical beasts and exotic plants and treasures. You may easily consume and gain maximum benefit from such things even without preparation, and gain even greater benefits from them with sufficient preparation and alchemical knowledge.
●Even if your cultivation system does not normally provide you with one you will still be gifted with perfect memory, including infinite storage and perfect indexing.
●As one specially blessed by this Essence and the heavens, you may ignore the usual limits of your cultivation system whenever you find it convenient. You may mix incompatible elements, cultivate female-only arts as a male or vice versa, ignore dietary or behaviorial restrictions normally required of cultivators, etc.
●Your cultivation cannot be 'crippled'. Injuries that would normally destroy your cultivation instead merely temporarily wound it, but you can heal in time. Likewise, any cultivation techniques that carry a risk of death if performed incorrectly are entirely safe for you; you may or may not succeed at them but failure will never kill or permanently injure you, and you may try again.
●Your cultivation never dead-ends or gets trapped in a bottleneck. Regardless of what choices you make or what system you are in, there are no 'traps' that leave you stuck at a given stage of cultivation forever. All setbacks are clearable with enough hard work and your 'foundation' is always ideally solid.
●Your willpower is truly unlimited, unbreakable, and unsurpassed, and you have a perfect sense of 'self'. No amount of pain or hardship can deter you, no illusion can trap you or bind your heart or soul, and you can focus on a task for eternity if need be. Any cultivation challenges that depend on strength of will or clarity of mind are auto-win for you.
●You have the luck of a top-tier xianxia protagonist. Coincidence and fate favor you greatly, mentors and training materials seem to be available whenever most needed, discovering treasures and rarities seem to be much more common for you than for other people whenever you go exploring and adventuring, and you have plot armor sufficient to survive almost anything.
●Cultivation is not for the idle, but instead for those who struggle and overcome challenges. Regardless of how powerful you grow you may always find things that challenge you if you make a sufficient effort to seek them out, until you finally stand among the highest of beings.
Essence of Ideal Growth
By consuming the Essence of Ideal Growth, the crystallized essence of possibility and capability, you gain the following boons:
●Any limits you have are broken. You may improve any aspect of yourself, including those aspects that normally could not be improved at all, to an infinite extent. While you may not be unstoppable now, time is all you will need before you surpass everyone.
● The passage of time lends you strength, and even when doing absolutely nothing, you may passively grow as if you were doing all-out training at a modest rate of improvement. If you were to put any actual effort into improving, then this growth would gain an astronomical boost. You have total control over where any growth is allocated, will never advance further or faster than you are comfortable with, and have an exact awareness of your amassed capabilities and how they measure up.
●So long as a particular skill, trait, or power exists within your local context, and you have a basic understanding of what it is and entails, you have the potential to develop it. This does not require educational resources or external aids and disregards entirely the limitations of your physiology and metaphysiology. You may even develop traits that one is normally only born with.
● Development in any area will never preclude or hamper development in any other area, and as such, you may safely acquire mutually incompatible traits. This is to such an extent that in a Xianxia world, you could simultaneously cultivate dozens of distinct foundations without any issue.
● As they improve, your skills, qualities, powers, techniques, and perks may develop a degree of potency, applicability, and versatility that defies their normal limits. With sufficiently good balance, you could walk on intangible holograms.
●Since improvement necessitates the removal of flaws, you may use training to remove vulnerabilities, crippling effects, and requirements. As an otherwise ordinary human you could eventually erode away your hunger completely, allowing you to not only go without eating but deny conservation of mass as your body generates replacement tissues without absorbing any external material.
●Your powers and internal power supplies cannot be removed, drained, suppressed, weakened, copied, altered, controlled, or otherwise manipulated against your wishes, even if you were somehow mind-controlled. You may toggle any of your powers from fully off to fully on, or anywhere in between. You may even permanently shed powers or abilities if you find that you truly do not enjoy them, only to retrain them later if you change your mind. You cannot ever be forced to use this metaphorical dimmer switch against yourself.
●Time is your ally and you will never be lessened by the passage of time, even in the subtlest of ways. No maintenance is required to retain the fullness of your powers, and no eternity is long enough to diminish your ability to enjoy life.
●At the time you first drink this Essence, you will be cured of any physical ailments, psychological trauma, and other unwanted mental conditions, ailments, disabilities, etc.
Essence of Hypercompetence
By drinking this perfect Essence, you gain the ability to operate at memetic peak performance.
●This Essence grants you hypercompetence, a level of ability where you can always operate at your absolute peak with trivial ease. You have immense natural talent for anything that you are potentially capable of doing. Likewise, your execution of anything is flawless to the absolute limits of your skill and knowledge, and will not have any fumbles, slips, unforced errors, or anything of the sort. Even your most instantaneous reactions may be undertaken as if you'd had all the time you needed to extensively plan out your next moves.
● Your talent for learning is unparalleled. You comprehend the basics of new skills/techniques/etc. almost immediately upon being exposed to them, and in such a manner as to provide the ideal foundation for eventually mastering all the nuances and complexities of a subject. You may learn any kind of skill, physical or mental, at least as easily as a very young child would learn language skills.
● Your perfection will not be hampered by a weak or imperfect body or mind. At the time you drink this Essence, you are cured of any and all physical ailments and disabilities. You are also made aware of any mental illness, disorders, disabilities or other conditions you may be suffering from and may have any or all of them cured at your discretion.
● Your body is now like a perfectly optimized machine. Your muscles simultaneously have the power of a champion weightlifter and the fast-twitch speed of a master martial artist, your speed, agility, and coordination are top of the charts, and your stamina and resilience are downright cinematic. You will require significantly less sustenance or sleep than you normally would. You will retain your health and fitness as if you were constantly practicing clean and healthy living, even if you aren't. Your body and clothes will almost magically shed filth and grime, and you will have minimal body odor.
● Your mind is similarly optimized, with your intellect being augmented to the highest levels that your species could naturally attain on your birthworld. This includes but is not limited to such things as perceptiveness, reaction time, pattern recognition, and creativity. Your memory is perfect in all respects, although you can still choose to selectively let things fade.
● You also receive a one-time appearance upgrade based on your wishes and idealized self-image, with the exact details of your build and "endowments" being up to you.
● You also gain an increased capacity for self-awareness and self-reflection. You can clear-headedly process and resolve your guilt or trauma and truly learn from both your successes and your failures, and then use what you've learned to make yourself a wiser, stronger-willed, and generally better person. You are immune to PTSD and unwanted value drift, and can retain an essential 'youness' about yourself even as you change and grow.
● Finally, your skills and abilities never degrade regardless of disuse, lack of practice, etc.
● Your hypercompetence may be fully or partially toggled whenever you wish, and may be automatically toggled back on during a life-threatening emergency even if you disabled your instantaneous reactions.
●The one exception to this toggle are your survival instincts, which will always be hypercompetent. You will never be taken completely off-guard by anything and will have unbreakable plot armor versus perma-death, death of personality, and other really bad things.
● As a special bonus, you receive full control over your fertility and other related buffs.
● This Essence immediately becomes part of your most inherent and innate nature upon first consuming it, and from that point on, its benefits will permanently and irrevocably be with you at all times unless voluntarily toggled by you as per the above benefit. Nothing else can ever remove or weaken your hypercompetence in any way; curses, magic, Clarketech, even the will of ROB or equivalent beings, nothing.