Meta Essence CYOA 30

Essence of the Scheming Potion Loli

 By imbibing this essence (based on I Shall Survive Using Potions!), you gain the following:

•Eternal youth, optionally also appearing as a loli if you want. The latter is a one-time choice. Either way, you are biologically immortal and alway healthy.

•Universal Linguistics: You can understand all languages and signals intended to actually convey information. This works through any sense and even on codes of arbitrary complexity. Your brain can intuitively decipher an impossible code so easily you might not even notice it was coded at all. This also works on animals.

•An invisible magic protection spell that repels all attacks and threats. As this is backed by a god, it would take something on that level to get through. This does not protect against minor (i.e. "chip") damage you do not register, being manhandling if they are gentle enough (e.g. they cannot twist your arm too far), or anything you let through. You can still be bound as well. You can also still harm yourself, though you cannot die from it.

•You can do pretty much anything as long as you can vaguely phrase it as summoning a container of some potion. This can be highly arbitrary and broad in scope. Potions simply spontaneously appear in containers anywhere vaguely around the you that you want. There is no limit on how many you can create at once.◦A potion can have effects such "instantly heal all injuries", "return your body to your prime/youth", "explode like nitroglycerin", "change your appearance", "make you sick for exactly 10 days", "make whatever is coated super durable", "let me understand animals", and "nothing, it's just water". You can arbitrarily add clauses to it such as "becomes inert after 5 days or if removed from the country", "cannot be used against me", and "only works for people who follow X rules".

◦A container is similarly arbitrary as long as it contains a "potion". It could be statue that infinitely generates a cure-all potion. They could be crystals connected to each other that function like cell phones with infinite range. It could be an unbreakable sword with a monomolecular edge that uses bio-electricity to vibrate at high speeds and cut almost anything...that also has some potion in the pummel or something.

•An item box pocket dimension to store your stuff. It is basically just a video game inventory system with infinite space and that you always have a perfect awareness of. Things are teleported in and out with a thought. Since time does not pass inside the item box, storing living things (like humans) in there is completely safe.

Essence of the Suicidal Hunter

 By imbibing this essence (based on SSS-Class Suicide Hunter), you gain the following:

•You have the power to Return By Death! Whenever you die, you are shunted 24 hours back in time with all your memories intact. You bring any powers back with you to the past, even to before you originally gained them. That includes this power too. One downside is that cooldowns are carried with your mind instead of resetting with your body when you go back in time.

•When you are killed by someone, you may copy a single one of their powers or supernatural-level skills. You will see all their abilities as floating cards with their descriptions facing away from you. All you see is their backs, colour coded with bronze/silver/gold/crystal for their power level. Unless you have some other power to cheat this, you have to choose randomly. You can only gain one ability from each person, no matter how many times they kill you.

•Every time you are killed you will see some trauma from your killer's past, viewing it as an undetectable ghostly third party.

•You gain a startling and disconcerting apathy in response to your own death. You do not like dying despite your power, nor do you like pain any more than you already did. Despite this, the sting of death and whatever arduous journey got you there is severely blunted. If properly motivated, you could kill yourself over 4000 times in one sitting to go back more than a decade, all without any psychological damage. You could also repeatedly starve yourself to the brink of death countless times to master a demonic martial art based on slaying those who have not suffered the same hardships as you.

Essence of the Super Streamer

 By imbibing this essence (based on OP After 30 Days Of Sign-In), you gain the following:

•You may be periodically called to a "border dimension" that looks like an empty version of somewhere on Earth. Think of it as an RPG dungeon, where you have to survive and beat the final challenge to leave. The level is always set low enough relative to your power level to be easily clearable as long as you are not intentionally trying to lose.

•You may decide each time if other people are summoned too, though the difficulty only scales with you.

•An anomalous program is installed on all sufficiently advanced computing devices and cannot be removed. Every participant can magically stream their adventure using it. The program can be closed by a viewer, but the stream itself cannot be interrupted.

•Each dungeon, everyone viewing has one "Fate Coin" to donate to whoever they want. This is a magical cryptocurrency illegally mined on their machine that can be used to increase your power (with diminishing returns) or buy various goods from the store. This can also be accessed and traded outside the dungeon between previous players.

Essence of the Supreme Yang/Yin Body

 By imbibing this essence, you gain the following:

•In some cultivation series there is the notion of a supreme yang or yin body. One where there is near boundless yet stable levels of either yang or yin energy, which can benefit someone else by transferring some of it through "dual cultivation" (i.e. sex). Now you are something similar. By having sex with someone you find the least bit attractive (physically, mentally, or whatever), you will permanently greatly enhance their vitality and any supernatural abilities they have. Turn a complete novice into a rising star after only a few rolls between the sheets.

•Anyone who finds out about this property will also know about the "have to be attractive to you" clause, hopefully warding off fat bastards and the like (unlike you are into that).

•Multiple people can take advantage of this at once, but might be penalized if they are not particularly active participants. You know what handjob, blowjob, and the like have in common? Yeah...they have "job" in the name. They have to put in some effort or emotional connection (though not necessarily both) for it to work.

•Be careful though. Keep in mind that it does not have be strictly consensual or enjoyable on your part, just that you recognize that some things about the other person or sex acts are overall attractive to you in theory. This most often means they have a rocking body, but are disgusting to you in personality. You might not have the choice to not stick in crazy if you are kidnapped, and they can still reap the benefits if there is something about them you find decently attractive, at least if it was from the distance of the fourth wall.

•It is not any fluid that is exchanged that is important, but rather the act of sex itself. What this actually means is up to you. If you genuinely think of it as sex, then it counts.

Essence of the System Supplier

 By imbibing this essence (very loosely based on the System Supplier novel), you gain the following:

•Do you like to help the weak grow absurdly strong and watch the fallout? You now have the power of a System...to give other people Systems. You know all those overpowered growth cheats in fiction like in The Gamer, Solo Leveling, and SSS-Class Gacha Hunter? You can now make stuff like that and give them to other people. You cannot apply them to yourself other than to temporarily do quality assurance though, good drug cheat dealers never get high on their own supply.◦From the novel itself: "Want to redeem? Create a Trade System. Want to do a lottery? Make a Lottery System. Want to add a skill? Create a Game System."

◦You can define various extra features such as "can communicate and answer the host's questions" and "the system maker's authority over the system supersedes the host's".

•You can freely teleport to any place in the multiverse to ply your wares. This includes fictional settings, or even fanfic AUs based on those. Anything anywhere and anywhen you can imagine is open to you. No place is barred from you, not the heavens or planes blocked from normal dimension travel. It can be as vague as "just before the sensei character is about to tragically die", allowing you to create power fantasy fixfics in real life.

•You perfectly understand any language that is not meant to be secret. This is just so you do not have translation issues everywhere you go.

•You have a shield that passively resists environmental effects to handle hostile realms, though actual attacks are another thing. So be careful about checking whether the locals are friendly before doing anything big.

Essence of the Ticket to the Other Side

 By imbibing this essence (based on The Boy of Death), you gain the following:

•You have an endless stack of red-and-black tickets. When ripped, you may call upon the spirit of a deceased person for one hour. During this time you have full access to any skills, knowledge, and powers of that person at their peak in their life. Even if the person was not superhuman, you can still express any personal prowess even if it should not be possible for your body (e.g. a thin boy hitting world lifting records).

•You can specify a particular person, or just vaguely defined parameters (e.g. "I need someone who can beat the enemy in front of me").

•If you rip a ticket and then decide not to call on anyone, it will repair itself without anything happening. You can actually use this to track people, leaving one half on someone and just indefinitely delay using it. Then when you officially cancel it, the half you still have on you will fly out straight to the other one.

•This is not free though, with each ticket costing one year off the end of your lifespan.

•The benefits dissipate after the hour is up. You may still be able to call upon some remaining embers any time afterwards, but it will only ever be a pale shadow of the real thing. In great times of need you might be able to get more out of them. Repeatedly accessing skills might also train you, building up those skills as your own.

•In canon, the main character could only ever call on each spirit once. Since you are probably not as self-destructive as him and plan to live a while, for this Essence you are allowed to call on any single spirit up to once per year.

Essence of the Unlimited Gacha

 By imbibing this essence (based on My Gift Lvl 9999 Unlimited Gacha), you gain the following:

•You now have access to a real life gacha. Best of all, it is free and so will not destroy your wallet like it normally would.

•Each roll of the gacha might net you a character, item, or some miscellaneous supplies with levels ranging from 1 to 9999. They are all generally elevated in quality to completely mundane stuff. All summons are completely loyal to you and genuinely care about you.

•While higher level rolls are rarer, the rates are quite reasonable if you remember you can roll as many times as you want. The canon MC made a small country for himself, with plenty of level 9999 powerhouses, a small army of people in the quadruple-digit summons, and people with levels above 100 as far as the eye could see.

•A squad of level ~15 soldiers was implied to have roughly the same training and operating capacity as a similar sized team of normal special forces. So as a baseline imagine lower double digits being the very limits of a mundane human with proper conventional weapons. Low triple digits (i.e. level 1XX) is a decently power street level superhuman in some way (i.e. in direct combat, support, or other roles). Breaking into four digits is when you see true powerhouses on the national level who would become recorded in a country's legends. A level 9999 character would be a world famous creature each worth an army in many fantasy worlds, and a dozen of them would be enough to take on such a planet on their own with the right preparation.

•Before you ask, since this was also a harem series the summons skew towards attractive female characters, especially the most powerful ones. You can change that if you prefer as long as you respect the power levels. You can also add characters from gacha games into the roster that can be rolled, though again they cannot be above the rough implied power of level 9999.

Essence of The Void That Binds

 By imbibing this essence (based on Hyperion Cantos), you gain the following:

•You gain the power of the Shrike from the Hyperion Cantos, along with any other miscellaneous abilities tied to the Void that Binds.

•Being made of "love", you have access to and absolute mastery over the Void That Binds. Also known as Plank Space, it is realm that permeates all spacetime while being unbound by it. Via the supreme application of empathy and love (odd considering the Shrike's operating procedure), it is possible access this realm without any external equipment.

•Firstly, you are able to instantly teleport to anywhere in space and time. It is not an exaggeration to say that engagements with you go "you beat everyone, you write a few novels, then the battle begins", in that order. You can also use this to loop your timeline to have an arbitrary number of copies of you in any situation.

•Secondly, you can manipulate the flow of time around you. You may appear to be moving at trillions of times the speed of light, while still being able to perceive somehow. Your reflexes are always at that speed, so you can always ramp up and down the time dilation as if you were already in trillions-c mode. You can also afflict someone with Merlin's Sickness, where they age backwards and lose a day of memories for each day that passes.

•You have vaguely defined shape shifting abilities, able to change from your current form, to the Shrike's 3 metre tall four-armed body, to any living being that has existed (or will exist) in the universe. As the Void connects all consciousness, you have access to the memories and thoughts of those people to create convincing impersonations. In your Shrike alt-form your are basically a humanoid mass of "infinitely sharp" blades which can safely perform neurosurgery or individually pluck out dangerous cells normally irreversibly merged with someone without them even noticing. The Shrike has never failed to cut through a physical material and might even ignore conventional durability.

•Regardless of your appearance, you are always really made of phase shift fields that displace you from the normal flow of time. You are rendered completely invulnerable to conventional weapons, as well as immortal. Throwing more biggatons at you will not be viable even if you just sit there and take it. A beam that cleanly drills metres-wide holes straight through mountain ranges might push you back a bit. It will generally take other supremely powerful wielders of the Void or other hacks to even deal damage to you. Lesser manipulations of spacetime will simply slip off you.

•Finally, you have access to your own Tree of Pain. Not actually a physical tree, this is a hyper advanced simulation people can be plugged into and have their bodies maintained forever. While the Shrike used this to cause unending torture that no one would ever adapt to, you can change it to anything you want, even designing your own "afterlife" for each individual.

Essence of Troubled Eide

 By imbibing this essence (based on Nobilis/Glitch), you gain the following:

○You are able to wield the Divine Attribute of Eide, the power of the dream-self. The Miraculous self-conception of the schemer, clever manipulator, or dabbler of forbidden arts. Whether you are a terrifying villain on the fringes of society or the troubled hero who dirties their hands on great threats so the rest of the world can stay clean, you project a metaphorical outer shell to deal with the world.

■Select a Technique. This is your primary method or theme with which you use Eide to tackle problems. This can be anything, from "magic", to "super science", to "gambling", to "cooking". No Technique is necessarily superior to another with enough imagination, so it is completely possible for the Technique of "tax fraud" to defeat one of "the Strongest Superhero".

○As this is Miraculous, this operates on a higher plane than physical reality. Or rather, it interacts with the narrative and conceptual bedrock of reality on which the malleable illusion of conventional "reality" is built on. As such, all Miracles unilaterally trump any "Prosaic" (i.e. non-Miraculous) action wherever they directly conflict. This can create what appears to be no-limits fallacies to mundane denizens as questions such as "what is the strongest attack you 'invincible' shield has ever blocked?" or "how fast can you react with Miracles?" start to lose meaning in the face of the potentially quantitively infinite potency of Miracles. "Impossible" in most cases mortals conceive of are wholly not so for those who wield Divinity.

○Each of the below Miracles has a Lesser and Greater version, listed with the required Miracle levels. You receive a rating of 7 in Eide. Any action level at or below this is completely free to use, while you will need to accumulate Stilling to go beyond that or boost Miracles to overcome Miracles Wards. Stilling is how solidified and defined your dream-self is, which is a detriment when the power of a dream is its flexibility. Stilling gradually decreases with time, or in chunks by taking a self-inflicted "wound" (e.g. "I have a sprained ankle", "I hear things that are not there", "I reveal a hitherto unknown weakness to peanuts") that slowly "heal" even if they are not physical ones.

■Agony Rite (0/4)

■You are "afflicted" with a certain condition and this Rite will Miraculously resist attempts to lift it from you. This is separate from your Technique. If you are infected with the idea of "being a harem protagonist", the lesser version of this will passively draw suitable partners to you (possibly to your detriment) and the greater would allow you to directly invoke the appearance such people or harem hijinks when you need it. You can also use this to force a new understanding of your Infection, such as reframing the state of "dying of fire" from manifesting as "attracts fires" to "combusts when very angry".

■Intensity (1/5)

■This makes it much easier and more comfortable to just go along with you than not. The lesser version is simply a heavy mundane (i.e. Prosaic) obstacle to overcome, with difficulty rising if actively invoking your authority. The greater version will Miraculously force targets to perceive you as so important and valuable that they cannot shrug it off without a powerful enough counter-Miracle. For instance, Greater Intensity will convince a mortal enemy who has you dead to rights to not kill just yet, giving you time to turn the tables.

■Stunt (2/6)

■Perform some cinematic or low-fantasy action based on your Technique. Both lesser and greater versions are functionally highly potent mundane actions (including non-Miraculously powered magic and super science). An example of Lesser Stunt might be to use the "SCIENCE!" Technique to understand a physics report on a topic you have actually never seen before, "cooking" to bake a cake so light that it literally floats, or "sleight of hand" to outmaneuver an entire army.

■Greater Stunt instead brushes up against the genuinely impossible in how its reasoning beggars belief even in the realms of magic or super science. These are feats such as "sleight of hand" so good you trap someone in an endless hall of mirrors or "artistry" so realistic that a painted tunnel can be used to run through a mountain (a la Looney Tunes).

■Costumery (3/7)

■Lesser Costumery allows you to instantly change into an outfit and personal equipment suitable for your Technique (e.g. superhero suit and utility belt), with your previous items conveniently stashed "somewhere safe".

■Greater Costumery instead allows you to "reveal" the existence of environmental features based on your Technique, such as retroactively declaring that there had always been a secret underground entrance to your lair through a random payphone.

■You cannot perform the switch when under intentional continuous observation, though it is instantly done when even attention momentarily lapses. Most mortal observers will instead assume they had simply not noticed a new feature before, even when directly looking at what was changed. As with much of Eide, ambiguity is your ammunition.

■Cliffhanger Rite (4/8)

■The Lesser Cliffhanger Rite protects against supernatural actions by allowing you to only "pretend" to be affected and then reveal you were just faking it after the effect lapses. A gigantic fireball might burn you to ash, but then the next "scene" you pop up again without any explanation.

■The Greater Cliffhanger Rite instead allows you to do this even before the effect ends, rebounding it on an attacker. For instance, in the process of being banished to another dimension you retroactively reveal the summoning circle was backwards and your assailant goes instead. Or a pyromancer seems to be burning you for a moment, before you reveal you are instead draining their mana through their spell instead.

■This only covers protections from Miracles or suitably fantastical Prosaic actions. An orbital laser will be affected, but a simple modern gun will still hurt you (unless it was supernaturally created, or wielded by a zombie, or something). Use your head when figuring out when some attack involves enough weirdness to count, as careful management of this Rite can make you effectively immortal and unstoppable.

■This does not strictly need to be processed through your Technique.

■Talent (5/9)

■Lesser Talent will make you automatically succeed in any "test" of your qualifications based on your Technique. They not only pass by whatever standard is relevant (usually "brilliant genius"), but also do better every subsequent time someone or something were to "test" them in the same way. Mundane sabotage that completely invalidates it as a test (e.g. a teacher outright refusing to look at your answers) is theoretically possible, but fate will conspire to make it an overwhelming difficult endeavour.

■Greater Talent is invoked when terrible circumstances have pushed the limits of your currently defined dream-self to the breaking point...and your Eide cracks. You temporarily transform into some otherworldly state that gives you transcendent power and merit in your Technique to engage the current problem. In this state you receive whatever arbitrary powers of arbitrary potency are needed. Then you rampage, generally retaining intelligence and emotional motivations, but having lost touch with normalcy in a way that makes it difficult to identify with that version of yourself after the effect wears off. This might be a moment akin to "going Super Saiyan", entering your "final form", using a magic Talent to become a being a "pure magic" (with you defining what that means), or revealing that your "SCIENCE!" Talent actually stems from your eldritch "true form" who possesses omniscient understanding of everything.

■Due to the potency of the Lesser version, the Greater version is probably going to be used primarily for duelling with other Miraculous beings or overcoming blatantly unfair circumstances (where still calling it a "test" is completely farcical).

■Strategy (6/10)

■This is used to craft Miraculously effective plans. This stops you from ever thinking "I could have set such a great trap if I had just had a lead on where my enemies were going", or "I could really use a magic anti-undead gem...but those do not exist", or "I should have made a contingency plan for such an enemy". Imagine this as memetic Batman preparation.

■Lesser Strategy can only be used when reacting to someone shaking up the status quo or upon suddenly seeing a major opportunity to plausibly (i.e. you can bullshit a justification) for you to do the same. For instance, suppose your Technique is "magic" and someone has placed a death curse on your loved one. You can come up with a spell to transfer the effect to a dummy "soul stone" that can "die" in their place. Your Strategy will ensure that such a spell and stone are suddenly on hand when the time comes (even when they should not or even could not), as well as the basic form of the plan works out. Simply describe (possibly retroactively) the steps taken.

■Greater Strategy forgoes the "reactive" requirement of its Lesser version and allows you to proactively designate an objective based on a deep literal or metaphysical "wound", then craft wide reaching longterm plans related to it. You are the only one who needs to actually see the connection between the wound and your objective as meaningful. Progress is guaranteed to be made (outside of extremely powerful counter-Miracles, especially other Planning ones), though these plans tend to unfold slowly.

■Casting Rite (7/11)

■The Lesser Casting Rite is a ritual in which you Miraculously craft thematically appropriate "minions" based on your Technique. This could be something like a shop owner to employ you or an evil crystal congealed from your own aura that will shift your exhaustion to whoever you give it to. Cast "minions" are able to perform mundane (i.e. Prosaic) actions, have the power to manipulate emotions, and can enhance their abilities with miraculous energy. You can give them new powers at the expense of taking on more Stilling. Finally, you can dump your physical or Miraculous exhaustion (e.g. Stilling) into them, and they can in turn dump it onto someone else. Any leftover exhaustion "stored" in them when you reclaim them—either by unmaking them or freeing them of your direct control (albeit they remain largely loyal)—goes to you.

■Instead of supporting actors, the Greater Casting Rite allows you to craft large scale semi-permanent world features based on your Technique. These are also protected against hostile Miracles and can even sap or restore Stilling (or whatever Cost they have) from people who enter. This can be used to create a gigantic city-spanning Hero Association complex that was totally always an institution in town, or a time-travelling pocket dimension that is bigger on the inside, or a labyrinth of twisted space to imprison supervillains, or a gigantic tunnel that connects opposite ends of the world together. In time, you could pull an entire setting into operating under the logic of your Technique (e.g. for some reason, everything in the future is settled with card games on motorcycles).

■Misdirection (8/12)

■Lesser Misdirection is the power to conceal something or divert attention to something else. You might wish to hide the Statue of Liberty, or your IP address, or even some extremely obvious idea. This Miracle work on them all the same. Be creative, as this power can accomplish some truly amazing things. You should be able to describe what you did (however nonsensical it is), but this is just for flavour as the actual mechanics can never in themselves be used to make the Misdirection fail. While the effect is sustained, you might hide a house by painting it a "colour people cannot see", or divert suspicion from yourself to some shadowy alter ego you just made up, or convince the entire world that all the stars have gone out, or use raw charisma to prevent a crowd of skilled detectives from realizing the gaping hole in your story. This can be selective, allowing you to choose what is hidden to whom.

■Greater Misdirection does not conceal a thing, but rather forces the world itself to perceive what you will it. While you are sustaining this effect, anything that contradicts your own constructed truth will fold like an illusion or brief hallucination. Be careful though, as either the old reality could reassert itself after you lift the effect or your new reality might permanently supplant it. With experience you will be better at it, but in the beginning your new truth will only sometimes stick around in the long term after you stop maintaining the Miracle. Either way, you can always just rescind it to return things to what they once were.