Essence ofGetting to the Point

By imbibing this essence, you gain the following:

• In any process where completion is dependent on a person's input, you can force it to spontaneously complete to whatever standard it would have achieved otherwise. The process will effectively just "skip" to its end state instead of merely going through the steps in super speed, both internally and from the perspective of an outside observer.

• If you are casting a spell that would normally take several seconds, you may instead allow it to fire off immediately. Even if the spell's limiting factor is out of the caster's control (it necessarily takes that long to gather that much mana from the surrounding atmosphere), so long as a person is also an active participant in the process then it will still resolve instantly all the same.

• The same amount of resources are expended in the sped up process. If you used this on a factory, the inputs might spontaneously disappear while the finished products popped into existence on the other end. If applied to the firing of a gun, you could achieve absurd rate of fire, but only for as long as your ammunition lasts. Now, you could also use this smartly by applying it to the acquisition of more ammunition, but only if you already know a definite process for resupplying (you cannot just say "well, I would probably eventually find more if I looked everywhere").

• This can be a bit disorienting if applied to other people, especially if you are speeding up a creative process. Are you a fan of web comic that released weekly, but cannot wait? You can make the next dozen (or hundred, or thousand) chapters appear right now...though the author may or may not be be a bit hazy on how the time was spent. They might intellectually recall the experience of doing the work (it is just patterns stored in their brain, after all) and it is certainly their work, but it might feel subtly off to them.

• While it might be possible to "game" this Essence by putting a normally superfluous person in a process, this still has its limits. For instance, you cannot make the days go faster, at least not in a world where people (or even civilizations collectively) could not meaningfully impact the that cycle as a "participant" rather than simply being subject to it.