Essence ofawakening (Warbreaker)

By drinking this essence, you gain the ability to use awakening, a type of magic that lets you animate non living things and dead bodies to make them do your bidding.

• Every living being on the world of nalthis has one breath (a small amount of magical energy that improves their immune system, keeps them cheerful, etc;

• You can temporarily transfer this breath to something else and give it a command, like 'Hold my beer', then the object comes to life and holds your beer, this process drains colour from things in physical contact with you or in your surroundings as a fuel, turning them grey. After the task is completed and you want to take back your beer, you can reclaim your breath from the object you've awakened and it turns back lifeless. You should be in physical contact with an object to awaken it. Awakened items are stronger than they usually are, a shirt can strangle a person to death on it's own and an awakened pants can absorb the impact of your fall from a five story building.

• With time and effort, you can even use colours outside the visible spectrum (like ultra violet light) for awakening.

• Items usually take more than one breath to awaken, so people buy breaths from others usually, you don't have this problem and your body keeps on producing breaths at a rate of 100 breaths per day, this rate of production can be improved with time and practice. The breaths you produce each day get stored inside your body until you use them, so you can wait till you have a sufficient amount and do a wide scale awakening. The more breaths you have the brighter colours around you appear, you may choose to spread this effect for a longer distance depending on the number of breaths you have stored or toggle this off, if you want to stay low profile.

• The number of breaths a item needs to awaken depends on how far removed it is from living things. So a dead body can be awakened with just one breath, clothes, cloth dolls, ropes, bones etc take anywhere between few tens to few hundred breaths, whereas things like stone, metals, etc; take anywhere between thousand to few thousands. One way to skip this issue is encase human skeletons in stone or metal and awaken them like golems or terracotta soldiers, these take less breaths than a statue normally takes. (Say 10 instead of the usual 1000).

• Commands given to an object must be precise and should be visualised correctly, if not, the target accepts the breaths, but wouldn't awaken. Commands should be spoken in a crisp and clear voice without mumbling or slurring, the words used in a command must be clear and unambiguous.

• Storing more breaths inside yourself gives you a variety of benefits. This process is called heightening and is divided into ten stages.

• First heightening (store 50 breaths) - gives aura recognition (the ability to sense life around you and how healthy the person in question is and the amount of breaths they hold (in your case, it's a rough guess of how powerful the person is).

• Second heightening (store 200 breaths) - gives perfect pitch.

• Third heightening (600 breaths) - perfect colour recognition (helps you determine exact shades and might help you determine the best clothes for yourself and friends).

• Fourth heightening (1000 breaths) - perfect life sense (maximizes the ability to sense life around you, letting you know when others are observing you, it lets you sense plants, spirits, ghosts, etc; even when they are trying to stay invisible (eg: servants from fate/stay night).

• Fifth heightening (2000 breaths) - grants agelessness, your resistance to aging and diseases reaches its maximum strength, you are immune to most toxins and physical ailments.

• Sixth heightening (3500 breaths) - grants instinctive awakening, you immediately understand and use basic commands without training and can learn and discover more difficult commands easily.

• Seventh heightening (5000 breaths) - lets you know if an object is magical or has been improved with magic, it even lets you know when magic has been used in your surroundings and you can track the person who used the specific magic by following the aura of magic connecting the spell to the person.

• Eight heightening (10,000 breaths) - lets you override the commands of others and take control of the awakened object. This can let you steal magical objects that are attuned to others, normally this power leaves you exhausted, but you can train to overcome it.

• Ninth heightening (20,000 breaths) - grants greater awakening, the ability to awaken metals and stone to create sentient objects with a rudimentary, child like intellect. Also grants you audible command, the ability to awaken things that you aren't touching, but are within the range of your voice.

• Tenth heightening (50,000 breaths) - grants you perfect invocation, the ability to drain colour completely from objects without any wastage and turning them white instead of grey, you also gain the ability to bend light around white objects like a prism, these two abilities combined can create stunning sights when you awaken something. Objects you have drained to white can't be drained again.

• Additionally you also get the ability to issue commands mentally.

• You can choose to be a returned, people who died and came back to life, they are powered by a divine breath, divine breath is something very powerful, its usually given by the goddess in charge of nalthis (the world where warbreaker takes place), divine breath gives you abilities as if you have the fifth heightening and your body is at the peak of its fitness, you can't grow weak due to lack of exercise and don't need food or water to stay alive, you have to sleep for a short while everyday (you can choose to ignore this). You have super human physical characteristics and can move fast enough to catch trained fighters offguard even if they are aware of your presence. Returned spend one normal breath a week to stay alive, and can change their appearance at will, usually they look like seven feet tall gods and goddesses with glowing bodies that appear perfect and godlike (this appearance is based on how people in a locality view gods, so you may look like an Adonis or Aphrodite or an old man with a beard), you have the ability to sense what an artist is trying to convey in an art and the feelings the artist has when creating the art in question.

• You can spend your divine breath to heal a person of any disease or regrow lost body parts, usually it leaves the returned dead, but in your case, once every month, you can use a part of your divine breath to heal anyone, your divine breath will increase back to its previous amount after some time, usually half a day.

• If you are a returned, when you have kids, they have an easier time learning awakening and they also inherit an ability called royal locks that let them change their hair colour based on their feelings, they also recieve a reduced version of your shapeshifting power that lets them change their body size or facial features slightly, they also gain ten breaths everyday, this amount can be improved with training.

• Irrespective of whether you are a returned or not, you can grant people the knowledge and ability to awaken, they produce ten breaths everyday. This amount can't be increased with training.

• Lifeforce manipulation techniques like ki manipulation can increase the amount of breaths you or your followers produce. (This is a suggestion based on my understanding of breaths, this isn't canon to the story).