Essence of theFlood

This essence comes in a hardlight container and tastes like sand.

• You are the progenitor of a new type of Flood. This does not alter the appearance of your body.

  • Your body has become a “combat form.” It is slightly tougher, stronger, and faster as a baseline. When not forced beyond baseline, it is capable of regenerating completely and cleanly. It can produce incredible power and shrug off wounds when pushed past baseline, but this will quickly cripple it and force it into an immobile “carrier form.”

  • All your bodies are capable of producing millimeter-long spores. These can either be airborne or passed through combat. These spores will infect other living creatures and turn them into more combat forms. They are immune to any infection or corruption that might try to uno reverso them.

  • Combat forms do not need to grow melee weapons, hardened carapaces, or any other body changes. If required, doing so without putting strain on the body would take several hours.

  • Any combat or pure forms that are of your Flood are as much your body as your original, linked together by your hivemind. Your hivemind works at any range, with signal lag equal to that found within your brains. Your hivemind is capable of splitting and merging seamlessly, allowing for multitasking.

  • Your hivemind is not solely limited by the neural tissue available to you - you also have a reserve that exists independent of any mass, and your Flood cell’s nature as both muscle and nerve gives you some mental capacity for any mass you have.

  • Once your infection reaches the brain, it is irreversible. Even the first growth of a Flood cell is almost impossible to reverse.

  • You may create “pure forms,” creatures made entirely from Flood cells and designed from the ground up for certain purposes. Pure forms exhibit a much higher baseline compared to combat forms, and can be designed to switch between certain forms to react to the situation. They can range from elite combatants to the keyminds, an immobile form designed to support massive amounts of highly complex neural tissue.

• Your memories are stored within a Domain-like construct.

  • This includes any knowledge or skills from those that you have infected.

  • It also includes a copy of all Precursor knowledge, as well as any knowledge added to the Domain by other races or assimilated by the canon Flood.

  • This includes knowledge of topics like usage of neural physics, pure forms, and other topics that may be relevant to you soon.

  • This Domain is capable of self-repairing, recovering any data lost to damage or time.

  • Your Domain collects information from the past of any world you are in. The inverse of the complexity of the information and the number of dead people who knew it are the factors that determine the rate at which information is collected.

• You are capable of operating as a neural physics effector. The power you can exert depends on the mental capacity of your hivemind. With just your original brain and body, you can perform tiny feats with some time in complete concentration. The more powerful your hivemind, the more powerful an effect you can produce, and the faster you can produce any given level of effect, with no upper limit. Some of the things you do include:

  • Slipspace manipulation, though depending on how you perform causality compensation may create vulnerabilities. Particle Reconciliation is more vulnerable to not functioning in the first place, but the multiversal-phase-based system the Precursors use does make you rather vulnerable when exiting slipspace.

  • Destruction, similar to the Halo Array’s effect. This was demonstrated by Abbadon, guardian of the Domain.

  • Filament manifestation, which allows for the creation of non-material “materials.” The star-roads are the most common example of this.

  • Telepathy, the reading or insertion of information into minds and system. This can be used on organic creatures, AIs, and computers. Systems that store their information in larger forms can be read but not written to.

• Optionally, when you drink this, you may be transported to any location and time in the Halo universe.