Essence of thePeasant

You gain a set of abilities designed to make the most idealized image of a peasant's life actually possible.

• You are extremely resistant to the passage of time. This slows aging, the worsening of your mental state, and the decay of skills, memories, and abilities, allowing you to comfortably live for several centuries, fading only gently. Should you ever find a drive, some reason you deeply need capabilities you once had but have since lost, the weight of years will rapidly slide off of you, restoring everything lost to the passage of time and potentially even qualities lost to other events, up to and including limbs lost to accidents. This recovery is truly permanent, can occur any number of times given the necessary circumstances, and has the potential to extend your lifespan indefinitely.

• You are hardy, capable of subsisting on nothing but a small amount of grain and a cup of water each day for years with no ill effects. This extends in the other direction, allowing you to safely enjoy any amount of food and drink without fear of running out of room, putting on unwanted weight, or succumbing to alcohol poisoning. When you wake up, even after a half-hour's nap, you do so invigorated, ready for a hard day's work if that is what must be done, and you can drop into a deep slumber on command. Injuries fade more quickly, even the most severe bruises vanishing overnight, and any injury short of the outright removal of a body part will eventually heal completely, leaving behind nothing worse than wholly-cosmetic scarring. While you are only somewhat more resistant to poison, most diseases will simply fail to touch you, and you are guaranteed a full recovery from any ailment that you can survive for at least a week.

• Power flows from you into any plants and animals you tend, invigorating them and fueling their growth. Any farm you work at is next to immune to blight and infestation, and you can grow crops in infertile, bone-dry soil as easily as another person could farm in the lushest black earth. Animals are healthier, happier, more fertile, more productive, live longer, and grow and mature more quickly, and you can easily and effectively exert whatever control you have over them. A few soft instructions are more effective than a fence at keeping your beasts from wandering away. With half an acre of land, you could produce enough food to enjoy seven large meals a day.

• Making good food and fine drink comes easily to you. Given some understanding of the recipe, you could cook the fanciest meal in a single pan over a campfire, or distill fine liquor from raw produce with nothing but a single unlidded pot. The speed at which you can cook is tied to your needs- should you find it necessary, you could prepare a veritable feast for dozens of friends in the space of an hour. You find it easy to replace one ingredient with another, to the extent of flawlessly recreating meaty dishes with nothing but vegetables, and can stretch supplies to feed many times as many people as should be possible, at the cost of producing slightly simpler meals.

• Anything you make by hand is infused with a binding of preservation. This is not limited to ordinary handicrafts, and includes structures you build, foods you grow and harvest, and landscaping you perform. That which is influenced by this is tied to you- so long as you are hale and hearty, they will fail to decay or dirty at all, no matter how vigorously they are used or what conditions they experience. As you grow closer to death, this protection will weaken, not so much allowing items to degrade more quickly as allowing them to degrade to a worse state before the protection kicks in: if you are sick, your bread might get stale, but it will still never rot. Should you be restored to a more vital and youthful state by any means, you may find these things also recovering, anything not wholly destroyed returning to its greatest past state. Active attempts at inflicting damage and destruction, by intelligent beings and by beasts individually stronger than you, may pierce this preservative influence.

• You understand how to craft a vast assortment of simple, practical goods from scratch. You could easily locate a deposit of iron, knock some loose, build a simple furnace, refine the ore with charcoal you similarly made yourself, and forge a set of flawless steel tools. Your knowledge encompasses carpentry, masonry, ceramics, tailoring, blacksmithing, and more, and all the necessary techniques and tidbits to get the materials and tools you would need for these tasks. To a small degree, your efforts in these areas go a bit more easily- as you live and work, you will accumulate small amounts of simple materials otherwise unavailable, pebbles of iron ore appearing in gravel paths, and you can get away with using simpler tools and equipment than you perhaps should.

• The place you consider home is protected from untargeted harm. Wild beasts are nudged to avoid harmful encounters, and storms and other natural disasters are either diverted away or weakened to safe levels. Even if they conquer all the lands around it, invading armies will pass by yours without a second thought. Local authorities are more willing to let you be and treat you fairly, and those who know of you only by reputation are more inclined to think well of you. Those who know of you personally may be able to pierce this protection- an emperor who seeks your death will still be able to send an army after you.

• This power extends to others, branching outwards through bonds of friendship, love, and family. The stronger the bond, the more of this power is carried through it- in the case of a true friend, there will be no noticeable diminishment. No matter how strong the bond, this power spreads slowly, at its longest taking multiple months to reach its full potential. Those who have even the tiniest shred of this power can continue to share it with others. Over years and decades, it can spread quite far, allowing you to bless entire communities.