Essence ofTempering

This Essence, when drunk, has no particularly noticeable taste, but nonetheless provides sensation - it is both spicy and painfully sharp, like you've swallowed stinging nettles. Yet, somehow, as you drink, you find it only becomes easier and easier to bear.

• By drinking this Essence, you experience a process of transcendental struggle, suffering, and triumph. The experience itself is never exactly the same for two drinkers, as it is tailored to their most fundamental nature and personality. Despite the hardship of it, however, it is just such the kind of struggle to buoy your spirit rather than shatter it, imbuing a strange form of enlightenment that will never leave you.

• Your drive has become a thing beyond legendary. To call it "willpower" or "discipline" does it a disservice. There is a core at your being that, in spite of anything you face, will not, cannot break. Simply supernaturally manipulating your emotions or personality are not enough to turn you from your purpose, and any mental suffering or trauma you experience from this point on will only cause you to arise yet stronger. You would remain unshattered in tortures beyond the reckoning of man that sufficed to break those whose will is infinite. You are even capable of resisting mundane biases and subliminal messaging, such that even "natural" influences like supernatural charisma and beauty will not be enough to move you should you not allow it. And yet, this willpower is not simple stubbornness; your actual reasoning is unaffected, so you may change your mind if there is reasoning that actually makes sense to you and your principles.

• As an extension of this principle, you now have that strange, indescribable quality that allows somebody to simply rise above their circumstances. It's not exactly power, nor talent nor luck nor fate. But when the chips are down and all others with your abilities and circumstances would fail, you excel. This doesn't necessarily guarantee victory or even a hope of it, but nonetheless you will often scrape by against all odds. Whether you're facing a god to ascend as a Campione, fighting an enemy that has perfectly copied all your powers, or adventuring in Orario against that which even the heavens do not believe you should be able to defeat, you are just built different. You are, in fact, that guy.

• These abilities may never be truly lost, and due to their nature, cannot be easily duplicated. This is because they are not truly "abilities" so much as they are a core facet of who you are now. Even stripped, somehow, of all Essences and reduced to mundanity, you will retain what you learned and became. To strip you of that would require either destroying you, or changing you so utterly that the difference is meaningless. And, even then, your aggressor would find themselves swiftly regretting it as you remember these lessons the moment you are faced with struggle again.

• Similarly, these abilities are recognized as truly a part of your worth for all such mystical purposes. Gazing truly into the depths of your soul will show that this is who you really are, that none could rightly call it fake, or your victories undeserved.