Benedict Jacka

The fourth of the branches, Life essentia gives drucrafters the ability to affect living biological systems.

Capabilities

Life effects work quite differently to Motion, Matter, or Light.  While Light and Motion effects tend to operate on a straightforward conversion basis (turning essentia into energy or vice versa) and Matter drucraft affects physical properties, Life spells either enhance or inhibit biological systems.  A typical Light spell is something like ‘create a light on X wavelength’.  A typical Life spell is something like ‘strengthen this particular system in this particular living creature in this particular way, which creates about a hundred secondary effects, only a few of which are going to be obvious’.

To do anything useful, a Life sigl has to focus on one bodily system or subsystem to affect.  Some of the more common choices are:

• Circulatory system:  Pumps blood, transporting oxygen/nutrients around the body.  Affects endurance and general body efficiency.
• Muscular system:  Enables movement, affecting strength and speed.
• Nervous system:  Processes sensory information and co-ordinates movement.  Affects general body operation and reaction speed.
• Respiratory system:  Exchanges gases between the air and the blood.
• Immune system:  Defends the body against infection.
• Urinary system:  Eliminates waste and regulates fluid balance.

Simply listing the systems like this, however, makes Life drucraft sound much simpler than it actually is, because every one of the above systems is interdependent with all of the others, and making a change to any one of them will cause knock-on effects (often unpredictable effects) to everything else.  This makes Life drucraft far more complicated in execution than all of the other branches, and potentially much more unpredictable.  Life drucraft research is notoriously difficult, and nasty accidents are common.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The most common way that Life drucraft is used in practice is to create a sigl that picks out one particular bodily system and enhances it.  Effectively this ‘turbocharges’ the system, allowing it to function better or more quickly than it normally could.  Muscles can lift a greater weight, blood can oxygenate more efficiently, nerves can process input faster.  With a properly designed sigl, almost any aspect of a living body can be improved;  to an outside observer, a Life-enhanced drucrafter just seems better than a normal person in every way.

By selectively enhancing elements of the immune, circulatory, and regenerative systems, Life drucraft can be used to treat injuries.  Life spells can’t instantly heal wounds – there’s no way for a body to quickly seal up a tear or re-set a broken bone – but they can make a body repair itself far faster than it could do by itself.  Powered by essentia and guided by a skilled medical drucrafter, a body can heal damage at ten times the speed it would do naturally, and with no lasting consequences.

The key word in that last paragraph, however, is ‘skilled’.  More so than any of the other branches, Life spells require the drucrafter to know what they’re doing.  Enhancing the wrong system, or picking the right system but enhancing it in the wrong way, will make things worse than if the drucrafter had done nothing at all.  As such, skilled medical drucrafters are always in high demand.

Finally, as with most drucraft effects, Life spells can be used in reverse, suppressing or weakening a bodily system instead of boosting it.  In theory this would mean that any Life sigl would have its mirror-image version that harms instead of heals, or debilitates instead of strengthens.  In practice, however, this is rarely done, for the simple reason that medical Life sigls are always in such high demand.  Every Life Well used to make a harmful sigl is one that isn’t being used to make a medical sigl, and given how much people are willing to pay for good health, this is rarely a good deal for the shaper.

Associations

Life essentia is associated with (unsurprisingly) life – vitality, fertility, reproduction, health, and endurance, as well as with rulership and dominion.  Its associated celestial body is Jupiter.

Distribution

The country with the strongest Life Wells is India, though Brazil comes a close second.  The two of them combined account for the majority of global Life sigl production.  Other countries with strong Life resources include Nigeria, Russia, Ghana, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Attunement is a measurement of compatibility between a drucrafter and a sigl.  Higher attunement means a sigl will function better, lower attunement means a sigl will function worse, and below a certain minimum a sigl will not function at all.

Attunement can be measured either as a percentage (between 0% and 100%) or as a ratio (1 to 1, 3 to 1, etc).  These are just different ways of expressing the same thing;  1 to 1 means 50%, 3 to 1 means 75%, and so on.  In both cases, what they’re measuring is what fraction of the sigl’s kernel is made up out of the drucrafter’s personal essentia, and what fraction is made from a different type of essentia (or from nothing at all).

Attunement matters because a sigl’s kernel being made from a drucrafter’s personal essentia is what makes it their sigl, and not someone else’s.  If that fraction of personal essentia drops below a certain level, the sigl won’t work.  The exact point at which that level is crossed is variable and depends on multiple factors, but on average tends to fall somewhere between 20% and 25%.    

For shapers who make their own sigls, attunement is usually irrelevant.  Since they’re the one and only person shaping the sigl, it of course will contain no personal essentia except their own.  As such, it’s easy for a shaper to forget just how big a problem attunement can be for everybody else.

Sharing the Load

Most sigls in the modern day are commercially produced and sold for profit, rather than being used by the shaper who creates them.  This causes an inherent tension in the shaping process.  To create a sigl, a shaper must use their own personal essentia to do so (otherwise, they’d have no way to shape the sigl in the first place) and from the shaper’s point of view, the more of their own essentia that they use, the easier the sigl is to shape.  However, from the point of view of the end user, the ideal is for the sigl to contain as much as possible of their personal essentia, and as little as possible of the shaper’s.  The higher the ratio of the user’s personal essentia to the shaper’s, the more effective the sigl is going to be.

The compromise that most manufacturers have settled upon (at least in the Western world) is a ratio of 3:1, or 75%.  Most reputable sigl providers will guarantee this as a minimum (which means in practice that most manufacturers will try to go as low to this number as possible without quite dipping below it).  Higher-end sigls aimed at the luxury or professional markets may advertise attunement ratios of 4:1 or occasionally even 5:1, though a ratio of 5:1 is considered extremely difficult for a shaper to achieve (and in practice most channellers can’t tell the difference between a 4:1 and a 5:1 sigl anyway).

However, even a sigl with a low attunement ratio results in a finished product which is more than usable . . . as long as it’s a solid sigl.  The real problems start when it isn’t.

Engineered Weakness

One of the more dubious legacies of 20th-century drucraft was the technique of producing ‘threaded’ sigls.  Essentially, threading is a method of reducing the essentia content of a sigl by removing non-essential parts.  This allows for much cheaper sigl production, but at the cost of drastically reduced attunement and lifespan . . . and these reductions are cumulative.

Put all this together, and one can end up with a sigl produced at a 3 to 1 attunement ratio (75%), that is also heavily threaded (reducing the sigl’s effective attunement by half) and which (due to said heavy threading) sublimates orders of magnitude faster than a solid one would.  Such a sigl could be bought new and yet still end up hovering between 20% and 30% attunement after only a couple of years.  This is how one gets the notorious ‘junk sigls’ flooding modern markets, which despite technically having a 3 to 1 attunement ratio, have lifespans of two to three years at most.  For those unfortunate enough to have to rely on such sigls, attunement is less a measure of compatibility and more of a ticking clock that measures how long they have before the sigl will have to be replaced.

‘Affinity’ can mean two things in a drucraft context.  Usually people use it to mean an affinity with one or other of the branches;  the same thing that makes it so much easier for a drucrafter to shape a sigl of one branch, as opposed to another.  However, it can also refer to the drucrafter’s affinity with a country.

Branch affinity and country affinity are similar in theory – they’re both a measurement of a drucrafter’s compatibility with a certain type of essentia – but work quite differently in practice.  Branch affinities are largely inborn, and somewhat unpredictable.  Although they do seem to be weakly inheritable – a drucrafter from a family with a strong Light tradition is statistically more likely to have a Light affinity – the correlation is not perfect, and it’s common for drucrafters to have at least one unusual affinity or disaffinity that seems to have come more or less from nowhere.

By contrast, country affinities are extremely predictable.  If a drucrafter grows up in a region, then they will invariably have a strong affinity for the essentia of that particular place.  This seems to be a natural consequence of the way essentia works;  all living creatures unconsciously take in, assimilate, and release essentia in a constant process.  As part of this, their bodies become accustomed to the quality and idiosyncrasies of the essentia in that particular place.  For the most part, this happens in the background and goes completely unnoticed;  it only becomes relevant when a drucrafter travels somewhere else, and suddenly has to adapt to essentia of a different kind.

Adjusting to a change in local essentia (sometimes referred to as ‘essentia shock’) is not difficult or dangerous, but it is disorienting.  This disorientation has a particularly pronounced effect on drucrafters with strong sensing skills;  the more sensitive they are to changes in background essentia levels, the more they’ll notice the difference.  A drucrafter with terrible sensing, on the other hand, is unlikely to notice much, since they’ll only really register the essentia once their body has assimilated it into personal essentia, by which point most of its unique features will have been overwritten anyway (one of those cases where ignorance is bliss).  In either case, the change usually doesn’t cause serious problems.

However, there is one situation where essentia shock does become a serious problem:  shaping sigls.  A shaper, when creating a sigl, has to manipulate free essentia from the surrounding environment without assimilating it first.  In this case, unfamiliarity with local essentia becomes a massive handicap, and for an unwary shaper is likely to cause a shaping to end in total failure.

The simplest solution to this problem for a prospective shaper to work with a local.  A shaper ‘guide’ can assist with the acclimatisation process, helping the new arrival become accustomed to the differences.  A limiter also largely bypasses the issue, since in this case the limiter’s creator will have done most of the hard work already (though having someone familiar with local conditions will still help).

The slower, though more thorough, option is for a prospective shaper to simply stay in the place long enough to become familiar with it.  However, this can take a long time.  Most manifesters argue that it takes a minimum of six months to a year to become familiar with a really different essentia environment, and mastering it can take considerably longer.

NB:  Though referred to as ‘country’ affinities, these affinities are not dependent on political borders.  For relatively small countries, this doesn’t make much difference, as the distance between two spots within the country will rarely be large enough for the local essentia to vary dramatically.  However, for really big countries, such as China, Russia, or the USA, it’s quite possible for native drucrafters to experience essentia shock just by moving from one end of their home country to the other.