A Beginner’s Guide to Drucraft #43:  Life Essentia

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.