By a Thread V0

By a Thread CYOA

---

Intro:

Your existence has been struck a glancing blow by the fading shockwave of some mighty being’s attack.
Fortunately, not only have you survived, you have gleaned a measure of deep metaphysical understanding from your exposure to the attack.
How were you harmed, and what did you learn?

Start with 6 Points.

---

Severing:
At least one aspect of yourself was damaged by the attack.
With what it taught you, you may be able to replicate the ‘damage’ on other aspects of yourself.
Take at least one option.
First pick from this section is FREE.

Physical
Costs 1 Point.
Your physical capacity to generate energy and regain stamina has been split off from your physical capacity to use energy and expend stamina.
100 [Threads of Stamina] remain to link these together, drawing from your physical resources to generate and store [Stamina] and use it to sustain your body.
Your supply of physical resources grows as your physical fitness and potential to consume and digest food increase, though you do not need to eat, drink, or even breathe to generate your physical resources.
[Stamina] can be used wherever you would previously use physical stamina, nutrients, water, or air.
100 [Threads of Stamina] can refine enough [Stamina] to sustain your body indefinitely, and their reserves, which take about an hour to refill while also sustaining you, are enough to let you sprint or do something similarly intensive for over ten minutes.

Mental
Costs 1 Point.
Your mental capacity to produce thought has been split off from your mental capacity to think.
100 [Threads of Focus] remain to link these together, drawing from your mental resources to generate and store [Focus] and use it to sustain mental function.
Your supply of mental resources grows as you learn, undergo new experiences, and improve your mind.
[Focus] can be applied to let you think, dredge up memories, and maintain consciousness- sleep is only necessary if you wish to temporarily decrease your use of Focus.
100 [Threads of Focus] can refine enough [Focus] to sustain your mind at a mostly-awake level indefinitely, and their reserves, which take about fifteen minutes of sleep to refill, are enough to let you maintain peak, hyper-focused mental function for half an hour.

Spiritual
Costs 1 Point.
Your spirit has been severed from that which maintains and produces it.
100 [Threads of Spirit] remain to link these together, drawing from your spiritual resources to generate and store [Spirit] and use to to sustain your soul and related functions.
Your supply of spiritual resources grows as time passes, as you forge interpersonal connections, and as you improve your willpower, determination, or faith in any concept.
[Spirit] can be applied to sustain and clean your soul and beliefs, removing stress and shoring up your sense of self directly.
100 [Threads of Spirit] can refine enough [Spirit] to ensure you never completely give up or conform to your environment, and their reserves, which take about an hour to refill while also sustaining you, are enough to let you withstand even horrific torture for a few solid minutes.

---

Expression:
There is more to these resources and threads than just sustaining you.
How much did you figure out?
Take any number of options.

Overload
FREE
You are able to expend additional resources to increase the potency of any effect.
This has steadily-diminishing efficiency; increasing an effect from 10x to 11x power is eleven times as expensive as producing the core effect.
If you can afford to expend ten times as much [Stamina], you can quadruple your rate of healing.

Resist
Costs 1 Point.
You are able to expend resources to protect yourself from harm.
[Spirit] may allow you to deflect a ghost’s blade or to prevent yourself from accumulating corruption, while with enough [Stamina] to burn you can cause a bullet to just bounce off.
This is always an active effect; maintaining your bulletproof skin is a constant exertion.

Rise
Costs 1 Point.
You are able to expend resources to temporarily enhance yourself in any way that suits the resource.
Applying your [Stamina] in a certain manner, you might find that you can actually regenerate from your damage instead of simply healing.
This is vastly more efficient than Overload, and is capable of a greater variety of effects- increasing intelligence instead of simple mental clarity.

Technique
Costs 1 Point.
You are able to apply resources through the lens of techniques.
Techniques must do something specific, and cannot make use of more than one type of resource- a valid example is a [Focus] technique that accelerates your perception of time, or a [Stamina] technique that instantly heals a wound.
Developing a technique takes time corresponding with its complexity, and they can be improved, such as by being made more efficient, with additional work.
A well-made technique will generally be more efficient and effective than a similar effect produced with Rise or Resist, and is less limited in what it can do.

Binding
Costs 1 Point.
You are able to bind the endpoints of your threads to other subjects.
Though you can only bind your threads to targets near you, there is no limit for how far they can stretch, and so long as at least one end of a thread is linked to you, you can recall it in an instant.
You can apply your resources through these linked subjects as if they were a part of you, and structure the threads such that they produce effects automatically.
With Binding alone, you cannot transfer one living being’s resources to another, though an item can be set to draw resources from its user.

---

Growth:
You’re definitely going to want more than you started with.
What routes of progression have you seen?
Take any number of options.

Weave
FREE
Through a significant expenditure of resources, time, and effort, you can weave new threads.
Expect to take about two hours of work for each thread initially, and to require greater and greater efforts to reduce this crafting time by smaller and smaller amounts.
You are also able to modify your threads through a quick and simple process, taking less than an hour to change them all.
In this manner you can optimize a given thread for storage capacity, refining speed, or even traits like efficiency with a specific technique or application of resources.

Cycle
Costs 1 Point.
By channeling your resources back to their source, you can slowly improve the source.
That is to say, by channeling excess [Stamina] into your body, you can slowly strengthen it (in a manner similar to but not quite so limited as exercise) and increase the amount of physical resources it can generate.
With enough resources, you can improve yourself at a constant, linear rate, but the price for a given degree of improvements scales linearly with the degree of improvement already obtained.

Siphon
Costs 1 Point.
You are capable of drawing resources from others.
An average human can support a thread each of [Stamina], [Focus], and [Spirit] simply from the excess energies they emit, though you can also drain from others directly at some cost to their health and ability to function.
With Binding, you can create items that send resources to you when used, or that draw on the ambient energies of their location.

Externalize
Costs 1 Point.
You can permanently convert a thread to an externalized version.
[Stamina] becomes [Ki], [Focus] becomes [Psi], and [Spirit] becomes [Aura].
They continue to draw upon your physical, mental, or spiritual resources, though they require greater quantities of them and the end product is correspondingly more potent.
Resist, applied with externalized power, produces a more tangible and obvious barrier, which can protect, to a lesser degree, against attacks of different kinds.
Rise, applied with externalized power, enhances you by providing access to simple abilities- clumsy flight, crude telekinesis, diffuse energy blasts, and so on.

Fusion
Costs 1 Point.
You can permanently combine threads, creating a fused version.
[Stamina] and [Focus] becomes [Chakra], [Focus] and [Spirit] becomes [Mana], and [Spirit] and [Stamina] becomes [Chi].
They are capable of anything their composite energies can do(and some more esoteric effects as well), and can be refined from any of the resources that formed them, though they are somewhat less efficient.
With Externalize, they are automatically made more potent(at a proportionately increased requirement in raw resources), and can produce externalized effects.

---

Aftermath:
The attack that so scarred you has similarly wounded reality.
Did you catch sight of it’s trail?
Take one option.

Yes
FREE
Choose a CYOA or setting.
Somewhere in the world is a rift that will activate the CYOA or let you travel to the setting when you pass through it.
You know exactly where this rift is, and are the only person who can sense or interact with it.

No
FREE
Choose a CYOA, and make a build for it.
This CYOA is applied to a random, valid subject somewhere else on Earth.

Actually, reality seems pretty much fine.
FREE
Oh.
That’s nice, then.

---

Notes:

You can eventually develop the options you didn’t take. Expect this to take a very very long time.

---