Shakkai (ritual)

"The cost of immortality is high. To live this long, I have sacrificed all ability to feel. Touch, taste, smell, color, emotion. I have not experienced these in centuries...I still remember the feel of sunlight on my skin. The scent of favored foods. The color of my first love's eyes. To experience those simple pleasures again would be worth anything."

-, a product of a successful Shakkai, recounts the experience to the ,

The Shakkai, from an ancient word of unknown meaning,  was a  that purportedly granted an  to those who successfully brewed an  compound of sufficient quality. It was considered the  of, requiring a lifetime of study and concerted research to successfully implement. Due to its difficulty and low success rate, it was primarily studied as an academic thought exercise for burgeoning alchemists, pursued only by the most powerful or delusional of Sith practitioners.

Composition
Successfully implemented, the ritual provided the subject with an indefinite lifespan, in effect turning off the individual's body clock permanently. Thus, the ritual could not necessary provide eternal youth per se, only preserve the subject at the age at which the ritual was first successfully performed. It was also incapable of granting true, as it only prevented aging and decay and did nothing to preserve the subject's health or protect against outside threats to the individual's physical well-being. Genetic ailments, plague, and disease could still negatively affect successful test subjects.

The ritual required the Force-aided brewing of a magical potion of a sickly green consistency that was transmitted to subjects via a series of IV cables. Surrendering themselves to the, subjects' bloodstreams and cellular substructure were bathed in several vats' worth of potion for an extended period of time, permitting the elixir to completely permeate the individuals' genetic profiles at a molecular level. Those subjects who survived the painful affair were rendered immortal, but paid a heavy price for such a gift.

Effects
Though granted an indefinite lifespan, the subjects of a successful Shakkai existed in a state of constant physical pain and suffering that never fully abated. Over time, this pain gradually subsided to a dull ache as the individual lost all sense of feeling, taste, touch, and smell, becoming numb to all but the most intense emotions and desires and largely detached from physical reality. These individuals contracted a form of artificial as a result of the procedure, perceiving their surroundings as little more than shadows and shades of monochrome gray. Over time, all remaining sight and hearing left to the subject was lost, rendering the individual completely senseless and indefinitely trapped within his or her own body.

Practitioners familiar with advanced Force abilities like, , and other such powers were able to circumvent and overcome some of these difficulties to a degree. However, as these abilities were limited and capable of only providing a blurry, distant, and vague picture of the subject's surroundings, they were never fully capable of replicating the richness of the natural world and were considered a poor substitute for true sense perception. In seeking to overcome the long-term physical limitations of the ritual, some subjects of even went so far as to embrace their species's genetic predisposition towards Bloodlust in an effort to temporarily dull their body's chronic  and feel some semblance of emotion.

Successful implementations
The, , was one of the few to successfully implement the Shakkai, though his implementation deviated from suggested conventional approaches and made use of experience acquired from his. The Emperor's unique Shakkai approach was most notably used to make, , immortal, and it was further theorized that the ritual was performed on multiple Sith servants of the  prior to the.

Behind the scenes
The author based the Shakkai in large part on nameless immortality ritual mentioned in the  "Hero of Tython" storyline of , with additional inspiration drawn from Gnost-Dural's Force Leprosy article. The word shakkai was selected due to its inclusion in the author's copy of  and its lack of any defined meaning. A reference to the Bloodlust article published here on Star Wars Fanon was included with permission from its author.