But I just want to point out, Running out of anam is the issue we run into the most consistently and this buff will kick in right away which will help us for the duration of this trip.
[X] You become far more proficient at storing anam in your core, effectively increasing it's capacity. (Kong Zhi's anam threshold grows by 10%)
Because in the end, what usually makes us vulnerable is running dry, this gives us a fair bit extra in the long run.
I'd argue that running out of anam is normally a problem because we can only get anam from particular sources, like Natural Wonders, and it's not always possible to take time to visit them and top up. Though this is
less of a problem while at the Delving Heart, it's much more serious of a problem while travelling, which I expect we'll be doing more of in the future, given our career path. Being able to cycle anywhere makes being out of anam a problem that we can
always do something about, as opposed to being the kind of problem that can only be addressed by spending tons of money.
[x] You learn to better utilize trapped anam and can draw from it as you would like. (Kong Zhi can cycle anam from materials as if they were Natural Wonders. Each point drawn from the material weakens it a corresponding amount, and the material is destroyed when it's score reaches 0.)
It opens up a lot more Anam aspects for us to cycle from. You never know when you'll need 5 Hunger Anam or a quick hit of Star anam. Cycling different types of Anam would also help further KZ's cultivation knowledge and could help with insights.
"Spend resources to get item X that provides anam of Y aspect" is already something we can do; pills exist, and I'd expect drawing anam directly from a material directly to be strictly worse than having that material refined into a pill which we then take. If we have mats and want anam, we could theoretically just sell the mats and buy pills.... except for the part where it seems like turning down an opportunity for future shinies. We already don't sell our mats, since there are better things we could be doing with them, so I'm inclined to think that we wouldn't get much use out of the material cycling perk.
That said, becoming able to cycle anywhere, probably get many of the same benefits from exposure to different types of anam, and once we've spent a bit of time figuring out which environments tend to produce which sorts of anam, it's likely going to be possible to get at many specific types of anam from non-Wonder sources.
Consensus seems to be for the nat 1s thing though, which is understandable.