Anima

Another way to improve your character is through anima. There are two types of anima: anima rage, which affects offensive stats; and anima shelter, which affects defensive stats.

Obtaining Your Anima

Rage: After entering the 5th floor of Hell Road, you will receive a token that you can use to buy your anima rage at Aryshi's shop on the airship. Be careful when purchasing as there are two to choose from. Choose the one that supports your character's main skills.

Shelter: This used to be obtained after successfully stopping the round 5 boss of War of the Ancients, but that is no longer the case. Now it is obtained during the main quest line. When you think it should be available to you, just go to Wine Barrel Village and talk to Obiazulu.
You have to complete the whole Polar Borderland main questline. They will occasionally say "Must be level - to complete". Once you finish the one that says you must be level 55 to complete (kill a couple sets of lizards, then sharks, then alligators, then nagas), you will be sent to Obiazulu who will send you to Hugh Sutherland. You will get an achievement saying that you complete the Polar Borderlands quests, then the guide quest scroll will appear and flash. Open it to find the Anima: Shelter quest. HERE is a complete walkthrough of this quest - it is looooooooooooooong!

Both of these are equipped by right clicking them. They fit into sockets in your Character menu (C menu). You can open the anima menus by clicking on the arrows next to them.

Leveling Your Anima

Once you get your anima, you will want to level it. If you open the anima menu, you will see an empty box. Underneath, it will say what you can put in it to level your anima. Anima charms are taken at all levels of the anima, but gear level accepted changes as the anima level gets higher.

You can obtain charms from completing the Daily Challenge (which also gives you great exp, transmutation scrolls, and champ points, so why not?). You can also get the charms by turning in WotA tokens to the bruten npc that lets you manual into WotA, or by buying the Ancestor Blessing boxes with wargod pts from Klass or the WotA npc.

Training Your Anima

Every day you can get 10 free anima training points for each anima from an npc next to the banker in the Union Hall. You can either confirm the tries that level a particular element on the anima, or you can confirm the ones that give you an overall positive training pts added. I prefer to do the overall positive, since once the anima reaches a certain number of training pts, you open a bonus skill!

If you find yourself with a lot of extra soul gold, it would be worth it to invest some in the additional trainings per day when you are having a lucky streak.

Evolving Your Anima

Once your anima reaches a certain level, it will need to be evolved. In the box that you normally put the things to your feed the anima (gear and charms) an image will appear showing you the item that the anima needs to evolve and open for more leveling.

Rage evolution items: These can only be bought from Aryshi's Mirage shop on the airship. They are kind of complicated to obtain. Every floor you complete in HR earns you ash that you can turn in for items that you can use to buy the evolution items. The lower level token items can be traded for higher level ones, so none need to go to waste. You collect these items from Aryshi's Mirage's quests that ask if you would like to exchange your ash. You can choose which ash to collect and which ash to exchange which is nice. Aryshi will hang onto your ash for as long as you like, so no need to collect each week if you are short on space.

Shelter evolution items: These can be bought by beating the bosses and trading WotA tokens at the WotA entrance npc; or, you can trade war god points to an npc in the Heroes Hall (just at the bottom of the stairs that Hugh Sutherland stands on). I would save your war god pts until after the first 4 evolutions since those are easy to get via WotA (you just need to beat each boss and turn in enough tokens to the WotA entrance npc - and there are enough groups that can get you past round 20). Round 25 is insane, so you will want to use your war god for that one.

When you evolve your anima, it will chose a random element to open next UNLESS you also pay to secure the next element. I never paid. But I did try to influence it by selecting the one I would like from the dropdown, before telling the anima to evolve. Surprisingly, it worked most times!