Complications In The Lord Ruler's Compounding

[Shattered]

How exactly did the Lord Ruler's compounding system work? I didn't fully understand it after reading Sazed's explanation at the end of The Final Empire. Supposedly his atium compounding was stopped after Vin removed his bracers, but doesn't he have to burn Feruchemically charged atium for it to work? Wouldn't that mean he would be perfectly fine without the bracers, so long as he didn't run out of his metal reserve? If that is the case, do the bracers only serve the function of storing age, then being filed into ingestible metal to be burned? Perhaps I just don't understand the logistics of compounding well enough. Please, relieve me of my ignorance.

[Observer]

You store age in atium, then eat it and burn it. This will pretty much take you back to being monocellular for as long as you're burning it, which is useless to you. Furthermore, even if it was useful, atium dissolves in the stomach really fast. So you shove all that extra youth into an atium mind, and slowly space it out to keep yourself at a useful age for a long time. Losing the atium minds cut TLR off from his youth, and he snapped back to being a sack of dust pretty fast. He wasn't burning charged atium because that would be impractical. 

[Moogle]

What happens is that when you burn a Feruchemically charged piece of metal, you get a super-boost of the attribute. So, burn a goldmind, and you can heal from the worst of wounds. Burn some age stored in atium, and you become a child temporarily.

 

It's just that quite often you don't want this superboost. Allomancy is really quite unsubtle. So what you do is store this superboost of this attribute in another metalmind while you burn the other metalmind. You can store a huge amount of attributes this way in a short amount of time.

 

Storing/tapping age is not permanent in Feruchemy. TLR still aged, he was a thousand years old. He had to constantly tap from his bracers to survive.

 

Brandon explains compounding mechanics in detail here and here.

[natc]

Also means that with youth/age, a unusual case of a feruchemical attribute that naturally decreases over time, that the older you are the more you need to stay young, so there should be a steady increase of the atium he needed to compound to stay immortal. Eventually he might even need to be swallowing continuously. Would take ages to get there though.

. . . unless spiking yourself with more atium allomancy gives better compounding returns as well as the expected stronger precognition? Huh. Never thought about that.

WARNING

Now for a wall of text, an extended example involving currency exchange and chocolate, so I can copy paste later to other people for the lulz. If TL;DR ignore me.

As they say above though. The strength of allomancy is that it is essentially on demand magic with no expense to your physical self (except your wallet, of course. Metal ain't free), but you have to use all of it right then and there in relatively short and bursts at fixed levels. For example, swallow steel. When you burn it you can push metal away until you stop burning. You can burn slightly faster to push harder, but not by much unless you use duralumin or nicrosil to force it to burn up instantly. So, say you give Preservation 8 bucks, and he, say, gives you two bars chocolate (Hong Kong dollars, because I am familiar with that. It's about 8:1 or so with america). For the sake of the argument he is actually giving you more than you payed for because he is nice. You must eat it now or it melts.

Feruchemy can stockpile as much magic as you want in advance and either use it slowly when you want to release it or just let it explode all at once, but at expense to yourself. Back to steel, you have a block of steel in your hand, which allows you to make yourself slow-moving to a variable percentage for a variable amount of time. You can then get back that power later when you are normal to go faster. It's like a bank account. You can put 100 US dollars of your lunch money into the account over 100 days, being one dollar short each day for lunch. You realize you need to spend that amount. You can have 100 more dollars to spend on one day, 50 per day over two days, 25 per day over four, 50 cents per day over 200 days, etc. Pretend that you are a shopaholic who spends money on hand immediately. 0% interest. Bad deal, but eh.

Burning a metalmind causes your allomancy to instead generate extra of a feruchemical attribute temporarily instead of allomantic powers through some loophole inherent to the system, so instead of repelling metal at will (for free, as it is extra power from Preservation) you will find yourself super fast without having to be slow first. The problem is you are forced to be super fast right then, not slightly fast for twice as long or ultra fast for short moments, and it will run out. Conveniently the powers you now get are powers you can also remove from yourself to store in metalminds to use later feruchemically. The effect of magic acting on your body is temporary, but magic stored in your metalminds unused stay there forever until used.

Right now, you are giving 8 bucks to Preservation, and then 1 US dollar as an example to tell him that you want that instead of chocolate. Still nice, he returns your sample dollar to you and gives you 2 dollars more, twice of what you actually paid as usual. You put one dollar in the bank, exchange the second for 8 HK dollars from a more sensible guy, and bring the last US dollar as your new example for Preservation. Repeat. You are earning one dollar for your account each time from Preservation's kindness (cremhole), instead of paying out of your wallet to put cash in your account. In 100 days you have 100 dollars in your account, like with feruchemy, but unlike before Preservation is paying for you, so you are never one dollar short in your lunch money. You couldn't keep it on your person because you'll spend it all that day and waste it, but you couldn't buy chocolate at profit from Preservation either as it melts and banks don't store chocolate. Now you don't have to be frugal and save, yet still have 100 bucks in your account to withdraw as you need! Unfortunately Preservation doesn't accept US dollars for chocolate for some reason, but still profit is profit. Preservation is a trillionaire and chocolate business is booming, so he won't mind for a long while. You can step it up with this backlog and mooch off of Preservation as fast as you want too, of course.

Back with steel, you are asking Preservation to give you speed, using a steelmind as an example instead of just steel (which gives you steelpushing). You then bank it in your other steelmind as if it was yours and use it as if it was yours later. Or stockpile ad infinitum. Works for healing, youth, senses, strength . . .

Edited February 27, 2015 by natc