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Losing 5th heightening


King Cole

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Ok, what would happen if you lived for hundreds of years because you reached the fifth heightening, then you lost all your breaths. Im pretty sure you would just begin to age normallly but is there a chance your years catch up to you?

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I don't believe so. The 5th Heightening doesn't work like other methods of extended life we've seen. 

Others trick your body into believing it's younger than it is, and when the effects end, the body reverts because your spirit knows you should have been aging the whole time. 

Breath though, when you reach that heightening doesn't trick your body. It literally stops the aging. Your spirit doesn't believe you should be older, because you are. You just physically stop aging until the breath leaves and aging continues. 

If losing the fifth heightening caused instant aging, we definitely would have heard about it. 

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Vasher is hundreds of years old, yet he goes without the fifth heightening on several occasions. True, he has his Divine Breath but since it is suppressed it appears he gets none of the benefits that come with it.

This would point to heightening immortality being more like a freeze-frame,

(mistborn spoilers)

Spoiler

unlike immortality from compounded atium, which is more like constant rewinding.

It can keep you from aging, but any aging you do when not at the 5th heightening is irreversible.

All in all, I agree with @Calderis.

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Another point that adds to the 'you'd just start aging normally' answer: Heightening aren't (generally, it gets wonky at higher levels where our knowledge is limited) a magic on/off swtich for powers remember, they're just the designation for whenever you max out a particular perk gained from accumulating Breath, but every one you add before that point is an incremental boost. Here's something Vasher thinks in Chapter 5

Quote

The priest, Bebid, looked about nervously. He had enough of a Breath aura to indicate that he’d reached the First Heightening. It was where most people—those who could afford to buy Breath—stopped. That much Breath would extend their lifespan by a good decade or so and give them an increased life sense.

Notice how this priest gets boosted life sense and an appreciably extended lifespan even though he's something like 950 Breaths off on average for the Fourth Heightening where life sense peaks and 1950 off from the Fifth where you stop aging entirely. Now, anyone who does a lot of Awakening is going to bounce around in their number of stored Breaths all the time. If this worked like a certain other system where you were essentially tricking your body about its age, we'd have heard of it not just from anyone who lost the Fifth Heighteining but from anyone who did lots of Awakening because they'd regularly experience unusual spurts of aging.

Edited by Weltall
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On 7/23/2017 at 2:22 PM, Faceless Mist-Wraith said:

True, he has his Divine Breath but since it is suppressed it appears he gets none of the benefits that come with it.

He gets some. (Though agelessness is.. uncertain)

Quote

Denth’s Speed

Yes, Denth is inhumanly fast. He’s a Returned, after all, and has all of the physical enhancements that come with that. Even when he’s chosen not to manifest most of them, he’s still got an edge, just like Vasher does.

How do they hide that they’re Returned? Well, it comes down to mastery of their ability to change their appearance. They can’t shape-shift entirely; they can just alter some things about their appearance. They can change their weight, their hair color, and things like that at will. Vasher doesn’t do this often, but Denth has been known to use it as a disguise. The problem, after you do this once and someone realizes it, your nature becomes very suspect.

They have learned to suppress their divine Breath. This allows them to hide, but they must be careful never to give away all of their Breath. Denth has been a Drab before—he’s not completely lying—but never for longer than a few days. And his divine Breath is always there, suppressed. So he doesn’t know what it’s like to be a true Drab, which is why in this chapter he says he doesn’t think it changes you that much. He’s never felt it.

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