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As someone who thinks about how interesting and diverse the system of Hemalurgy is, I have tried on multiple occasions to figure out ways to overcome it's limitations. In order to do that most effectively though, we would have to know what causes this problem in the first place. Unfortunately, we don't know what it is for certain yet, but here are some theories I and others came up with. 1. (this particular theory was made by the 17th Sharder, Pathfinder) The Identity of the spiritweb held within the Hemalurgic spikes causes damage to the spiritweb of the recipient because their own Identity isn't compatible with that of the donor. 2. The holes created in your spiritweb by Hemalurgic spikes are a fundamental requirement of how the powers get stapled into you own spiritweb; you need a hole in your soul in order to shove another piece of someone else's soul in there. 3. It is Ruin's own investiture that causes the damage, and is a fundamental part of how that investiture works. If the damage done to one's soul is caused by conflicting Identity, you could blank the Identity of the donor before their power was taken. Easier said than done, as the only practical method of doing this is with their consent, but if you could grant them four or more Hemalurgic spikes, then use emotional Allomancy to control them, you could then force them to blank their Identity so that you can spike them. If the Hemalurgic weakness is caused by it needing to be a hole in your soul to grant access to the power, then you could follow similar steps as with the Identity theory, but then Allomantically burn the spike to grant you that power permanently without needing you pierce your soul with a foreign piece of spiritweb. This has some assumptions tied to it, as we don't know for certain that splicing your spiritweb with someone else's through this method will grant you their power. If it really is Ruin's own investiture that is causing the problem...that's pretty difficult to deal with, seeing as how standard Hemalurgy is all tied to his investiture. However, you might be able to replicate a Hemalurgic charge with Selish Forgery, which would be powered by the Dor, not Ruin, so it might be a functional workaround. The amount of investiture within the art of Forgery isn't naturally big though, so you'd have to solve that problem, and you'd still have to deal with the location limitation. Not only that, but it might be the case that using Forgery to replicate a Hemalurgic charge would actually draw on Ruin's investiture (though it's pretty unlikely, who knows what could happen when dealing with magic system hacking like this?), which would make this method ineffective when dealing with this theory's workings. Does anyone else have any theories on why Hemalurgy causes damage to your spiritweb, and how to fix it?

For instance, if someone used Hemalurgy to give themselves the ability to grow a Gemheart, could you grow multiple if you were a Singer and already had one, or if your just gave yourself multiple spikes providing that ability? Could someone who did this bond multiple Spren? Would a Fused with multiple Gemhearts be able to hold more Voidlight?

Is the blessing of stability weaker than the blessing of presence, since the blessing of presence gives you other mental enhancements in addition to making you harder to control? As a side note, does the blessing of stability make your spiritweb less likely to crack when you've suffered trauma, thus making it harder for external investiture to get in?

If someone who had the potential to become a Misting or Mistborn was given a Hemalurgic spike before they had the opportunity to snap and come into their powers, would the Connection to Ruin prevent them from snapping and gaining their inborn Allomantic powers from Preservation's power?

Assuming that you could find a way to bypass the physical mutations of giving yourself Hemalurgic spikes filled with human attributes (such as being a shapeshifter, such as a kandra), and you found a way to combine multiple Hemalurgic charges in one spike (possibly by using Raysium), could you use a super charged Hemalurgic copper spike to give yourself abilities that you'd find in the movie Limitless? Kind of a lot that you'd need to overcome, but if possible it would be one of the most powerful abilities that you could get.

If you were to go to the cognitive realm on Roshar and implant one or more Hemalurgicly charged copper spikes into a lesser spren, could you grant it sapience? Would you then be able to bond it like a radiant spren? Would it be easier to bond because of the holes in its spiritweb?

In the Cosmere, Identity is a unique attribute held by an entity that separates it’s investiture from another entity’s investiture, such as with a Feruchemist’s Metalminds. However, I believe that Identity has more meaning than simply keying your investiture to you. I think that it acts as a natural separation form other spiritwebs, a natural defense from other’s control over you. We’ve seen multiple beings in the Cosmere that don’t have an Identity, and both of them can be controlled pretty easily by external influence; the Slaveform Singers and the Lifeless. Lifeless probably also have something else going on that makes them able to be controlled by others (their Awakened Commands), but here is a WoB that says if a Lifeless were to tap certain Metalminds, they may not stay a Lifeless. . . With the Slaveform Singers, they just do what anyone says without resisting. I believe the reason for this is that the natural Connection that is possessed by their human slavers can “dominate” them without much resistance. It would be a similar situation to a Connector Ferring dominating a Hemalurgic construct with an enhanced version of their natural attribute of Connection, only instead of having holes left in the soul by Hemalurgic spikes, it’s that the Singers don’t have any separating attribute in the first place. Having a higher intelligence and strength of will would likely allow them to resist control, but in many cases of mind control it seems like the targets are of only simple intelligence, which makes controlling them easy. It seems as though your Identity also has an influence on your state of mind, as we can see with Listeners and Singers who take different forms, so blanking your Identity may leave you feeling with significantly reduced motivation or emotion in general. It may be possible to Feruchemically enhance your own Identity and make yourself less susceptible to outside influence, or you may be able to more easily manipulate someone actively storing it. This theory may have some holes in it, but this is how I understand it now. Thanks for reading

I recently read this quote, and the bold part got me thinking... Hemalurgic duralumin can steal Connection. What if you removed your own Connection, then healed just enough to leave a scare over your spiritweb, then granted yourself another duralumin spike containing the Connection of someone young as well as possibly another small source of investiture to replace the removed innate investiture that contained your Connection. Could this be a somewhat vampiric method of maintaining biological immortality? What's more, you could likely repeat this process whenever you started to grow old, and it would not grow less efficient since it's not actively fighting against your natural age, it's replacing it.

Is there a way to stabilize your spiritweb to make it less damaged by Hemalurgic use? The kandra blessings of Presence and Stability both make the kandra less susceptible to being controlled, but since they are imparted via Hemalurgy itself, it also causes more holes to be made in their spiritweb than before. Could there be some way to stabilize, heal, or somehow reinforce your spiritweb to make it less susceptible to being controlled via the holes left by the use of Hemalurgy, that doesn't involve using more Hemalurgic spikes?

If you take a Hemalurgic spike that steals a power, you can then split it into multiple smaller spikes, much like the earrings that the Pathians use to communicate with Harmony. After that is done, you can staple the spikes into your recipient and use emotional Allomancy to dominate them. I mean, it's a completely evil way to use Hemalurgy, but hey, it would probably be something that could happen if a villain wanted to use it.

During the time of the Final Empire, not all of the metals, or even all of the powers of the known metals, had been discovered yet. But now in Scadrial’s modern era such things have been discovered. So, would Marsh want to get his hands on these powers? For instance, if there was a Slider Misting who’s continued existence he. . . disagreed with, would he also be willing to use Hemalurgy to get their power as well? What about gaining access to other magic systems? Would he be bound to Scadrial like his brother, or like with Mistings and probably Ferrings, would he be free to leave? This WoB seems to say that Allomancy can be taken off world without too much difficulty, but what about Hemalurgy? In fact, there is a WoB that says that someone is going around the Cosmere and collecting magics via Hemalurgy. Could that be Marsh? So, I guess I've got a few questions here, really.

Okay, first of all, I have no idea what raysium would do as a Hemalurgic spike, and it would be pure insanity to try and figure it out before Sanderson tells us. And that's me saying that. But here are some ideas I had for how you could use raysium in combination with Hemalurgy without using it as a spike itself. Can you use raysium to extract the charge in a Hemalurgic spike, then add multiple charges into one spike to create a heightened effect, but while using only one spike? Would only one charge be able to effect you at a time, since they're created from separate pieces of spiritweb? Could you store a hemalurgic charge inside a perfect gemstone to prevent it from leaking? Would the gemstone still be able to grant a Hemalurgic effect if you stabbed someone with it, or would it need to be transferred back to a metal that corresponds with the Hemalurgic charge? If you could extract the charge from a spike that had weakened to the point where it would no longer lose power via Hemalurgic decay, and then combined multiple charges, would they then leak again, or since they probably still count as separate things, like how bio-chromatic breaths are separate, would they no longer lose their charge?

Hemalurgic spikes cannot directly steal breaths from a donor since they are too much within the physical realm, and not enough in the spiritual realm, where pretty much all of their ability to manipulate resides. However, all you need to do to get the breaths of a person is for them to willingly grant them to you. So, if you were to grant them spikes instead of trying to make a spike from them, and then you used emotional allomancy or some other method of mind controlling them, you should be able to force them to give you their breaths. Does this seem plausible?

There is a WoB that says that if a Forgery were stolen via Hemalurgy there would be less damage done to the spiritweb of the donor than would typically take place. Could you use this as a viable method to protect yourself from Hemalurgic theft? Could you create a “dormant” piece of false spiritweb, similar to how there is DNA in real life that is dormant, so that you don’t actually make any adverse changes to yourself in order to gain extra protection? Maybe you could do this by making a Forgery that doesn’t change anything about your past, but is basically the same as what actually happened. Are there any magic systems other than Forgery that might be good at this?

Hemalurgy uses a smaller portion of power, just enough to hotwire the spiritweb. So, could Forgery reasonably be used to create a hemalurgic spike that functions as any other spike would?

Jasnah Kholin is a very intelligent, very driven, and very practical person. When, and yes I believe that for someone like her it is only a matter of when, she discovers Hemalurgy, will she be okay with using it to accomplish her own ends? To me, I would think 'yes', but what do you think?

This quote was shown to me on one of my previous threads by another of my fellow 17th sharders, Honorless. And it got me thinking, based off of what I know about awakening, and how the system works, was the sword that Nightblood was awakened from holding a Hemalurgic charge? Was that what allowed it to gain it strange, investiture devouring powers? This quote here leads me to believe that when awakening, you cannot actually give an awakened object the ability to just magically do whatever you want, or we'd probably see a lot more powerful awakened magic objects. But if you were awaken something Hemalurgically charged, or that had some other kind of investiture involved, would that allow you to hack the system, and get something different? But of course, this could not be the case. But if it is, just let me say; I called it

Hemalurgy removes a piece of someone's spiritweb and grafts it onto someone else's spiritweb, and parts of your spiritual DNA can be passed on. So, if a steel inquisitor were to have a child, would their kid have the spiritual, and possibly physical DNA of not just their two biological parents, but also all the people who's souls got stapled on as well? Would certain physical traits of those "soul parents" manifest in the child, such as having a mixed race? Man, if this were the case, and Marsh had a kid...it would be a bit weird for Marsh to have to explain that to said kid that they actually have twenty-some parents.

What makes a Steel Inquisitor a "Hemalurgic construct" as opposed to just "a person with spikes"? We see people with Allomancy/Feruchemy granting spikes in both HoA and BoM without their being Inquisitors. Is it just an in-world classification to distance the Inquisitors from regular humans? Is the dividing line between "person with spikes" and "Steel Inquisitor" having a linchpin spike, and if so, what determines the need for a linchpin? And what changes do Inquisitors get/suffer other than their actual given powers, if they are genuinely Hemalurgic constructs?

Hemalurgy can take Connection via duralumin. Could one take the Connections that the heralds have, then give themselves those Connections, then somehow "heal", those damaged and weakened Connections to re-forge the Oathpact?

If an individual can obtain a piece of investiture that stays with them rather than being converted to kinetic investiture or leaking out, they gain certain benefits. We can see these benefits with those who hold a number of bio-chromatic breaths or a Dawnshard, but most other magic systems don’t allow the investiture to stay with the practitioner, which prevents them from gaining heightenings. However, a hemalurgic nicrocil spike can steal general investiture, granting it to someone. My question is if someone took, for example, stormlight held by a surgebinder, would this investiture leak out as it normally would, or, since the spike itself is holding it, would it stick to the person enough to grant them the heighteinings? Could a person even do this, since hemalurgy primarily steals from the spiritual realm? If this is the case, what kinds of investiture (other than Divine Breaths) would be viable for a nicrocil spike?

Aviar seem to draw a small amount of investiture directly from the spiritual realm to fuel their powers, without needing to use a catalyst, like how Allomancers need to. If someone could Hemalurgically take an aviar power, could they use this to get ‘free’ fuel for any other manifestations of investiture they might have, such as Surgebinding or Allomancy?

I once made a theory that you could possibly Hemalurgically spike an Allomantic gold shadow and then graft it to yourself in order to overwrite your spiritweb, kind of like a bootleg version of Forgery. But could you instead spike an Allomantic electrum shadow? Perhaps you could give yourself skills and memories from a hypothetical future version of yourself? You normally would only be able to see a few seconds into the future, but maybe duralumin or reverse compounding would allow you to stretch it further.

Since hemalurgic spikes don’t usually grant resonances, would they also not interfere with any resonances that you could develop naturally? For example, could Marsh gain a resonance if he somehow got another power without the use of hemalurgy, without needing to worry about his many spikes interfering?

Hypothetical scenario. Kaladin (or really any radiant) has their spren bond stolen by a hemalurgist. Kaladin lives, and Syl breaks the bond before the hemalurgist can give himself surgebinding, but is Syl able to re-bond with Kaladin, or was the piece of spiritweb stolen by the spike necessary for the bonding process, and will he therefore need it healed by an outside source before he can bond a spren again?