Immortality via Hemalurgy?

[Trusk'our]

I recently read this quote, and the bold part got me thinking...

Quote

Doom-Slayer

So how do the exact mechanics of Feruchemy in relation to Compounding work?

This confusion is primarily around how [the Lord Ruler] gets his near infinite age.

Okay. So first off, I understand the concept of how they work. Feruchemy is net zero, Allomancy is net positive, combine them and you end with a net positive Feruchemy ability.

So how Feruchemy normally works... you take say weight, store half your normal weight and then you can access it whenever you want. So you (originally X weight) are taking A weight, storing it, and then you are at (X-A) weight, with access to A. So we have a metalmind that store magnitude with the efficiency of how its received based on how quickly or slowly it is drawn upon.

All the metalminds except atium seem to act this way. Atium seems to work as storing magnitude/time rather than just magnitude. The way I understand it is that say a 30 year old person becomes 50 years old for 1 day, this would give access to 20 years difference for a 1 day period.

The Lord Ruler then exploits this by gaining access to say 20 years difference over 10 days (magnification by Compounding) which he then slowly feeds into himself to lower his age.

Why this difference? I'm assuming its to maintain a neutral "body age" because with just magnitude a person could permanently make themselves younger by Compounding.

With just magnitude of "20 years of youth" being stored, if the Lord Ruler magnified it, he could turn it into "200 years of youth" and then he would never need the constant stream off youth (and wouldn't have died without the bracelets)

Hope this makes sense.

Brandon Sanderson

All right, so there are a few things you have to understand about cosmere magics to grok all of this.

First, is that magics can be hacked together. You'll see more of this in the future of the cosmere, but an early one is the hack here--where you're essentially powering Feruchemy with Allomancy. (A little more complex than that, but it seems like you get the idea.)

The piece you're missing is the nature of a person's Spiritual aspect. This is similar to a Platonic idea--the idea that there's a perfect version of everyone somewhere. It's a mix of their connections to places, people, and times with raw Investiture. The soul, you might say.

(Note that over time, a person's perception of themselves shapes their Cognitive aspect as well, and the Cognitive aspect can interfere with the Spiritual aspect trying to make the Physical aspect repair itself.) Healing in the cosmere often works by aligning your Physical self with your Spiritual self--making the Physical regrow. More powerful forms of Investiture can repair the soul as well.

However, your age is part of your Connection to places, people, and times. Your soul "knows" things, like where you were born, what Investiture you are aligned with, and--yes--how old you are. When you're healing yourself, you're restoring yourself to a perfect state--when you're done, everything is good. When you're changing your age, however, you are transforming yourself to something unnatural. Against what your soul understands to be true.

So the Spiritual aspect will push for a restoration to the way you should be. With this Compounding hack, you're not changing connection; it's a purely Physical Realm change.

This dichotomy cannot remain for long. And the greater the disparity, the more pressure the spirit will exert. Ten or twenty years won't matter much. A thousand will matter a lot. So the only way to use Compounding to change your age is to store up all this extra youth in a metalmind, then be constantly tapping it to counteract the soul's attempt to restore you to how you should be.

Yes, all of this means there are FAR more efficient means of counteracting aging than the one used by the Lord Ruler. It's a hack, and not meant to be terribly efficient. Eventually, he wouldn't have been able to maintain himself this way at all. Changing Connection (or even involving ones Cognitive Aspect a little more) would have been far more efficient, though actively more difficult.

Though this is the point where I ping [Peter Ahlstrom] and get him to double-check all this. Once in a while, my fingers still type the wrong term in places. (See silvereye vs tineye.)

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.

[Stormlit-man]

To me the title of this topic doesn't and the description don't exactly match up if I am interpreting that the question is can you achieve immortality via hemalurgy I would say yes based on the given quote because the quote says that it would be far more efficient to change connection through hemalurgy and maybe convince the spiritweb of the person who wants to be immortal that it can't change. If the spiritweb is perpetually stuck the same then with a slightly delayed response that makes you cognitive self and physical self relatively  unchanging. I think that this is what might have happened with Hoid because whenever he is hurt he always reverts to the same form. Now one might ask if Hoid's spiritweb is always the same then how does he gain access to new systems of investiture and I would say that even though the spiritweb it's self is convinced that it is unchanging you could still add bits and pieces and it would keep those changes because it is convinced that it woun't change it's self but if something else changes it then that is added to the state of unchanging.   

[Dunkum]

I think you'd need to re-spike yourself periodically, since each spike would still be tied to a specific time, but based on that WoB I think it could work.

[Trusk'our]

8 hours ago, Dunkum said:

I think you'd need to re-spike yourself periodically, since each spike would still be tied to a specific time, but based on that WoB I think it could work.

Probably. But still, it would be significantly "cheaper" to do this instead of compounding Atium for youth (if you remove the whole "probably need to kill someone to make it work" aspect). Plus, it probably won't get less efficient over time as with Atium-granted youth.

[+ShardlessVessel]

11 hours ago, Dunkum said:

I think you'd need to re-spike yourself periodically, since each spike would still be tied to a specific time, but based on that WoB I think it could work.

I wonder if you could Connect yourself to a relative time. Say, "last week". Not January 7th, but last week, whenever that happens to be today.

[Trusk'our]

3 hours ago, ShardlessVessel said:

I wonder if you could Connect yourself to a relative time. Say, "last week". Not January 7th, but last week, whenever that happens to be today.

Maybe, that'd be pretty interesting idea. But something that specific might only be possible if you were a Bondsmith or if you could somehow else sense, understand, and take specific Connections without a bunch of extra stuff along with it. I think Hemalurgy is pretty cool, but it does have some limitations.

[Dunkum]

21 minutes ago, Trusk'our said:

Maybe, that'd be pretty interesting idea. But something that specific might only be possible if you were a Bondsmith or if you could somehow else sense, understand, and take specific Connections without a bunch of extra stuff along with it. I think Hemalurgy is pretty cool, but it does have some limitations.

yea Aon-Dor could probably manage it, but I doubt Hemalurgy could

[Trusk'our]

6 minutes ago, Dunkum said:

yea Aon-Dor could probably manage it, but I doubt Hemalurgy could

Maybe Forgery could too, if you were really, really skilled since messing with Connections is it's whole thing.

Edited January 15, 2022 by Trusk'our