Another Problem For Advanced Hemalurgy

[Trusk'our]

I've had several ideas on how one could vastly increase the power of their individual Hemalurgic spikes, 'Supercharging' them, if you will. This would reduce the need for a large number of spikes, but still allow someone to have a massive boost of power.

However, I literally just thought of a problem that might occur with this.

If you put too much Investiture in a spike, it will gain sapience, or a least a lesser form of sentience, which might cause it to be able to manipulate or even straight up puppeteer you through the hole it makes in your Spiritweb. Normally it takes a truly massive amount of Investiture to bring an inanimate object to life (Nightblood has tens of thousands of times the amount of Investiture as a regular human being), but it might actually be easier to bring a Hemalurgic spike to life than by Awakening an object as it already has a foundation for a personality, an Identity, and spiritual DNA held within it, but that of course is just a hunch.

[Stormtide_Leviathan]

I don't think that would be too much of an issue honestly. Large amounts of Investiture can gain sentience, after a large amount of time. However, I don't think that spikes implanted into someone would run into this problem. Cause I think, in this case, the spiked person's own sentience will fulfill whatever property of investiture it is that tends toward sentience. Investiture doesn't always become sentient, if it has someone to direct it already. The biggest example of this is, of course, shards which need Vessels but if they could function sentiently on their own probably wouldn't.

I'm also not sure you even could invest a spike enough that you'd run into this problem. There's a limit to just how much investiture a given piece of metal can hold. [Band of Mourning]

Spoiler

While they're not a spike, look at the bands of mourning. They were stuffed full of about as much investiture as they probably could be, since they were so invested they didn't even register to Wax's metalsense and were made to be powerful, and they sat around for (at a conservative guess) at least a century or two and still didn't develop sentience.

 

[Trusk'our]

On 6/19/2022 at 2:04 AM, Stormtide_Leviathan said:

I'm also not sure you even could invest a spike enough that you'd run into this problem. There's a limit to just how much investiture a given piece of metal can hold. [Band of Mourning]

  Hide contents

While they're not a spike, look at the bands of mourning. They were stuffed full of about as much investiture as they probably could be, since they were so invested they didn't even register to Wax's metalsense and were made to be powerful, and they sat around for (at a conservative guess) at least a century or two and still didn't develop sentience.

 

Spoiler

True. The Bands of Mourning weren't sentient even though they were filled to the brim with power, but they also didn't have a foundation for a personality to form, so it would likely have taken much longer for them to become sentient. Take Awakened blades, for example. We've only seen two, but both seem to have at least some semblance of intelligence, even though Azure's blade isn't so Invested that it cannot hold all the Investiture, causing leakage, similar to Nightblood. I would venture to guess that they have sentience because they not only possess a large amount of Investiture, but that they also have a specific Command that allows their personality to develop. A Hemalurgic spike might also have this problem because it also has a foundation for a personality to form, arguable even more complete than an Awakened object, since a spike's foundation came from something that already worked.

 

On 6/19/2022 at 2:04 AM, Stormtide_Leviathan said:

I don't think that would be too much of an issue honestly. Large amounts of Investiture can gain sentience, after a large amount of time. However, I don't think that spikes implanted into someone would run into this problem. Cause I think, in this case, the spiked person's own sentience will fulfill whatever property of investiture it is that tends toward sentience. Investiture doesn't always become sentient, if it has someone to direct it already. The biggest example of this is, of course, shards which need Vessels but if they could function sentiently on their own probably wouldn't.

Okay, that is a fair point. So, I suppose that a Hemalurgic spike would mostly depend on whether or not they count being implanted in a person as being directed enough to not need to gain sentience.