Atium and Heightening

[+Oltux72]

What happens if you have enough breath for 5th Heightening and store youth in an atium mind? Do you still age? If not , how much youth can you store? And if you store too hard, will you die?

[HSuperLee]

Huh. This is the first question I asked when I joined the 17th shard. Someone proceeded to show me a WoB, which I cannot find again, where the question was asked and RAFOed. Thus I started a thread theorizing on it, and concluded that we really just don't know.

[Weltall]

Here's the WoB:

Quote

BlackYeti

Suppose you had a full Feruchemist, who got enough Breath to reach the Fifth Heightening. What would happen if he started storing in atium?

Brandon Sanderson

Hehe-- I'm going to RAFO that one.

Shadows of Self Edinburgh UK signing (Oct. 21, 2015)

Anyhow, because the Fifth Heightening stops the aging process it doesn't matter if you're also able to use F-Atium, you're not going to age naturally. But very weird things would probably happen if you tried to store or tap youth at that point, due to the intersection of what BioChroma's doing to you and what F-Atium is trying to do.

[StarrFall]

Was just thinking about this yesterday and thought I'd come search it out; didn't have to go back far.  In my mind, there are 2 probable things that would happen. 

First, and least likely in my mind, would be that F-Atium would simply not have any noticeable effect when you are holding 2k+ Breaths.  Since age isn't really a dynamic trait any longer, filling/tapping F-Atium would have no effect.

Second would be that F-Atium would just work exactly as it always does, where the amount of time you spend filling the Atium mind can be spent tapping it, and running out of F-Atium charge would return you to the age you were when you achieved 5th Heightening, ad infinitum.  If you are able-bodied at the time you achieved 5th Heightening, there isn't really much benefit to doing this beyond using age as a disguise or some such.

This second line of thought does make me wonder if you could hack your age on a more permanent basis by filling/tapping Atium while divesting yourself of your Breaths, and then reclaiming 2k+ Breaths while at your F-Atium adjusted age to lock that age in.  Given that your spirit web never really loses track of how old you should be where Feruchemy is concerned (hence the need for more and more Atium when compounding), I doubt that would work but it wouldn't stop me from trying