Hemalurgic Burning

[Enter a username]

For a while, I've been wondering what happens when an Allomancer burns a Hemalurgic spike. The Coppermind says that

Quote

If an Allomancer attempted to burn a Hemalurgic spike, the Allomancer's spiritual DNA would be spliced to that of the person's contained in the spike. The consequences of this are as of yet unknown.

This helps, but I don't understand what it actually means. Does the Allomancer get the attribute in the spike? Is it closer to Allomantic/Feruchemal compounding? Does something completely unrelated happen? (I personally think the first is most likely, but I really don't know.)

[Karger]

Brandon has gone back and forth a bunch.  So we don't really know.  WoBs on the subject tend to get a bit wishy washy and contradictory. 

Edited May 15, 2020 by Karger

[Light In the Darkness]

It seems to me that what would happen is that the SDNA would be permanently nailed into place, with or without a spike. So, if you burned a spike that granted feruchemical steel when it spiked someone, you would now be a steel ferring, permanently. This might mean it could get passed down, like normal allomancy and feruchemy can. It might also mean that you could use hemalurgy without opening up to Harmony's control, depending on how much damage to your spiritweb the splicing causes.

Terrifying Idea:

1. Spike a Nicrosil Ferring and a Nicrosil Misting.

2. Grind both spikes into very small pieces. every piece will have some of the charge, but it should be fairly evenly distributed, so each charge will be very small.

3. Acquire an Unsealed Metalmind to allow people to burn electrum (for the misting spike) and bendalloy (for the Ferring spike).

4. Distribute the spike dust to a small army and have each one burn it in turn via the metalmind. Your army can now compound investiture.

5. Use a similar process to give desired powers en masse. Because they can compound their actual ability to burn metals via the nicrosil (which is how that seems like it should work; I might be wrong), it doesn't matter how small the original hemalurgic charges were; you would have allomancers as strong as the Lord Ruler. This could be done without the splicing, possibly, but it would be much less efficient; you might be limited to only a few individuals like this being created for each pair of nicrosil metalborn killed. Obviously, if I'm interpreting "splicing" or Nicrosil Compounding wrong then this is caput; but it is a scary implication.

[Enter a username]

Yeah... Why aren't there Lord Ruler-style compounders from regular double nicrosil Twinborn? (And for that matter, regular nicrosil Ferrings tapping nicrosil in order to burn one of their nicrosil metalminds?)

Edit: I've started a new forum dedicated to this topic here.

Edited May 20, 2020 by Enter a username
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