Reducing age with Essence Marks?

[Hmmm lies]

So I was thinking, if you change your history with an Essence Mark so you spent a large period of your life in a Cadmium bubble or a Bendalloy bubble, could you become younger or older with an Essence Mark? Would that require additional Investiture?

[I read Stormlight first]

I do believe you could change your age with an Essence Mark. We have seen a worldhopper who uses stamps and I think they have gained some form of functional immortality so It is possible. I am not sure you need to have to use a speed bubble to change your age but that is a very good option. I don't know if you would need more investiture than the normal Dor would provide you but I'm no expert.

[alder24]

48 minutes ago, Hmmm lies said:

So I was thinking, if you change your history with an Essence Mark so you spent a large period of your life in a Cadmium bubble or a Bendalloy bubble, could you become younger or older with an Essence Mark? Would that require additional Investiture?

Changing your age with Forgery is possible, but it's really hard. Your age is part of your Connections, that's what you would have to try to change.

Spoiler

VindicationKnight

Is it possible to change your age with Forging?

Brandon Sanderson

Changing your age with Forging is very hard.

/r/books AMA 2015 (July 19, 2015)

 

Spoiler

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.)

General Reddit 2015 (Nov. 20, 2015)

 

[Hmmm lies]

I thought this might be easier, since you aren't changing when you were born, but how time passed for you

[Trusk'our]

3 hours ago, Hmmm lies said:

So I was thinking, if you change your history with an Essence Mark so you spent a large period of your life in a Cadmium bubble or a Bendalloy bubble, could you become younger or older with an Essence Mark? Would that require additional Investiture?

Oh, I like that one! I should think that should be very doable depending on the plausibility of getting in said bubble, but I could see this being a cheaper way Investiture wise to reduce age than Atium Compounding. You would probably lose your memories as a side effect, but storing the ones you wanted via Coppermind and Tapping them after applying the stamp would most likely circumvent this limitation.

When I first saw the title, I thought you were going to propose changing the actual time of birth for a person to make them younger, but this seems way better as I think it would be able to change more.

Edited December 6, 2023 by Trusk'our

[Returned]

I think that the difficulty in Forging your age derives mostly from:

1. The situation of having been in a time bubble is itself pretty unusual
2. Being in a sufficiently intense bubble for long enough is largely implausible for more than a few gained/lost minutes at a time
3. The time-distorting effect is achieved 100% through constant use of Investiture

The circumstances that would satisfy all three of these are going to be hard to come by, even impossible. You'd need a Pulser or Slider, with access to huge amounts of cadmium or bendalloy, and who wants to use their powers frequently and for extended periods. And you'd have to Forge being near them, them wanting to use their powers in that way, them wanting to include you, and outside circumstances allowing the time distortion to progress undisturbed for long enough to make more than a few minutes' or hours' difference. It's a lot more intense than "what if this table had been made really well by a mundane craftsman".

[Trusk'our]

1 minute ago, Returned said:

And you'd have to Forge being near them, them wanting to use their powers in that way, them wanting to include you, and outside circumstances allowing the time distortion to progress undisturbed for long enough to make more than a few minutes' or hours' difference.

Harmonium devices could be used instead so that the Pulser doesn't have to be caught in it as well, which I think increases the plausibility.

3 minutes ago, Returned said:

It's a lot more intense than "what if this table had been made really well by a mundane craftsman".

I don't think that it would be easy necessarily, but it's certainly not impossible.

[Returned]

17 minutes ago, Trusk'our said:

Harmonium devices could be used instead so that the Pulser doesn't have to be caught in it as well, which I think increases the plausibility.

I don't think that it would be easy necessarily, but it's certainly not impossible.

I'll agree to both of these for sure, though the other difficulties seem difficult to get around to me; more plausible doesn't necessarily bridge the gap all the way to realistic. But someone sufficiently skilled with Forgery could potentially do it, and I think that all aspects of Forgery will become easier as the Cosmere timeline progresses.

If I got to hack together my own age-defying scheme across all of the Cosmere through Forgery, I'd Forge compounded atium and then Forge/actually obtain a lot of Breaths. Though I imagine that would be even harder!

[Quantus]

WOB strongly implies that all of Sel IS one giant time bubble, we just dont know which direction it runs.  So assuming the Forger is a Worldhopper and off-world when they do the Stamp, they should be able to change their history to have spent more or less time on Sel than elsewhere and modify their age that way.

 

Quote

 

Jeremy

If vast amounts of Investiture can distort time in a similar manner as a black hole, [...] does that include Shards? Would time dilation be greater on Roshar than on Nalthis?

Brandon Sanderson

No, because the Shard is contained almost entirely in the Spiritual Realm. In the Spiritual Realm, time and distance have no meaning. So, what this means is: Large piles of Investiture that somehow make it into the Cognitive Realm or the Physical Realm are going to cause time dilation, but the Spiritual Realm—where it belongs—it's not going to do that.

That's gonna make some exclamation points raise above the heads of some people.

The Dusty Wheel Show (June 17, 2021)

 

 

[Tamriel Wolfsbaine]

3 hours ago, Trusk'our said:

Harmonium devices could be used instead so that the Pulser doesn't have to be caught in it as well, which I think increases the plausibility.

I don't think that it would be easy necessarily, but it's certainly not impossible.

Harmonium devices could be stacked upon eachother too right?  

 

If a bendalloy bubble and cadmium bubble offset eachother in this spaces where they overlap could cadmium bubbles of differing sizes be placed inside one another?  

If 1 minute inside a cadmium was 1 hours outside of it and you had a full hours worth of cadmium to burn outside then you could skip 60 hours worth of time with just 61 minutes worth of cadmium. 

This assumes that the outer bubbles will run out before the inner bubble does. Either way you could turn a few seconds into weeks or even years if you wrote it correctly.  

 

Not that I know anything about forging or essence marks. But does it cost in investiture to use it the same amount that the investiture would have been required to accomplish it?  

You would need an ungodly amount of cadmium but if you had the correct amounts placed in the correct order and put up just 4 of the cadmium bubbles the inside one could pass 24 years in a minute.  Granted I think it would require 4 years worth of cadmium to be burnt on the outer bubble and just taking that down by 60 times each new bubble.  

So still an incredible amount of investiture... and if it requires that same amount every time you want to use it then... 

 

[Hmmm lies]

Okay, but what if there just so happened to be a few Pulsers around in the past, combining their bubbles, possibly with harmonium, and you just Forged yourself so you were there, rather then being in time bubbles that didn't really exist, I feel that would require less, if any besides the base amount, Investiture

[Aetherbound]

13 hours ago, Hmmm lies said:

Okay, but what if there just so happened to be a few Pulsers around in the past, combining their bubbles, possibly with harmonium, and you just Forged yourself so you were there, rather then being in time bubbles that didn't really exist, I feel that would require less, if any besides the base amount, Investiture

I will point out that if there was lerasium around and you had the opportunity to eat it, you still would need more investiture to Forge yourself into a Mistborn. (the WoB exists but I am lazy)

[Hmmm lies]

hmm, okay, so the stamp would likely require extra Investiture, although the idea of overlapping them could work. The question is, I suppose, does having used Allomancy in your Forged past use the Investiture, or is it just having Allomancers being involved with it, which would be a lot less.

[Underwater_Worldhopper]

I really don't think that you'd need to inject a proportional amount of Investiture into the Stamp to make yourself younger this way; I actually think it's actually a really ingenious way to do this. You don't need to substitute the Investiture into your soul, because you're not trying to give yourself any powers here like you would to become an Allomancer, not any more than a regular Essence Mark. Say you're 20 and are friends with a group of Pulser Savants who decide they really really want to time travel 40 years into the future in what will be only a couple hours for them, and they invite you. You decline, but then 40 years down the line, you want to go back to being 20. You stamp yourself so that you said yes, and voila, you will have become younger. The only thing your Essence mark will change is where you were for a couple of hours 40 years ago, and it will completely rewire your Connection to your age. Changing age was hard for the Lord Ruler because he was constantly fighting against what his soul was trying to force on him. With an Essence mark, you can change that Connection no problem, and it wouldn't be any harder than any other regular Essence mark, probably even easier. It all comes down to plausibilty. If you had that opportunity, I think it's 100% possible, and probably even easy. If you didn't and you needed to Forge the circumstances under which you were in a Cadmium Bubble too, then it could become much more difficult, and potentially even requiring an injection of Investiture.

[Hmmm lies]

I feel the main benefit of this, even if it does require extra Investiture, is you could change your age a lot more, while having been born at a different time could likely only be changed so much.

[therunner]

I think primary issue is that such Essence Mark would by necessity imply that the Slider is also young now, but at the same time cannot affect him. This might be rather large obstacle, because Essence Marks only rewrite what has been done to the object (or what the person specifically chose to do), and cannot change external things.

So simply meeting the supposed Slider would break the Essence Mark.

But Essence Mark saying you used charged Harmonium would be easier, though also rather fragile because getting your hands on such large amount of Harmonium is very unlikely, and Essence Marks are stronger the more likely they are.

Edited December 8, 2023 by therunner

[Argenti]

4 hours ago, therunner said:

I think primary issue is that such Essence Mark would by necessity imply that the Slider is also young now, but at the same time cannot affect him. This might be rather large obstacle, because Essence Marks only rewrite what has been done to the object (or what the person specifically chose to do), and cannot change external things.

So simply meeting the supposed Slider would break the Essence Mark.

But Essence Mark saying you used charged Harmonium would be easier, though also rather fragile because getting your hands on such large amount of Harmonium is very unlikely, and Essence Marks are stronger the more likely they are.

Not really; an essence mark on Shai (Shaizan) does not, for example, change any of the Teullu people into having memories of it. They don't change anything outside themselves and aren't affected by it.

[therunner]

3 hours ago, Ookla the Silver said:

Not really; an essence mark on Shai (Shaizan) does not, for example, change any of the Teullu people into having memories of it. They don't change anything outside themselves and aren't affected by it.

I'd say there is a rather large difference between people not remembering someone, vs. person being decades older then they should (or dead).

Forgery must be plausible, otherwise it either does not take or it breaks easily.

[Argenti]

6 hours ago, therunner said:

I'd say there is a rather large difference between people not remembering someone, vs. person being decades older then they should (or dead).

Forgery must be plausible, otherwise it either does not take or it breaks easily.

There is not really much of difference, they're both just aspects of the spirit web. This isn't atium compounding, where the soul fights aging you, forgery would change what the soul thinks is correct. But it doesn't matter, since forgery doesn't care about now and people who you meet now, it cares about possible pasts for you and who you met then.

[SwordNimiForPresident]

It would probably be more plausible to forge yourself as having had the 5th heightening for as many years as it would take to give you the correct age. Giving yourself the 5th heightening now would probably require a bunch of extra investiture, but making so it was in the past might bypass that requirement.

You could probably make it so that you also lived on Nalthis at the time to make it more reasonable. Maybe you could even use your Forger abilities as a justification for being able to afford all those breaths, given that your skill would be extremely unique on Nalthis.

You might also be able to write a stamp that has you living on Roshar with the Shin for however many years and being in possession of an Honor blade. That would be less plausible in my opinion, but still probably more likely than spending extended amounts of time in a cadmium bubble.

[Hmmm lies]

I suspect you would need the necessary Investiture, but considering it's not kinetic Investiture, I assume you would only need 2000 Breaths worth of Investiture to do it. In fact, I doubt the 5th heightening would be necessary, it would seem that having a large amount of Investiture will allow you to be ageless. Good idea

[RoyalBeeMage]

if you forged so that you used to be 5th heightening why not stay there?