Do you have to actually eat the metals to burn them?

[CognitiveShadow he/him]

Are there other ways to ingest, absorb, or take in the metals that would still allow you to burn them? And would the effect be more/less powerful based on different ways or would it impact they actual effect of burning the metals?

For example, what if you were shot by a shotgun that had pure alloys of some burnable metal or another... could you burn those metals if you survived?  I mean we do see Sazed access metals that were shot into his body but that was with Feruchemy. So I'm curious if the same rule applies for allomancy or not.

Other more extreme questions: would you be able to snort steel flakes and still access the metal reserves? Would it be any different? What if you injected them into your blood stream? any way to turn it into a topical cream that you absorb through the skin (sounds impossible to me but hey I'm not expert)? What if there was a vaporized metal powder in the air that you inhaled? Lol that just made me think of a vape pen for mistborns, can't wait to see that in era 3.

Anyway - let me know all your crazy thoughts, I'm sure this will all be purely speculative.

[HSuperLee]

Actually, there's no speculation at all. We have a definite answer to this.

Quote

Matthew Grady

Does a metal need to be swallowed to be burned? Or can it be injected or snorted?

Brandon Sanderson

It could be either of those two things. Yes. Basically, metal into the body in any way is going to work, generally. There's nothing magical about the stomach, even though it works the best when we talk about it. It's just more intermixing the nature of the metal with your soul in the cosmere, your Spiritual entity, is what gives them that ability.

YouTube Livestream 10 (June 18, 2020)

 

[CognitiveShadow he/him]

5 minutes ago, HSuperLee said:

Actually, there's no speculation at all. We have a definite answer to this.

 

Damn that was pretty much a one sentence summary of my thought process and a clear cut answer! Thank you kindly!

 

Here's hoping we see some vaping mistborns down the road lol