Could Gold Compounding Extend Your Lifespan?

[Creation he/him]

I was thinking, and if F-gold gives you health, and if you die from your cells failing, could gold compunding give you unlimited or and extended lifespan?

[Treamayne]

19 minutes ago, Creation said:

I was thinking, and if F-gold gives you health, and if you die from your cells failing, could gold compunding give you unlimited or and extended lifespan?

BLUF: No.

Most healing in the Cosmere (like Gold) is based on making the Physical Self match the Spiritual Self - but your Spiritweb knows how old you are (or should be - just ask Rashek) and many of those things are a normal part of aging, so Gold would not see it as something that needs to be healed. It's a normal part of your Spiritweb. 
WoBs:

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Iceblade44

So White Sand [then Elantris] is earlier... Then how the heck old is Khriss then? Will we ever get an answer as to why every worldhopper is flippin' immortal?

Brandon Sanderson

There is some time-dilation going on. I'll explain it eventually; we're almost to the point where I can start talking about that. Suffice it to say that there's a mix of both actual slowing of the aging process and relative time going on, depending on the individual. Very few are actually immortal.

Faera

Implying that some are actually immortal?

Brandon Sanderson

Depends on which definition of immortal you mean.

• Doesn't age, but can be killed by conventional means. (You've seen some of these in the cosmere, but I'll leave you to discuss who.)
• Heals from wounds, but still ages. (Knights Radiant with Stormlight are like this.)
• Reborn when killed. (The Heralds.)
• Doesn't age and can heal, but dependent upon magic to stay this way, and so have distinct weakness to be exploited. (The Lord Ruler, among others.)
• Hive beings who are constantly losing individual members, but maintaining a persistent personality spread across all of them, immortal in that as long as too much of the hive isn't wiped out, the personality can persist. (The Sleepless.)
• Bits of sapient magic, eternal and endless, though the personality can be "destroyed" in specific ways. (Seons. Spren. Nightblood. Cognitive Shadows, like a certain character from Scadrial.)
• Shards (Really just a supercharged version of the previous category.)

And then, of course, there's Hoid. I'm not going to say which category, if any, he's in.

Some of these blend together--the Heralds, for example, are technically a variety of Cognitive Shadow. I'm not saying each of these categories above are distinct, intended to be the end-all definitions. They're off the cuff groupings I made to explain a point: immortality is a theme of the cosmere works--which, at their core, are experiments on what happens when men are given the power of deity.

Shagomir

Heals from wounds, but still ages.

Would Bloodmaker Ferrings exist in this category as well? If not, what about someone Compounding Gold?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, you are correct.

Shagomir

As a Bloodmaker ages, what keeps them from healing the damage and carrying on as a very old, but very healthy person? Do they come to a point where they can't store enough health to stave off the aches, pains, diseases, and other things that come with old age?

This makes sense for traditional Feruchemy as it is end-neutral, so storing health becomes a zero sum game - eventually, you're going to get sick and you're not going to be able to overcome it with your natural healing ability no matter how much you manipulate it with a goldmind.

...Unless you've got a supply of Identity-less goldminds lying around. Would a Bloodmaker with a sufficient source of Identity-less goldminds (or the ability to compound, thus bypassing the end-neutral part of Feruchemy) eventually just die from being too old?

Brandon Sanderson

Basically, yes. They can heal their body to match their spiritual ideal, but some things (like some genetic diseases, and age-related illnesses) are seen as part of the ideal. Depends on several factors.

Stormlight Three Update #5 (Nov. 29, 2016)

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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)

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Tehdren

For instance, a person's spiritual component knows how old they are.

Wow. Has this been talked about before? This kind of seems like a big tidbit. Now we have some idea of how Hoid changes his age?

Brandon Sanderson

I haven't said if this is a method Hoid uses or not, but it's part of the reason the Lord Ruler turned to dust when he lost his metalminds. (His body tried to match the age his spirit said he was.)

Phantine

If they somehow killed the Lord Ruler in a conventional manner, would he still have turned to dust?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. The metalminds would have stopped being tapped, and the spirit of the matter would probably still have had this strange effect. Not it didn't happen to the bodies of the shard vessels who died.

Phantine

Would koloss spikes turn off when they die too, so dead ones shrivel up like raisins?

Brandon Sanderson

Hemalurgy changes the spirit. So not necessarily.

Stormlight Three Update #5 (Nov. 21, 2016)

 

Hope that helps

[CoderDrag0n8 He/They]

1 hour ago, Creation said:

I was thinking, and if F-gold gives you health, and if you die from your cells failing, could gold compunding give you unlimited or and extended lifespan?

36 minutes ago, Treamayne said:

BLUF: No.

Most healing in the Cosmere (like Gold) is based on making the Physical Self match the Spiritual Self - but your Spiritweb knows how old you are (or should be - just ask Rashek) and many of those things are a normal part of aging, so Gold would not see it as something that needs to be healed. It's a normal part of your Spiritweb. 
WoBs:

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Hope that helps

Agree with treamayne, it would also probably be related to how you age slowly, so your identity slowly changes with your aging.

[Duxredux he/him]

I would say it would probably give you a longer than average lifespan but that's it. You'll still die of old age, but at the peak of physical health. All the other things than normally would make you kick the bucket, barring having your metalminds stripped from you and executed, wouldn't be a problem at all. If you did have longer life... it would be as a spindly incapable geriatric like TLR who was still alive up until getting stabbed through the heart if I remember right. Not a great option.

[Creation he/him]

But, would it cure, for example, cancer, addictions, and diseases? (if they aren't genetic)

Edited October 22, 2025 by Creation

[Xanpheon]

16 hours ago, Creation said:

But, would it cure, for example, cancer, addictions, and diseases? (if they aren't genetic)

Fairly explicitly, yes. 

F-Gold is somewhat typical in how it exerts the healing. Provided those conditions are not part of the person's "ideal self", it would help treat and/or even remove the effects from the user.

For example, for addiction (Stormlight Archive spoilers):
 

Spoiler

While Teft was still struggling with the emotions that caused him to rely on the Firemoss, the physical effects of the addiction and weaning himself from it were significantly lessened by being able to draw in Stormlight. Now, admittedly, part of this is Phendorana keeping him on track, so there's still a mental element to the addiction that Stormlight doesn't seem to be able to 100% fix, but still.

Diseases and cancer though, 100%. Since Wayne explicitly heals from any diseases he suffers from as a result of storing his "Health" almost as soon as he stops storing it, it's a reasonable inference that it can strengthen your resilience to them and also considering we have confirmation that it can actually transition someone who identifies as a different gender than they were born with if their self-image is different from their physical body, cancer isn't particularly out there.

[Nitpicking]

I don't think anyone answered the original question. The Lord Ruler, and then Marsh, delayed their deaths by the very difficult and expensive method of compounding atium. Atium ferrings can store youth in their metalmind, then burn it to gain enough youth to live for centuries.

[Creation he/him]

Okay, thanks

[Nitpicking]

I feel like correcting myself: atium ferrings (or full feruchemists) who are also atium mistings (or Mistborn) can compound atium.