Do hemalergic spikes contain Preservation's or Ruin's investiture?

[The Living Avo]

When you spike an allomancer, you should be storing Preservation's investiture. Why then are the Mists and the Well of Ascension repelled by hemalergy? Does the investiture somehow become Ruin's?

[Mystfall He/Him]

3 minutes ago, The Living Avo said:

When you spike an allomancer, you should be storing Preservation's investiture. Why then are the Mists and the Well of Ascension repelled by hemalergy? Does the investiture somehow become Ruin's?

Pretty much yes. We know Allomancy is of preservation, Hemalurgy is of Ruin, and Feruchemy is both.(Allomancy is end positive, power is gained. Hemalurgy is end negative, power is lost. And feruchemy is end neutral, power is neither lost nor gained) Anyways, Hemalurgy is of Ruin, and that’s what the Mists are reacting too. Ruins influence through his art. Ruin is essentially, through Hemalurgy, corrupting(in the eyes of the original power) it.(think of it similarly to enlightened Spren on Roshar) when I use hemalurgy to steal pewter, I’m not using Preservations power to burn pewter, I’m using Ruins. 

[The Living Avo]

2 hours ago, Mystfall said:

Pretty much yes. We know Allomancy is of preservation, Hemalurgy is of Ruin, and Feruchemy is both.(Allomancy is end positive, power is gained. Hemalurgy is end negative, power is lost. And feruchemy is end neutral, power is neither lost nor gained) Anyways, Hemalurgy is of Ruin, and that’s what the Mists are reacting too. Ruins influence through his art. Ruin is essentially, through Hemalurgy, corrupting(in the eyes of the original power) it.(think of it similarly to enlightened Spren on Roshar) when I use hemalurgy to steal pewter, I’m not using Preservations power to burn pewter, I’m using Ruins. 

The part about using Ruin's power to fuel Allomancy makes sense. I'm still confused as to whose investiture is charging the spike. Is the investiture's Shardic Intent (if that makes sense. I forget if that's the right term.) flipped from Preservation to Ruin? Is it Preservation plus a bit of Ruin? I guess I just don't understand what Corruption means in the Cosmere. Like I have the same questions for Glys. (Is he made of Honor/Cultivation, Odium or all three?)

[Mystfall He/Him]

21 minutes ago, The Living Avo said:

The part about using Ruin's power to fuel Allomancy makes sense. I'm still confused as to whose investiture is charging the spike. Is the investiture's Shardic Intent (if that makes sense. I forget if that's the right term.) flipped from Preservation to Ruin? Is it Preservation plus a bit of Ruin? I guess I just don't understand what Corruption means in the Cosmere. Like I have the same questions for Glys. (Is he made of Honor/Cultivation, Odium or all three?)

I believe it’s preservation and ruin, and the mists don’t like the ruin part. And Glys is all three I think 

[The Living Avo]

Ok thanks. I just found a WoB on Corruption.

Quote

Roger

As I understand it, red is a sign of corruption in the cosmere. I just reread The Emperor's Soul, and it mentioned wisps of red smoke when Shai tests the Soulstamps. Does this mean she is corrupting Gaotona's soul?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, that is what that means. Corruption doesn't have to have the negative connotation, right? Basically, it means an outside influence is changing the Spiritual nature of the soul. And, yeah, that's exactly what is happening right there. Now, I would call that a pretty good thing, but... like, all of those things, where she is playing with someone's soul, and changing it, and changing their past, and things like this. This is, by cosmere definition, corrupting someone's soul. That's expressly what it is.

YouTube Livestream 10 (June 18, 2020)

 

It isn't the clearest, but I think this means Corruption means you're adding additional, foreign investiture. For example, I think Autonomy was Corrupting Harmony by investing him. (somehow)

[Returned he/him]

Hemalurgy is more about the action of spiking and less about what is stolen via the spike. Creating a hemalurgic spike that steals an Invested Art tears away a part of a person's spiritweb/soul and stores it in the spike. The tearing and theft/diminishment of the spiritweb/soul is the ruinous thing, not whatever the spike stores, and that's what the mists are recoiling from. The spike is always ruinous in the same sense that Allomancy is always drawing on Preservation's power via an enhanced connection to that Shard, and what it steals is part of the person who was spiked rather than a piece of Preservation itself. It's also worth noting that the mists don't seem to recoil from Mistwraiths or Kandra even though they are fundamentally hemalurgic creations. Unless I'm forgetting something, or it's just not highlighted in the narration. So either there is more to it or there is some imprecision at play.

I'm not sure that a hemalurgist uses Ruin's Investiture to fuel Allomancy (I don't recall any commentary that supports it offhand, though it's late and I'm tired so I might just be blanking), and that wouldn't be consistent with at least some other applications. A feruchemist who gained their power through Hemalurgy still has to fuel it exclusively with their own attributes, someone who stole a Radiant bond would (presumably) still need Stormlight (or other, loose Investiture) to use their powers, etc., and spike-derived Allomancy seems identical to "natural" Allomancy. I don't think that corruption is related either, though we have seen some hemalurgists who were also corrupted. The stolen bit of spiritweb/soul is what it always was, there is just a bit less of it due to loss inherent to the process. That said, there is a lot about Hemalurgy that we don't know so I'm not too comfortable saying it definitely is or is not some particular way.

If you're deathly allergic to peanut butter, and someone slathers the outside of a box in peanut butter, you would probably avoid touching the box. What's inside the box is totally unrelated to that aversion.

Edited 9 hours ago by Returned

[PanLin they/he]

13 hours ago, The Living Avo said:

When you spike an allomancer, you should be storing Preservation's investiture. Why then are the Mists and the Well of Ascension repelled by hemalergy? Does the investiture somehow become Ruin's?

The spike itself draws on Ruin's Investiture to create a hemalurgic spike. Hemalurgy is a destructive power that forcibly rips chunks of spiritweb off the target; both the Investiture itself and the method by which it works are repellent to Preservation.

Hemalurgy, as Ruin's Invested Art, inherently corrupts and damages everything it touches, even if what it's holding onto is a piece of Preservation.

A spike could contain any ability, and the mists would react the same, and they seem to react to hemalurgic constructs, too. From the wiki:

Spoiler

Any Allomancer with a spike will slightly repulse the mists as if they were pushing it away from them.^[27] Additionally, certain Hemalurgic Constructs such as Koloss will sense a "hatred" from the mists.^[28]

 

12 hours ago, Mystfall said:

when I use hemalurgy to steal pewter, I’m not using Preservations power to burn pewter, I’m using Ruins. 

This isn't true—the hemalurgy itself is Ruin's power. When you use it to steal an allomantic ability, you're stealing the part of the target's spiritweb that contains the innate piece of Preservation's soul that allows for allomancy. When you graft that spike to yourself and use the allomantic ability, you're still using Preservation's power; it's just a stolen power.

Edited 1 hour ago by PanLin

[The Living Avo]

This is more of a tangent, but why is Harmonium so unstable, but Scadrian spirit-webs are not. Are they like grandfathered in from a time when the shards were friendlier to each other? Also, why would the Mists be repulsed by hemalergy, but not the investiture you get from preservation when burning a metal. Is it because the Mists are more sentiant?