I don't think Marsh needs more Atium

[Pechvarry]

Assumptions:

Preservation can power allomancy directly (though Vin distinctly did not give Elend Atium-juice).

Ruin can power Hemalurgic manifestations of the other 2 arts.

Conclusion:

Harmony can fuel anything that touches his mist, if he wills it.  Such as for his right hand man.

 

Marsh can definitely burn atium.  If he also had an Atium Feruchemy spike, he could store age in it, and then stand in the mists (with Harmony's blessing), and burn fake-atium (fakium?) to Compound his age, storing the extra in his 2 Atium spikes as he goes.  

 

One misty night every few weeks takes years off ol' Ironeyes.

 

What am I missing?

[king of nowhere]

I think harmony, being a god, can just make marsh younger without needing atium or compounding.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Giving Marsh atium kills two bird with one stone.

[Nepene he/him]

Harmony isn't fond of direct intervention, and as such probably prefers that Marsh do it on his own.

[Pechvarry]

But that requires a way to introduce atium back into the world. Creating a well or pits -- that's a lot more meddling than just juicing Marsh directly.

And to be clear, I DO believe Marsh is Sazed's right hand man. Which is worth mist-juicing.

[Voidus]

Marsh can definitely burn atium.  If he also had an Atium Feruchemy spike, he could store age in it, and then stand in the mists (with Harmony's blessing), and burn fake-atium (fakium?) to Compound his age, storing the extra in his 2 Atium spikes as he goes.  

The fake Atium would have to be invested with Marshes feruchemical age for him to compound with it, you couldn't store an attribute in a metalmind, then burn some random other metal source to compound

I'd see it more as Marsh just not depleting his feruchemical charge when in the Mists.

[Nepene he/him]

But that requires a way to introduce atium back into the world. Creating a well or pits -- that's a lot more meddling than just juicing Marsh directly.

And to be clear, I DO believe Marsh is Sazed's right hand man. Which is worth mist-juicing.

 

March has a good storage.

 

He probably won't need more until the second trilogy at least. And then there probably will be some more atium.

[Phantom Monstrosity]

The fake Atium would have to be invested with Marshes feruchemical age for him to compound with it, you couldn't store an attribute in a metalmind, then burn some random other metal source to compound

I'd see it more as Marsh just not depleting his feruchemical charge when in the Mists.

Sazed could just top up the atiumminds to full.

[Observer]

Harmony  has more Ruin in it than Preservation, and because of this needs to vent off the extra Ruin. Whether he fills Marsh's metalminds or Bippity Boppity Boos some atium into existence isn't overly relevant. Where else would Harmony spend that investure?

 

Edited for clarity

Edited May 31, 2013 by Observer

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Harmony  has more Ruin in it than Preservation, and because of this needs to vent off the extra Ruin. Whether he fills Marsh's metalminds or Bippity Boppity Boos some atium into existence isn't overly relevant. Where else would Harmony spend that investure?

 

I'm sure he can find something to occupy his time

 

[Duskshard he/him]

Atium isn't needed for Marsh to be immortal, he's got gold and he can compound that.

 

I know it says in AOL that compounding gold doesn't make Miles immortal, but that's just wrong. If someone was to constantly heal themselves at the rate the Miles does then atium becomes redundant in regards to immortality because they would never grow old in the first place. You would stay the same age as you were when you started to constantly heal yourself.

 

Storing age in atium would then only be useful if you wanted to change your appearance by changing your age.

 

Which then poses the question, then why did the LR use atium to achieve immortality instead of gold?

 

Well obviously the real answer would be because Brandon needed a clever way for Vin to defeat the LR, but my rationalization would be that the LR didn't realize that constantly drawing on a healing charge would stop him from aging as well, and so only tapped healing when he needed it.

 

OR.

 

Ruin gave him a nudge in the direction of using atium to store age knowing that by doing so the LR would be creating a weakness that could one day be used to defeat him.      

[Senor Feesh]

Or, as has been theorised, gold-healing is dependent on other factors as well (such as your perception of yourself), otherwise Sazed could have de-eunuch'd himself. Perhaps the user's perception of their own age is also a factor, so you still age normally, just incredibly healthily.

 

This has been a topic of some heavy theorising, I'm sure Kurkistan can point to some relevant threads

[Duskshard he/him]

Or, as has been theorised, gold-healing is dependent on other factors as well (such as your perception of yourself), otherwise Sazed could have de-eunuch'd himself. Perhaps the user's perception of their own age is also a factor, so you still age normally, just incredibly healthily.

 

This has been a topic of some heavy theorising, I'm sure Kurkistan can point to some relevant threads

 

 

 

I'm critical of gold healing because it not only heals you at an accelerated rate, but it also regenerates the body in a way that not even accelerated healing would allow. (people just don't re-grow body parts no matter how fast they heal)

 

However, even taking the unnatural regeneration ability that's being put together with accelerated healing, Sazed wouldn't of been able to regrow his package. He was made a eunuch as a baby and the wound was long since healed before he became a keeper and learned to store health.

Now even though I don't like the whole regeneration aspect, I'm willing to accept it on fresh wounds such as a blown of finger so long as there is enough health stored in the metalmind to do it.

What I won't accept however is the ability to use stored health to regenerate wounds that have already healed over and are now a scare.

 

Plus, perception has nothing to do with it. If you're constantly healing at that rate then the cells in your body aren't going to break down, so you won't age.

It doesn't matter if you perceive yourself to be 500 years old, your body will still look like that of a 30 year old if that was the age you started to use healing constantly.  

[Phantom Monstrosity]

You could just as easily argue that gold healing 'should' cause rapid aging, since each cell goes through more divisions.

There is definitely a supernatural element to aging in the cosmere; for instance, young children on Nalthis have noticably stronger Breaths than old men.

[Duskshard he/him]

If you're constantly drawing a healing power that's both healing and regenerative then the cells wouldn't decay and age, so you won't either. The same way Miles doesn't need to breath because his healing won't let the cells in his lungs break down and die.

 

I've only read Mistborn and Stormlight so far, so I don't really know what mean about breaths in your second sentence.    

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Warbreaker reference

Anyway, gold healing routinely creates matter out of nothing. What determines how the freshly created cells'should' look? It clearly isn't based on the cells next to them - since otherwise you'd end up with gold cancer. Trying to make aging out as strictly a matter of healable damage isn't that profitable as a means of inquiry; there has to be a template, and there's pretty good evidence the template shifts over time.

And the Lord Ruler knew how feruchemy works, and there's no reason he'd compound atium instead of gold if gold worked like that. Same with sazed and marsh; we know marsh needed to have an atium spike for immortality.

Also, gold feruchemy heals shardblade wounds, so it really isn't vaguely biological

[Duskshard he/him]

Gold healing doesn't create matter out of nothing, matter can't be created out of nothing, it's created out of the energy in the metalmind.

Of course a cell could model itself on a cell next to it without you ending up with cancer. (cancer couldn't even survive in someone tapping that much healing)

Drawing that much healing effectively puts your body into a sort of perfect stasis and whenever it's knocked out of that state it's instantly drawn back to how it was.

You can't have a system of healing that's so perfect, that as long as you have enough healing stored that it will instantly heal a bullet to the face and lets you live without breathing but yet the body breaks down on a cellular level. It just doesn't make sense.

The Lord Ruler knew how feruchemy worked, but didn't know about compounding and atium until the Well, and if he found out that atium was specifically for holding age then he maybe he could of overlooked the potential of gold to achieve the same result. Or as I said before the decision to use atium could of been influenced by Ruin.

I do realize that this isn't how Brandon has created his world and that gold is for healing wounds and atium is for age and immortality, It just doesn't make sense to me so I have to rationalize it so that it does otherwise these little things really bug me.

Gold feruchemy heals shardblade wounds? How could you know this, it's from two different worlds. I haven't watched or read any interviews from Brandon, so all I really know is what I've got from the books. Is it Brandon that's said this?

Edited June 16, 2013 by Duskshard

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Gold healing doesn't create matter out of nothing, matter can't be created out of nothing, it's created out of the energy in the metalmind.

The point is that you end up with significantly more pounds of Miles than you started with; he isn't going to starve to death because he regenerated an arm.  It's celar that normal cellural mechanisms of growth aren't being invoked.

Of course a cell could model itself on a cell next to it without you ending up with cancer. (cancer couldn't even survive in someone tapping that much healing)

Drawing that much healing effectively puts your body into a sort of perfect stasis and whenever it's knocked out of that state it's instantly drawn back to how it was.

But how does the healing know what a cell's DNA 'should' look like? 

 

As far as realmatic theory goes, the obvious solution is that it's a soul-based 'ideal' version of some variety.  Basically, the soul has a template, and healing causes the body to conform with it.  Otherwiese there'd be issues with (for example) inquisitors rejecting their hemalurgic spikes, like how Miles' flesh spits bullets back out.  There's similar stuff going on with the Returned from Warbreaker, and (to an extent) the Heod from Elantris.

 

If you end up cutting a bloodmaker into pieces, the piece with the soul is the only bit that regenerates.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/18u4tg/i_got_a_chance_to_chat_with_my_favorite_author/c8ozega?context=3#c8inben

About Miles from Alloy of Law and his regenerative powers. If he was bisected down the middle and the halves were separated immediately before the healing process could begin, would the two halves each regrow into a whole Miles?

Good question. In all of the cosmere's Shard-based magics, the greater portion of a bisected body regrows the lesser portion. If it were done EXACTLY halfway, the soul wold jump to one or the other randomly and that would regrow.

Amusingly, this first came up in 1999, six years before I got published. (I see someone else already mentioned the situation where I had to consider it.)

 

 

The Lord Ruler knew how feruchemy worked, but didn't know about compounding and atium until the Well, and if found out that atium was specifically for holding age then he maybe he could of overlooked the potential of gold to achieve the same result. Or as I said before the decision to use atium could of been influenced by Ruin.

He learned about all sixteen of the metals at the well - including ones that were impossible to create with the technology at the time.  Given that he was able to precisely modify bacterial metabolisms, I think it's safe to say his knowledge of biology was sufficient so that he wouldn't have overlooked an easier method of gaining immortality.

 

Gold feruchemy heals shardblade wounds? How could you know this, it's from two different worlds. I haven't watched or read any interviews from Brandon, so all I really know is what I've got from the books. Is it Brandon that's said this?

 

There's a ton of additional information in interviews and other novels.  This particular piece came from the reddit Ask Me Anything earlier this year.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1ced7z/iamstilla_novelist_named_brandon_sanderson_ama/c9hh5j1?context=3#s
2) Does a limb that has been "severed" by a Shardblade have any Hemalurgic bindpoints? If the same limb was then cut off more conventionally, would a Bloodmaker ferring be able to grow it back?

Brandon:
2) A severed Shardblade limb needs repair to the soul before it would function again. A Bloodmaker would be able to heal it without needing to grow it back.

[Duskshard he/him]

That quote at the end of your post actually clears up some of the issues I've had with how the healing system works.

 

So if healing not only effects the body, but the soul, are you saying that the soul acting as a template is whats used to regenerate the body to how the soul remembers it to be, and that the soul ages affecting how the body looks. In other words in this universe people don't age because of biological degradation but as a reflection of the age of ones soul?

 

Have I understood that right of am I complete of base?  

 

If that's how it works then my issues about gold have just disappeared.

 

Although it does pose the question, if the body needs the souls template to regenerate, then how is the soul able to heal from a shardblade if that template has been severed?

Edited June 16, 2013 by Duskshard

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Although it does pose the question, if the body needs the souls template to regenerate, then how is the soul able to heal from a shardblade if that template has been severed?

 

Honestly, that part's kinda weird, best explanation I can come up with is that the shardblade cuts the body and soul apart, rather than actually damaging the soul (Szeth's explanation is 'A Shardblade did not cut living flesh; it severed the soul itself.' - so there's room for that interpretation, though I'm not sure how much people in universe know about how shardblades work on a realmatic level.  Pity the ars arcanum doesn't have it - but Words Of Radiance is supposed to show us how shardblades are made, so we'll probably have more info there).  So the feruchemical gold would just be reestablishing the connection. 

 

You can apprently do really weird things by messing with the links between realms - mistwraiths are humans who have a block between the two realms, and if 'turns you into a jellyfish' is a possible outcome for messing with realm links, 'makes your arm useless' seems pretty small potatoes.  But that's just my guess; shardblades are kinda weird.

 

Here's the cite on mistwraiths.

 

http://www.17thshard.com/forum/topic/2383-qa-with-brandon-sanderson/?p=42374

How intelligent is a mistwraith? Could you raise and train mistwraiths like dogs or horses, controlling what forms they take by the bones you give them? Would you be able to train yourself a horsewraith steed by giving it only the bones of a horse?

This is feasible. One thing to keep in mind is that mistwraiths are people who have a blockage between the physical and the cognitive realm, messing with their ability to think. Think of them as mentally-stunted people. There's enough there to train, but then you have to dig into the ethics of it...

 

Then again, it's also possible that the 'body template' is spiritual realm, and the shardblade cuts into the cognitive bit of the soul, or the template is cognitive and the shardblade cuts the spiritual bit.  I find the difference between cognitive and spiritual is kinda fuzzy in a lot of cases, and though some people have fairly well-developed theories, I don't think we really have a lot of data.

Edited June 16, 2013 by Phantom Monstrosity

[Duskshard he/him]

That seem like as good an explanation as any. It does say sever the soul and not destroy it, so it stand to reason that if a shardblade cut through someones wrist then a part of the soul will be trapped in the hand. 

 

So we can say that if a shardblade severs a limb, then it is severing the spiritual aspect of the soul from the cognitive aspect and feruchemy can be used to reconnect the spiritual to the cognitive. 

[Phantom Monstrosity]

Maybe.  I expect we'll get a lot more clues in Words of Radiance.  I just hope those clues aren't part of the 650 pages that get cut from the first draft