Fercuhemy Musings

[baby he/him]

Could feruchemy be used to store other forms of investiture like Stormlight or breath?

[Bort he/him]

Yup. A Nicrosil ferring can store investiture, Stormlight and Breaths both being examples of investiture.

Edited September 28, 2015 by Bort

[Yata he/him]

Could feruchemy be used to store other forms of investiture like Stormlight or breath?

Like Bort says the Nicrosil ferring (or feruchemist) could do this. But he must have a way to have other type of investiture.

With the breath is quite simple, someone could give to you and you can put in the metalmind, but is quite useless because the Breath could be put in any object. But Using the Feruchemy you could storage and tap it without Command.

With the Stormlight is more difficoult because a standard man could absorb Stormlight. You have to be a Surgebinder or something like and together a Ferring to do something like that.

I want to add at the list also the Mist (black or white) but this is quite at Ruin/Preservation/Harmony will to give them to you.

[Moogle]

We do not know that Nicrosil Mistings can store Breaths/Stormlight. It is speculation for the moment.

 

Every other magic system needs to be hacked to work with different types of Investiture. Expecting Feruchemical nicrosil to work to store other Investitures is an unsupported assumption.

 

It is entirely possible that nicrosilminds can only store Feruchemical Investiture, or some other specific type (like your innate Breath-equivalent - note that Nicrosil Ferrings are called Soulbearers).

 

It is premature to say anything with confidence regarding the metal. Brandon has RAFO'd everything to do with Feruchemical nicrosil consistently.

[Yata he/him]

 

Every other magic system needs to be hacked to work with different types of Investiture. Expecting Feruchemical nicrosil to work to store other Investitures is an unsupported assumption.

Sure but we don't know what actually "Hack" mean in the Manifestation of Investiture.

Could be something extreme complex or some quite "easy" like to have access to different Manifestations that could work together.

 

PS: I remember a WoB about the "stormlight and metalmind" without a RAFO answer. I'll try to find it.

[Bort he/him]

According to Coppermind, feruchemical Nicrosil stores investiture.

 

All Scadrial feruchemical metals store investiture - the person using them stores their own attributes into the metal to be tapped later. Only Nicrosil specifies 'investiture', which I would take as the ability to store non-feruchemical investiture. Whether this is the ability to store Breaths, or Stormlight, who knows.

 

Also, I didn't specify that it would be simple. It may even be that Nicrosil feruchemy is the hack that allows people to use other types of investiture.

 

I do think that in order to store investiture, the person will need to be able to draw in and use said investiture already, so, a Radiant feruchemist could use Nicrosil to store Stormlight, but a standard feruchemist would need a workaround. Like I said though, this is just a personal belief.

Edited September 28, 2015 by Bort

[Moogle]

...

 

I took issue with you directly saying "yup" as an answer to Once-ler's question. I interpreted your post to mean "yes, Nicrosil Ferrings can store Breath and Stormlight because those are Investiture and they store Investiture" - which is, in my opinion, guaranteeing it's possible. I apologize if that's not what you meant.

[bluepotion he/him]

So if a soulbearer (Nicrosil Ferring) was to become a sliver of a shard by temporarily having excess to a large chunk of that shards power, such as taking up the power at the well of ascension, would he/she be able to store that power in his/her metalmind(s)?

 

​Since shardpools are literally liquid Investiture I see no reason the soulbearer wouldn't be able to.  However this brings up more questions, such as.  How much nicrosil would it take to store that much Investiture? And, if the well of ascension had been stored inside of nicrosil metalminds would the power still come back in the same amount of time (1024 years)? (I believe that it would reform since there never seemed a limit of atium that formed from the pits, even when most of it was being held by the kandra and not being used).  If the power did reform and instead of soulbearer we had someone like the Lord Ruler, who would be capable of compounding atium for youth and live indefinitely, how much of preservation could this person lock away if they took and stored the power of the well away multiple times?  with enough time I don't see why the entirety of a shard could't be locked away, given that the person had enough nicrosil.

 

I know that there are no real answers to most of these questions since so little is known about both nicrosil and shards/shard pools, but these are just a few of the crazy thoughts going through my head

Edited September 29, 2015 by bluepotion

[Yata he/him]

So if a soulbearer (Nicrosil Ferring) was to become a sliver of a shard by temporarily having excess to a large chunk of that shards power, such as taking up the power at the well of ascension, would he/she be able to store that power in his/her metalmind(s)?

If the Nicrosil may really work in this way, that isn't sure but I think It does. Is probably what Rashek does.

I dont' think that you could take a "large piece of shard's power" without using something like "a big mountain of metal", but also a tiny part had an Huge amount of Investiture.

 

But if you take "a part" of Well's power. That part aren't came back within the remain power of the Well, unless you had used from your metalmind.

The reason to the Kandra's treasure was to remove that atium from the Pits-cycle. Now that all his Atium is used. The Pit will produce a lot of Atium, or at least if Harmony doesn't mess with the Pits. 

[Oudeis he/him]

So if a soulbearer (Nicrosil Ferring) was to become a sliver of a shard by temporarily having excess to a large chunk of that shards power, such as taking up the power at the well of ascension, would he/she be able to store that power in his/her metalmind(s)?

 

​Since shardpools are literally liquid Investiture I see no reason the soulbearer wouldn't be able to.  However this brings up more questions, such as.  How much nicrosil would it take to store that much Investiture? And, if the well of ascension had been stored inside of nicrosil metalminds would the power still come back in the same amount of time (1024 years)? (I believe that it would reform since there never seemed a limit of atium that formed from the pits, even when most of it was being held by the kandra and not being used).  If the power did reform and instead of soulbearer we had someone like the Lord Ruler, who would be capable of compounding atium for youth and live indefinitely, how much of preservation could this person lock away if they took and stored the power of the well away multiple times?  with enough time I don't see why the entirety of a shard could't be locked away, given that the person had enough nicrosil.

 

I know that there are no real answers to most of these questions since so little is known about both nicrosil and shards/shard pools, but these are just a few of the crazy thoughts going through my head

 

Hrm. You seem to be arguing the point in both directions. First you say, if it's stored, the power would still replenish, because it's infinite. But then you say, if you store enough of it, you have all of it, because it's finite. It's one of the two. If it's infinite, you could store it forever and never get the whole Shard, or even enough to matter. If it's finite, then the power is 'trapped', and it won't replenish. Either way, I don't see you able to use this trick to keep collecting the power until you have the whole Shard, even with a mountain of nicrosil.

 

Another point; I'm not sure nicrosil could hold the power of the well. It might be able to hold something. Saying, "nicrosil stores investiture, the Well is investiture, therefore nicrosil can store the well" is a little like saying, "This cage is designed to hold animals, Frank is an animal, therefore the cage will hold him." If the cage is a cat-carrier, and Frank is a silverback gorilla, the first two statements are true, but do not prove the third. If there's anything that has the simple raw power to break its way out of whatever means feruchemy uses to trap something, I'd suspect it's the power of a Shard.

 

As for the mining of atium. A few points. First, we have no idea how quickly it used to condense; all we have is the rate at which it does at the time of the Collapse, which is presumably something near, maybe slightly below, one per week per slave they have. If it was significantly more, the slaves would have a much greater chance of finding them, and they wouldn't die very frequently. Also, and admittedly I'm speculating a bit here, when Kelsier destroyed the mines with iron, he could easily have found any leftover atium waiting to be harvested. He did not come back with fabulous riches, so presumably if there was more to be found, it was a marginal amount.

 

So, my thought is, after at least two thousand years, all the atium, basically, has been found; the reason some of it grows back is, people burn it, and when it's released, it replenishes. I have to look it up; how many guards were there at the Pits? I'm sure they say early in The Final Empire when Vin suggests targetting it with the army. Can we extrapolate from that to a fermi estimation of how many prisoners they'd be guarding, and therefore approximately how much atium they harvest every week (assuming that at least a fraction of them are killed (or just die) each week)? See if that seems like a reasonable number for "the amount of atium every Mistborn across the Final Empire might burn in the average week", keeping in mind that the Lord Ruler has to compound it to give himself a thousand years of age for seven more days, each week.

 

Okay I'm nerd-sniping myself... A thousand years of youth... for seven days... is seven thousand.... year/days? That is the worst unit ever. However, we know that compounding returns an attribute tenfold, meaning however he did it, whatever the mechanism, whether he burns a year, fills a bead with ten years, burns the ten years to get a hundred, over and over, at the end of the day, one way or another he'll have burned the atium for 700 year/days. God I need a better way to say that. In fact, the more recursive his burn, the more atium he'd have to burn. So, assuming he has sufficient stored-youth already to just burn... how much atium would 700 year/days be? I would estimate that at no less than hundreds of beads.

 

So basically, I think the atium isn't being produced forever because the atium is infinite, I think it's being produced to replenish exactly as much as is being burned.

 

Remember, Vin and Ruin are absolutely equal. Not a smidge of difference in their power. Perfectly balanced. Preservation has his power invested in humanity. Ruin's equal amount is tied up in the atium. If it were drawing forever, Ruin would actually be weaker than preservation. But he's not; they're balanced.

 

This is what I feel a lot of people don't get about the atium. It's not about the physical atium; it's about the cycle. A chunk of Ruin's power has been removed, and placed into a system. Through the mechanism of the Pits, this power collects in physical form. Burning it allomantically releases the power and send it back to the 'pool' from which atium condences. If this were not the case, the army of Seers at the end of Hero of Ages would have been giving atium's power right back to Ruin, but they weren't.

 

But the rest of your idea is solid.