From Reddit: Creating a Shardblade on Scadrial

[Raykoda]

As I was perusing through Reddit, I found this this comment by /u/pervyfguy69 about abusing the magics of Allomancy and Feruchemy to create a Nightblood or Shardblade-like weapon.  I thought that these fine forums, being the obviously more cosmereically (???) enlightened portion of the interwebs would like to take a gander at his thought experiment.  

Also please note that there are some mild spoilers for OB within that comment, and the thread.  (Hopefully) you have been warned.

Here's an edited version without these mild spoilers, for those still not inished the book:

Spoiler

Beware long post incoming (also I'm kind of proud of this thought experiment so if /u/mistborn were to chime in on its validity then that would be super chill. sorry to keep invoking you, Oathbringer got me hype):

A shardblade cuts the spiritweb of an object or, in Nightblood's case, cuts on all three planes of existence; spiritual, cognitive, and physical. So whereas a Shardblade cuts the essence of an object on a spiritual level, Nightblood obliterates the object by destroying its physical form, its soul, and its idea of itself. 

Moving on to the task at hand we require a heavily invested object capable of cutting on the spiritual (or at least cognitive) plane. Fine. Feruchemy is the only way to invest inanimate objects on Scadrial (of which we are aware, at least). Allomancy will allow us to augment Feruchemy with compounding. For the sake of the thought experiment let us say that we have available to us super-bands of mourning: a macguffin whence we can make use of all 16 Allomantic and Feruchemical abilities. I would suggest as an alternate (more realistic) option that perhaps a kandra with the capacity to use more than two blessings at a time and to use blessings capable of bestowing any Allomantic or Feruchemical trait. However, for the sake of ironing over the the various kinks arising from the question "how do we have access to all these powers" and focusing on the theoretical creation of a shardblade from metallic arts let us for now say that we have an individual like the lord ruler with access to 16/16 Allomantic and Feruchemical abilities.

So first off, we're going to want to compound nicrosil like a mad boss. Cycle through nicrosil metalminds by storing investiture then burning those metalminds to release investiture equal to about ten times the amount stored, then store the released investiture into new metalminds and keep cycling. One could also use duralumin to enhance the burning of the nicrosil metalminds to basically just vacuum up a whole bunch of Investiture.

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If we take a break from sword-making at this point it becomes worth pointing out that given the following rules of Allomancy:

• allomancy acts as a a conduit whereby preservation's Investiture is tapped and used as - essentially - an energy source
• Investiture returns to preservation once used ("like water running over a turbine before returning to the water cycle")
• storing investiture means that you're storing a quantity that would otherwise dissipate back into the "reservoir" that is preservation and therefore interrupting the cycle

One would probably be able to use nicrosil to essentially suck up and store all of preservation by cycling through metalminds enough times. Whether that would turn Harmony/Sazed into Ruin by sucking up all of his better half, suck up all of Harmony now that Preservation and Ruin are conjoined, or even possibly confer upon the bearer of the invested metalmind the capacity to Ascend, is up to subtleties of investiture that have not yet been officially explored.

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Anyhow, back to making this sword. Say we suck up and store an appreciable quantity of Investiture, to the point where we have access now to much greater than the amount of investiture (1000 breaths) used to create Nightblood. Now we're going to tap that Nicrosilmind to supercharge an important step in the process, drawing upon some unconventional methods to try to make a sword believe it's very sharp.

In no particular order we are going to use Nicrosil-enhanced (note, regular nicrosil, not our super-charged nicrosil minds) compounding to store the following qualities in absurd overabundance: strength(pewter), mental speed(zinc), wakefulness(bronze), determination(elctrum), energy(bendalloy), senses(tin), connection(duralumin) and identity(aluminum).

The last thing we will need before going full ham is an Aluminum sword. It is worth noting that aluminum is a relatively soft metal, but we are going to try to change that. In any case, an aluminum sword, sharpened to the highest degree possible.

Now comes the fun part. We are going to treat the aluminum sword as a metalmind, and we are going to use a bunch of the qualities we compounded and stored earlier to do a weird and specific thing. We're going to take all those metalminds that we stored chock full of the aforementioned qualities, powder them, ingest, and then use our supercharged nicrosil to enhance the following burn:

Touching the sword we are going to burn duralumin and electrum to create a situation where we are deeply connected to the sword even to the point of believing we are the sword. Having become the sword on a spiritual level (with just enough identity left to be able to utilize our powers and keep our lofty goal of creating a shardblade in mind), we are going to burn our pewtermind, our zincmind, our bronzemind, our bendalloymind, and our tinmind such that we are the most powerfully alive (energy, wakefulness), strong(pewter) and sharp (mental speed, senses) version of that sword as possible.

Finally, we are going to burn our aluminummind and our super-charged nicrosil-mind to ensure that our identity as a super strong, sharp, living sword is about the most powerful thing in the universe - then we're going to store that identity in the sword.

Now, granted, metalminds are a storage space for investiture, not really useful without a feruchemist to draw from them or store in them. However, this is our experience of metalminds as used by feruchemists without much more than the basic level of Invetiture with which each person is born. I'm willing to bet that fueled by our supernova-esque nicrosil-powered shenanigans, a sword-shaped aluminummind invested with the most powerful sense of being a very sharp, strong, and alive sword will be Nightblood-esque in its qualities. Perhaps even more powerful, as it doesn't necessarily have a will of its own, only the desire to be and belief that it is, able to cut through any part (spiritual, physical, or mental) of any thing - this means it would be easier to use than Nightblood, which requires a lot of fueling.

I welcome all thoughts and critiques - u/Oudeis16  (the op), what say you?

TL;DR use metallic arts to "awaken" an aluminum sword.

Also importantly: according to Brandon himself this "shoots past RAFO territory so far, it can't even see the line from where it's now standing".  

Thoughts?

[Brightlord M. Alhstrom he/him]

Umm. Well, I think if you left a completely filled nicrosil metalmind the size of a sword alone for a bit, it might eventually develop sentience. It depends on how much investiture is actually being stored when storing nicrosil.

Edited December 6, 2017 by Ookla the Altruist

[SpeakoftheDeval]

I think this misinterprets the mechanics of nicrosil  feruchemy- it says that it stores investiture in the ars arcanum but  feruhemy is end neutral so you can't just make investiture with it so what that probably means is it stores the size of the cracks in the spirit web that allow investiture through and thus ability to manipulate investiture 

[+ElephantEarwax he/him]

I think it sounds good. It is well thought out, but he is missing a bit.