Vin metabolising metalminds

[GoWibble he/him]

Do we have info about lift hacking into metalminds / changing them into Investiture (through her hack via Nightwatcher)? Major levels of it if so. She could be so awesome...

[Calderis he/him]

Lift has to be able to metabolize something to convert it to investiture. 

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Argent

Does Lift turn food into Investiture directly or is it similar to the metals on--

Brandon Sanderson

Similar to the metals.

Argent

So like a gate?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes.

Argent

Okay, that's good to know.

Brandon Sanderson

She can metabolize-- She can draw-- It's not actually the food, it's-- It's not like the metals, not exactly. It's not-- What she can do is she can metabolize into Investiture instead of sugar. Does that make sense?

Argent

Yeah.

Brandon Sanderson

We metabolize food into sugar. She can metabolize it into Investiture. Does that make sense?

Argent

That makes a lot of sense. So if she eats--

Brandon Sanderson

She's got to have a blood sugar spike.

Argent

So if she eats like a cake it will give her more Investiture--

Brandon Sanderson

Faster. It will give her faster.

Argent

Whereas if she eats a vegetable...

Brandon Sanderson

Vegetable... More calories is going to equal more. But the better comparison would be a sausage and bread. Because bread is a fast blood sugar spike and the sausage is not. And that's how I'm working in my head. It's kind of a magical version of a blood sugar spike and I have it happen to her faster than it could happen. Like normally you eat a piece of bread and your blood sugar spikes in a half hour, it's going to go faster for Lift.

Argent

Hers is like five minutes.

Brandon Sanderson

Hers is like five minutes, but a sausage would be slower.

Firefight Chicago signing (Feb. 20, 2015)

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Ted Herman (paraphrased)

 Can Lift convert cremling shells to Investiture? 

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

She can only convert what she is able to metabolize for nutrients to Investiture.

Arcanum Unbounded Hoboken signing (Dec. 3, 2016)

And the Investiture in a metalmind would still be keyed to someone else. 

[Weltall]

Lift can only convert things her body can normally consume into Investiture. That means she can't swallow a metalmind or even a bead of atium (which is condensed Investiture) and convert the metal and/or the Investiture within it and use it. Doesn't work that way.

Quote

Ted Herman (paraphrased)

 Can Lift convert cremling shells to Investiture? 

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

She can only convert what she is able to metabolize for nutrients to Investiture.

Arcanum Unbounded Hoboken signing (Dec. 3, 2016)

EDIT: Wow, simultaneous posting xD

Edited October 16, 2019 by Weltall

[GoWibble he/him]

What if it is unkeyed, and remember the possible hack?

[Wingshard]

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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)

(The highlight for emphasise is my own)

(Assuming that the hack mentioned in the WoB above is what you are referring to when saying) 

1 hour ago, GoWibble said:

What if it is unkeyed, and remember the possible hack?

 It would seem that the hack in question is more an interaction between magic systems which may very well exist between Feruchemy and Surgebinding then on with Lifts particular ability to metabolize food into Investiture due to the aforementioned WoB which states the following.

 

Quote

 

Ted Herman(paraphrased)

 Can Lift convert cremling shells to Investiture? 

Brandon Sanderson(paraphrased)

She can only convert what she is able to metabolize for nutrients to Investiture.

Arcanum Unbounded Hoboken signing (Dec. 3, 2016)

 

Therefore it would seem that Lift's metabolization does not affect Metalminds, even if they are unkeyed, as she can only convert nutrient's into Investiture which a Metalmind is almost certainly not. Perhaps her increased presence in the Cognitive Realm could have some effect but seemingly Metalminds and the metabolization of nutrients into Investiture do not interact.

[Karger he/him]

1 hour ago, GoWibble said:

What if it is unkeyed, and remember the possible hack?

Still no.  Sorry.  She is not native to scadrial and is not an alomancer.

[Config2]

So if Lift was an Allomancer, with the ability to metabolize metal into investiture, she could metabolize an unkeyed (I think this is the right term) metalmind. That wouldn't be different from Miles' compounding his Gold metalminds. She wouldn't be using atium, which has special properties as a godmetal, so she couldn't do the ageless hack detailed above.

However, her ability is to metabolize nutrients into investiture (Brandon is a little unclear on the biology here, but essentially he is saying that the chemical energy that is stored in organic molecules can be converted from its chemically stored state to investiture, in Lift's case). 

Basically, her ability is to surgebinding what burning metals is to allomancy. That doesn't imply that she can suddenly burn metals to power surgebinding, or food to power allomancy. Feruchemy isn't really a part of that hack, so much as it is operating normally, but the person using it has access to much greater quantities of the attributes. 

I.E: Lord Ruler fills a metal mind with his youth, lets say a year, which is normal for feruchemy (he is now one year older than his actual age). He then ingests the metalmind, and burns it. Allomancy is net positive, so he would now be younger by more than the year he stored (he is now some amount younger than his actual age, however much over a year he got from burning his metalmind). He then stores the more than a year youth into a different metalmind (he is back to his starting age, with some amount of youth stored). He can then repeat this process, except now when he stores the year at the beginning, he is adding it to the stored reservoir of youth that he has, meaning that the extra gets multiplied also.

The reason he can't live for ever, just for a very long time, is that the rate at which his youth is consumed in order to maintain the physical aspects of youth increases as his actual spiritual age moves away from his physical age. Eventually he would have to be storing an burning constantly to just maintain his age, because he was burning through it so quickly. This last bit is what is special about Atium as a metalmind; the rate of usage is determined by more than his intent, but also his spiritual aspect. It ultimately makes even this hack decay, which fits with the shards original essence (ruin and entropy). If he was able to do this burning of atium perfectly with no downtime between storing and burning the metal, then he could live forever, but would spend 100% of his time storing and burning.

 

If Lift had an ability that was the same as feruchemy, but for food (she could hold a sausage, store stormlight in it, and then draw the stormlight out without eating it, like a sphere), then she could do the same hack, but with stormlight, but just for the amount of stormlight she was holding. It wouldn't change her age. She would have to have an ability similar to feruchemy with food, with the ability to store youth in the food. 

As far as we know, she has neither of those abilities. We aren't even sure if she can store stormlight in a sphere, burn through stored nutrients (like fat), or if her conversion is 100% efficient.