compounding I'm a bit confused on compounding

[That1GuySpencer]

So, in compounding does one burn the power stored inside of a metalmind or does one burn the metalmind itself. In Alloy of law, Wax claims that Miles needs lots of gold for his constant compounding, this leads me to believe that its the latter; at the end of Alloy of law, it says that they removed all of Miles' metalminds so that he couldn't heal himself. I'm just a bit confused, and I have only read era 1 and Alloy of law.

Edited July 13, 2020 by That1GuySpencer
Confusing wording

[Darkfinder she/her]

They burn the power in the metalminds and then store the power in a metalmind to get consistent healing.

Edited July 13, 2020 by Darkfinder

[Frustration]

So basically when you store in a piece of metal you change what it gives you when burnt. So you do need to burn it, but you can then take that attribute and store it as well.

[Karger he/him]

The process of storing power in a metal effectively changes the metal itself.  For gold it turns from regular gold(burning gives visions of the past) to invested healing gold(burning heals).  Miles uses his feruchemical bloodmaker abilities to create invested healing gold metalminds and then burns them with his misting augur ability.  Burning depletes his stock of gold which is why he always needs more.

[Halyo_Alex he/him]

3 hours ago, Karger said:

The process of storing power in a metal effectively changes the metal itself.  For gold it turns from regular gold(burning gives visions of the past) to invested healing gold(burning heals).  Miles uses his feruchemical bloodmaker abilities to create invested healing gold metalminds and then burns them with his misting augur ability.  Burning depletes his stock of gold which is why he always needs more.

Also important to note is that the whole process bypasses the usual issue of conflicting identity with metalminds, which is why Vin couldn't burn Sazed's Pewtermind for feruchemical strength.

[datalaughing he/him]

It's probably easier to picture when thinking about compounding age than it is when compounding health. Era 1 spoiler (since initial post says you've only read Alloy of Law):

Spoiler

So The Lord Ruler stores some age in an Atium metalmind and then burns that metalmind to get that stored age back ten-fold. But he wouldn't want that age back all at once, right? Allomancy gives all the energy to you over however long it takes to burn the metal (and Atium burns quick). You don't want to spend an hour looking 10 years older and then get all that back in one burst, because you'd look 600 years younger for one minute or something like that (I didn't do the actual math). That would be bad. I don't know what would even happen if you got so much youth back that you became younger than your age at birth. So he takes most of that huge burst of age and funnels it back into another Atium metalmind to store up for later. Then he has an enormous pool of age he can tap into from that newly-filled metalmind.

Same thing with Miles and his healing. 

Edited July 13, 2020 by datalaughing

[trav]

Miles takes feruchemical gold and burns it. which uses the feruchemical effect and fuels it with allomancy. the gold is used up in this process. burned. this increases the effectiveness of the feruchemical attribute. he can store 1 health and get 10 back.

if he does so while already healthy he can simply store the 10 health in another gold mind. rinse repeat. near infinite health at the cost of a bit of gold.