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Hoid Theory: He is collecting Shardic Investiture so that he can (attempt to) recombine them into some approximation of whatever Adonalsium's Pre-Shattering Investiture looked like (not breaths or Stormlight but their progenitor), which is the specific brand/flavor of Investiture required to activate this Gem. That might be like trying to recombine a rainbow into White Light, but Magic.. He'd then either be using it as a weapon to vengefully Shatter Odium the way they shattered Adonalsium originally, or perhaps to break a hole through Time or Death (my best guesses for the "Old Rules" he hopes will not stop him).

Stumbled across a random WOB that I think supports this theory that we've just seen co-opted Surgebinding:

I dont think that is quite true (at least for Alomancy, we dont know where feruchemy comes from), the whole function of Lerasium is to permanently modify the Spiritweb. I think Leras was using the Mists (and his more general connection to all Scadrians) to make those manually for each person, not unlike how he could consciously fuel allomancy direcly via the mists rather than burning metals

haha, nice. Lacking any real information, top suspect would be Frost, no?

Rock and Rayse Rayse to be the angry devil all the time, and Rock because he'd then be his equal and entirely immune to his tantrums.

It's certainly possible. There's nothing supernatural about the defense though, it would basically just be a contest of their magical manipulation skills versus your mundane emotional self-awareness. Now if are asking whether any other magics could detect it and tell the difference, I can think of a few possibilities. White Sand operates as a reasonable Investiture detector, so it should indicate that an effect is active, though Im not sure how detailed it can be about the type or source. The Heightening offer an awful lot of sensory enhancement but I dont think it would translate to allomantic pulses. Who knows what's possible with the Door or the unseen Surges.

Thats interesting! Im not sure about the significance of 16 though, I thought that was significant due to the patterns/methods used for the Shattering itself, not something that was significant to Adonalsium directly?

The Unmade are "twisted spren" created by odium, with the appearance of varying degrees of sentience, though the Name strongly implies that they were something else originally that Odium "unmade" and rebuilt for his purposes. They also (occasionally) have fairly distinctive names, which planted a nagging seed in my mind that I want to explore. So: Do we know anything definitive about the origins of the UnMade? Is is possible that the variance we've seen is because they where made from more than one base species? And if so, is there any reason he couldnt have gotten Yolen Natives (Dragons and/or Sho Del) for those base materials? For what it's worth: this was sparked by me mistakenly thinking that "Uli Da" was typically hyphenated the same way several of the Unmade are, and I thought it could a really interesting late-SA reveal to discover that they were not native to Roshar at all but where part of an entourage that Odium carried with him.

I think a big part of the problem is the energy balance of the thing: Matter, Energy, and Investiture are all three facets of the same thing. A typical metal sample has just the normal energy of physical matter, while a godmetal has all that PLUS a massive amount of Investiture Charge because it IS crystallized Investiture. So even if they appear equivalent, the Godmetal has massively more Stuff crammed into it, it's a more dense material. Investiture works similar to that Volume analogy, so the first barrier to Soulcasting it would be to actually get enough free Investiture to equal the target volume of Godmetal, whihc would pretty much just be another Godmetal or captured fluid from a Shardpool. THEN you start getting into the varying nature of Investiture from Shard to Shard, and I dont think we fully understand the mechanisms at play there. Just because you can get enough Investiture from one shard doesnt mean you'd be able to turn that into any specific Godmetal. If you had enough of Preservation's Shardpool you might be able to make Lerasium specifically, but I doubt you could do so with Stormlight or Breaths. And at some point the quantities involved would run the risk of you just Ascending instead.

Based on what you laid out in that other thread, I think that Mateform might also be a form independent of a Spren. There's that line "The Last Legion hadn’t known how to transform into anything other than dullform and mateform, at least not without the help of the gods." If the "gods" are Spren (which seems a common usage with several groups) then she could be saying that those where the two forms that didnt require spren. Geek Sidebar: Which leaves us with one form per classic DnD Ability Score: War=Strength, Work=Constitution, Nimble=Dexterity, Mediation=Wisdom, Scholar=Intelligence, Art=Charisma. Plus the ever-present bardic stat of "I Dont care, if they have genitals I wanna DO them!"

For what it's worth, a relatively popular theory (that Im coming around to these days) is that Nightblood's activation Command ("Destroy Evil", which ended up basically just being "Destroy Some Stuff") used the initial Breaths Investiture to forge a Connection to another Shard, and that "Destroy" as the Command caused the Bond to go to Ruin. We know per WOB that Nightblood is heavily Invested far beyond the Breaths that went into his creation (though no confirmation on if he's just accumulated that investiture by absorption). Also, worth noting that "Black" is not an exclusive color for either Ruin or Odium, so that doesnt confirm or deny anything particular.

Team Cultivation! Seriously, the race of the fodder does not matter in this fight, both races (all three) have and will fight for both sides. Which is, for what it's worth, where I see Nale's logic breaking down.

To the OP: Because Im Greedy Id have to burn some amount of it Pure, if only to allow me to burn any and all Godmetals I may come across later on. Any other decisions or relative usefulness of the metals would be a way more situational decision. If I have access to any Ettmetal, it would make several abilities far more useful. If I have to worry about facing off against other Mistings, Kolos & Kandra, and/or full Mistborn would be important as well.

Spike off a Larkin's ability to drain Investiture? Other than that, Sensory upgrades are the most common Ive seen before (Runelords by David Farland explored that a lot), so increased Hearing or Smell, or alternative wavelength ranges on Sight to see UV or IR.

Hmm, interesting, if the healed can still hear something of the Rhythms then it means they have some amount of functional connection to the Spiritual Realm. That might still work, in the sense that if the First Transformation is an equivalent event to Snapping, then it would follow that it would not be Healed away any more than Gold Compounding repairs the Snap on Scadrial. But that would also imply that there is both a...Child-form(?) that is their natural larval state pre-Transformation as well as a "lost" natural-form that is what they'd be if they were allowed to mature to full adulthood without ever being broken to allow for bonding of a spren. If all this proves correct would be something they havent actually seen or allowed in generations, possibly even pre-shards.

Not the forms themselves, but the ability (or imposed Inability) to take a form at all. The spiritual equivalent of a genetic mutation, it was an alteration of the sDNA. EDIT: To the OP, I very much like it, it all fits with how I was envisioning things. I have one thing to offer, not a counter so much as an alternate interpretation: According to this WOB, the Rhythms represent "a direct connection to the spiritual realm", and as you say the indication is that in any true-form that Rhythm is being filtered through (facilitated by?) the Spren they've bonded; this Connection to the Spiritual is what facilitates/regulates the Forms. Unlike any of the other forms though, the Rhythms are entirely absent in the Slaveform. So what if the Slave-form is the result of an inter-realmic block/amputation similar to what turned Scadrians into Mistwraiths. The DullForm, then, would not quite be an active self-defense mechanism, so much as the natural result not having a spren that resonates with a given Rhythm strong enough to forge the realmic bond that would support the transition to a new form (more or less the issue you get when burning improperly mixed alloys on Scadrial. Further, this could mean the theorized "birthform" is what the Singers are in their "pre-Snapped" state, when their spirit-webs are still Whole and do not require any external pieces to allow them fully functional Sentience; however the process of their First Transformation is the event where their Spiritweb is sufficiently rent to allow the Bond, after which they require that supplemental Spren or else they cannot maintain themselves. I know we've seen almost nothing of Singer children, but if Im right then I suspect they do not hear the Rythms at all until their First Transformation.

I was basing the idea that gemstones are the Rosharan equivalent of Metal on these WOB's, not my own observations. EDIT: To clarify, I understand that gems serve a qualitatively different role in Rosharan magics than metals do in the Metallic Arts. My main point here is that since there are multiple WOB's that seem to equate the two (in his writing process if nothing else) and it's the only example we have of a multi-shard world (that's not broken like Sel), I think it's a viable place to look for hidden clues, and given that correlation they have a strong likehood of being reflected in all the magics the much like the way Metal is.

If we look to Scadrial for comparison, I think one thing we can be sure of is that all three Magics will utilize Gems in some regard, given that they are Roshar's equivalent to Metals as the Focus. I suspect there will be something in the Ten Essences that will apply as well, and Im guessing it will focus on the "Body Focus" part of that chart which, correct me if Im wrong, doesnt seem to play a prominent visible role in Soulcasting or Fabrial tech? Anyone have thoughts on the theory that Moash's dagger attack was an example of Voidbinding (as opposed to a gem-operated Fabrial, Nightblood imitation, etc)? Regarding Cultivation and the Old Magic, given how much she is directly involved in Surgebinding via the Spren, and Id say was likely pretty instrumental in the Spren being able to copy Honor's original Herald template with the Radiants. Personally, I wouldnt be displeased if it fell out that Cultivation (via the Nightmother) had co-opted the then-defunct Ashyn Magic system and was granting each of the the Boons in question via unique, individualized, and purpose-built diseases. I think that would fit both with the idea of the Boon/Curses being a more direct intervention while still playing into the general theme we have going of magics being changed and/or co-opted by Shards, Spren, The Five Scholars, etc. Not to mention would fit perfectly with my take on the 'Cultivation' Intent which is typically more about raising/nurturing/modifying what is there already instead of actual, original genesis of anything.

Agreed, put like that. I think I was taking a different view of the monothiestic possibilities: My statement only really makes sense in the model that there is (potentially) only one God Beyond, but that there would be many Adonalsium-equivalents, each with their own finite region of Supremacy, such that All Investiture of the Cosmere would be Adonalsium, by definition, but that other areas (galaxy clusters) would have their own Adonalsium-level deity and (potentially) their own completely different rulebook. Thus it would be possible that the Matter/Energy/Investiture triumvirate is a local model not shared by other regions, and if they did have Investiture as a 3rd state of existence it would be a completely separate store of energy than what Adonalsium had command of. If, on the other hand, you are correct that the Cosmere was simply the most recent building project of Adonalsium and the rest had been abandoned to auto-pilot (like the classic Watchmaker analogy of God), I tend to agree with your view. At least, if the Shattering itself did not send out any sort of cosmere-wide disruption, I could easily buy into the idea that those existing systems will only see any effect of the shattering when a Shard actually, willfully messes with them. On the same logic that I assume the shattering of Honor or Devotion, etc did not propagate noticeable effects out to the other shardworlds

Nitpicky question, but is that literally the case? I know there are WOB's that certainly say INfinite, but there's also that one that saying that Investiture itself in not infinite in the Cosmere just like Matter and Energy are not. Im wondering if it's another relative semantic thing like how an "Uninvested" person still does have the normal base Investiture of a living, sentient person. My own current origin for Adonalsium leans toward him being a superpowerful but technically finite god that is from Elsewhere and is actually responsible for the Creation of the Cosmere region of the wider universe; Im still undecided on whether the Three-Realm model is from Beyond him (like true Death) or if it's a local rulebook instituted when he/it created the Cosmere area.

Agreed. I think it would take nothing short of the emergence of a rival Bondsmith to rally enough support for action. Which could actually be pretty interesting to see play out. There's also still Ishar, I suppose.

@Fanghur Rahl Im still struggling to see the connection you are making; I dont see how Adonalsium being from the Cosmere region of the universe or not precludes any of the various origins (an Emergent Power, an Ascendant mortal, a pure god-entity, etc). Any of those could have happened locally or have happened elsewhere before Adonalsium found/created the Cosmere, no? Those are different things. Making it a part of you different from splitting it off of yourself. Preservation and Ruin created Scadrial whole and so are heavily invested in its substance and people, but that is a wildly different process than being Shattered. EDIT: I dunno, there are a lot of common human motivations for self-sacrifice, and protection of what you've Created (both living child and creative works) is one of the more common and powerful. If he thought he was defending the Cosmere, either fomr himself or from something else, I could easily see him taking the willing stance. Though I personally tend to think it was less of a knowing acceptance and more of a blind spot to what presumably was a really long-shot attack, on the scale of me having a blind-spot for bacteria attacking me. That sort of assuming that this kind of thing would cause sufficient multi-realm disruption and/or fallout that whatever Fortune/Prescience etc he may have had would have been unable to warn him sufficiently.

Good point, and in most instances I agree with you. But I think in this case a planet is going to be a lot more than the sum of its parts. Shardblades work as they do because they arent (pure) attacking the physical. And so consider: if you cut the planet in half you are destroying not just the physical stone ball, you are also entirely destroying the stormlight ecosystem, the entirety of Roshar's Shadesmar region (which includes a thriving and invested population all it's own), the Identity of an entirely planet, and the invested home of multiple Shards. At there very least that would result in those residents being displaced elsewhere, along with the resident Shards and Perpendicularities. I just think that is waaay too much widespread, interconnected fallout to still say the planet isnt Invested.

Hmm, Is there a finite volume in those shardpools? I mean, imagine if you actually managed to barrel and remove the shardpool liquid from a Shardworld. Could that work? Cold you significantly weaken one that way (kinda like that mass-burning of atium?)

Oh, Im not criticizing, just taking advantage of the chance to nerd out on electricity for a second.