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What is confirmed is that there is a fuzzy window of time between physical Death and "final" death, where a cognitive shadow (and associated spiritweb) are still around. This window is extended by Investiture. After that window passes, what's left is going to get recycled by the system, along with any other "consumed" Investiture. But even after tons of time passes, even just the physical aspect (the meatsuit corpse) of the dead person will still have a "spiritweb" enough to be targeted by Forgery (as any object can, but it's going to be the object/bead level of existence that doesnt take spiritual damage from a Shardblade, doesnt have enough Investiture to charge a Spike (per WOB's about spiking stuff out of Lifeless), and wont physically be particularly Invested but would still be Connected to the person they used to be (because the Spiritual Realm is all Times and Places at once). What is intentionally not confirmed is whether there actually is anything separate and distinct that Goes Beyond, or even if a Beyond itself exists. One Returned believes he's a copy of a "real" person that already died and went Beyond, leaving a Investiture Fossil behind that gets to be all depressed about it. Others say the Returned get grabbed in the grey area and Returned before they get the chance to go Beyond (more like what apparently happened to Szeth).

I have to wait until we actually know he's using Feruchemy and only Feruchmey before I can use 16 as confirmation about how Feruchemy itself works. There is no "only what the body needs" for calories and water, the biological/chemical process require waste products to be produced (and a lot of the water goes to carrying it all out through the kidneys). Looking at Lift as a realmically similar (we assume) process, she converts blood sugar and bodily fat-stores into "Lifelight' Investiture but it's theoretically already gone through the processes that would have stripped the energy and left the waste. On the other hand, Investiture supplements Breathing (via stormlight or Feruchemy) there is no backlog of CO2 in the blood or anything, they simply dont need to inhale or exhale for the duration that the Investiture is available (bypassing both sides of the coin), so it could really plug the Magic handwave into one of several places in the "natural" process. This old WOB sure implies there could and/or will be a Poop Metalmind eventually.

I have to ask: If you are surviving entirely on Compounded F-Bendalloy Investiture...would they need to poop? Ive always assumed F-Cadmium and F-Bendalloy would be the core of some Space-age Life Support Systems later on, but I was never sure if the ships would have Waste Disposal (converting waste mass back into Investiture or something) or just supplement directly with Investiture to bypass those processes completely.

Welcome! Here's that WOB. If you find it in the Arcanum (link at the top of page) and click the Copy button within the WOB box to copy it to your clipboard, or Share to copy just the link. 16 is a transplant from Scadrial and apparently is one of the debunked identities that folks theorized might be Restares. That puts Spook pretty high on the list by virtue of being one of the few named Scadrians that could make the trip and one we love to theorize is still kicking about. There's also a Kandra somewhere on Roshar (and Lasting Integrity should count). Felt would technically fit the bill but we know what he looks like. No others come to mind. He could be using Cadmium bursts to skip through time, or he could probably be using Feruchemical compounding to supply Food and water from pure investiture, and sustain himself that way (along with Atium compounding or some other form of Agelessness).

Was Hemalurgy created along with Scadrial, or did it have some pre-existing analog (like Lightweaving or Microkinesis)? Did Endowment create the Nalthian Population? The Planet itself? Can Leechers burn metals out of anybody, or only from people who already have the ability to burn that metal? (to settle an ongoing debate) What is something AonDor Cant do? So far it seems like the most open-ended of all the magic systems. Did the Five Scholars use Awakening and Commands to worldhop, or did they just need to dive into a Shardpool somewhere (or something else, like needing help from the other side)?

No clue, but Goodreads implies there was an e-book release in 2020, maybe that's why it has such a specific page count for being over a decade away: https://www.goodreads.com/work/editions/61659548-extinct

As a concrete counter example: WOB confirms that you cannot store the "memory" of learned skills like Muscle Memory, so there's a confirmed swatch of the person's whole Self that is not included. They might remember being a soldier or craftsman, but would not gain any of the learned skills. Separately, there is a very long standing (real world) philosophic debate on how much Memory = The Self. It's one of the Big Questions, and spirals around questions of head trauma, Alzheimer's, etc. that can impact memory in a person.

This question all depends on how much you believe in The Beyond, a soul separate from the Spiritweb, and all that stuff that is intended to be an ongoing in-world debate. Tanavast died but left a Cognitive Shadow behind, which he merged with the Stormfather spren. His soul may or may not have moved on by then (Vasher has some depressed thoughts on the Returned equivalent). It may or may not be possible to separate the shadow and spren now, even for a Shard. But at the end of the day, if Tanavast could have been revived Cultivation would certainly have tried it.

"Nth Post" a Poem by Quantus I shall win this game By using the win condition Semantics are fun.

To be fair, the WOB strongly implies that Endowment created the Population of Nalthis, but she may not have created the whole planet as was the case with P&R making Scadrial. She might have just settled a barren planet with no life (hence the lack of a fossil record). I lean toward thinking that she populated an existing world, just because it simplifies the whole question of why Scadrial's creation took two Shards and a bargain.

Yup, that locks it. Cool, thanks. Damn, I was really getting excited by the idea that the Rosharan ecosystem is a variant Fainlife...

What makes you discount dragon as a possibility? I agree that she doesnt seem to be the most understanding of people, but if she were Sho Dal or Dragon (either one) and she went and made a world, I would have expected Fain Life instead of a human population. Though maybe she made it like a ant-farm, an outsider wanting to study them as pets.

Well, that's the fallout Hoid has faced from previously holding one of the Dawnshards, but I dont think that is confirmed to affect everyone that hold any of hte four (which are different from each other in ways we dont yet know). That being said, Hoid cannot Physically harm anyone, eat meat, or seriously contemplate doing either. But he can punch a disembodied Cognitive Shadow in the face (which surprised even him) implying he is free to do Cognitive (and possibly Spiritual) Damage. Also, Tress is one further into the future of the Cosmere than almost any story we have, so the possibility does remain that Hoid has found a way around that limitation off-screen.

I prefer to believe none of the words from that poem have actual etymology. Still, nice catch, and I agree whole-heartedly with your Nightblood point.

She went into immortality with a mate. Now that mate is both dead and avenged, a quite retirement (or at least some new chapter in life) would make sense. Godhood is a responsibility whether they like it or not, she may not want to keep the burden forever (and alone). Also, if I'm right about the hidden meaning of the Queen Tsa story, she's fascinated by mortal life and wants to experience it.

We dont know, but best guess is that the differences in behavior are from a different Awakening Command than Nightblood's "Destroy Evil." The color drain is indicative of Awakening, the magic system from Nalthis, but other than that we dont know what she (the blade) is and/or does. She's weaker than Nightblood per WOB, but she's also younger and she may or may not be growing in the same ways. Nope, the opposite. Nalthians are both with more Investiture than cosmere average, and drabs have less than standard (see WOB below).

Hello and Welcome! You are right, Wit IS the best. Who's your favorite character so far?

I dont think that's quite how the math works. Assuming they have infinite Stormlight and are in space, they get sustained Acceleration from a constant gravitational force. With no upper limit holding them back they'd eventually get to the Speed of Light with a single Lashing, and more will just get you there faster. But then as you start approaching the Speed of Light, even the concept of Time starts to change and the calculations will get weird, assuming Relativity is still be in play by normal RL rules and not some Cosmere Objective Timeframe. But Speed Bubbles get so weird with the rules that this likely would too.

Fair point, thought if he keeps himself to the animalistic ones that even Syl's aunt hunts, he might consider it more like eating meat than cannibalism.

Oh, yes He very much did, and that's the accepted Cosmere terms for what happened there. It's also why Rayse use of the word seemed so significant. We have three characters that are confirmed to have met with Cultivation directly and not just the Nitchwatcher. One is Mr T and we know what happened there. Another is Dalinar who is Bonded to Tanavast's ghost and is showing all kinds of weird stuff beyond just a Stormfather Bondsmith should be capable of doing. And we have Lift, who is now blurring realmic lines and is confirmed to be converting calories directly into Cultivation's Lifelight.

Depends how far back into sprite graphics you mean by 2D, but offhand: Ultima series, not counting the horrifically buggy Ultima9 or the two experimental shooter-rpg's called Ultima Underworld. Final Fantasy6 is widely considered the best story of the series by anyone able to play sprite graphics. All those are old, though, and these days RPG is a pretty broad umbrella that mostly means "Presence of Plot". Can you give us some examples of games you've enjoyed? Also are you limited to PC or any particular console(s)?

Fwiw, I did find a lot of references to shields and armor both in the flashbacks to Amaram's army, and I think in Dalinar's flashbacks too. But all those are Human-on-Human battles, I wonder if some of it might have simply been worked out of the equation as the activity shifted from a War of Retribution to a very bloody sport of Gemheart Racing. Also, I could be wrong but I always imagined the Plains to be a hotter, more desert-like place than Alethkar (storms allowing, anyway) and thought it might be that the Alethi armor traditions didnt fit the climate (like all the heavy metal-wearing crusaders in the desert that time). Yup, found it in Ch 15 (titled "the Decoy"): Sadeas said he'd tried giving the bridgecrew's shields at first, but the singers ignored the crews and fired at the soldiers and horses instead. Since he calculates them as significantly less valuable than trained soldiers, he took the shields away and just planned to bring twice the number of bridges that he needed for actual troop transport, and the rest were just tactical arrow-sponges disguised as troop transport. By the time they had the conversation we saw, Dalinar just wasnt really willing to compromise anything see saw as coming from The Codes, so he stuck with animal-pulled bridges with heavy fortifications instead of any form of calculated Acceptable Loss. EDIT: Reading those scenes again with his Codes obsession, he really had a lot of Skybreaker in him back then...

Short answer it that it hand-wavy breaks physics, much like classic comic book speedsters, and there has a been a ton of debate and discussion trying to reconcile it. The latest Ive seen kind of dwindled off from a general "Higgs Field Shenanigans" statement that was really just a different sort of hand-wave. It's not gravity manipulation because the effects and math dont line up, and there's not physiological and/or bulk change the way there is with feruchemcial Strength. For practical purposes (and this is my sense of it) they are able to increase what mass the outside universe Thinks they have, sort of like a heavy, skin-level force field. They cant get crushed under their own weight, but they also cant move an equivalent weight that isnt themselves.

Also Todium seems to consider either outcome of the contest a Win, or at least believes he can get there, so I dont think he'll abandons the opportunity. If he backs out, I think he'd work hard to be let out of the deal by Dalinar, so there'd be no wound for another Shard-killing Shard to exploit. Frankly he could pull that off easily by just revealing that Odium is under new management, in a way that made them Believe it was their own victory instead of a new threat (just like Cultivation)

It certainly still was in Warbreaker. It seems to have evolved since then. It's effects are different now, and I suspect it either has reached or is approaching the tipping point of being so over-Invested that it is collapsing the three realms together, somewhere between a perpendicularity and a low-level Ascension.