Extesian

No Botanica thanks for putting it up in the first place. I enjoy the discovery And that puts it in more context, knowing it was a translating clarification (maybe that's on the source and I missed it). I imagine you get/got some fascinating insights from the process. And thank you, of course if you are able to get clarification that would be very welcome, it's been of interest to me for a while!

Yeah agreed at the very least it's a nice little thought experiment and I do like the analysis from both of you.

I definitely get what you're saying @Pattern and I always support discussion if astrophysics and particle physics (my great loves are the very big and the very small), but my issue is simply that it seems unnecessarily complex. We know there are Cosmere magics that can perform time dilation far more easily that finding and protecting yourself from a blank hole. So I like your thinking I just think it's a difficult method compared to some of the simpler possibilities.

@Calderis Nightblood can be bonded as Vasher did. Or are you suggesting his bond only formed when he drew Nightblood for the first time? That may be right but I haven't heard that. Also I would've thought seons are true spren. Spren is just a Rosharan word for splinters no? We've been told they would even class Shards as spren.

There are Korean influences everywhere because Brandon did a LDS mission there. The Alethi are the big one, they were heavily influenced by Korean culture mashed up with medieval knights. The glyphs are also based on Korean/Chinese writing systems I believe. The Azish government is based on Chinese Confucianism. The soulstamps are based on Korean stone carvings. Safehands are inspired by the Korean offense at the soles of feet. Horneater stew is based on a Korean dish J

I think the issue is that his original Breaths created his soul and they can't just be used, they are his spiritual aspect. A human can give away their Breath because it's in addition to their soul, but it actually is Nightblood's soul. And yeah any time Nightblood gets new Breaths he immediately eats them so he can't actually give them away. I wonder if Nightblood was ever given breaths? I suspect he would just eat them instead of being able to use them.

I always bring it back to this when someone is sceptical of Nightblood's power. Cresting waves of crashing soldiers all charging one woman with a sword. There's no way that's just hams to hand combat. Nightblood fully invested i think is a weapon of mass destruction. Brandon also says Nightblood is one of the most dangerous things in the Cosmere and that he can do 'funky' things when fully invested.

Finally, Elantrian! All shall love me and despair! Extesian - 1. Hoid - 0.

Nice first post! Welcome to the Shard J I like the thinking around space-time reasons for long-lived worldhoppers. I think, though, the reasons are more realmatics than physics. Please be aware there will be spoilers here. The introduction threads are supposed to be spoiler-free, so this thread would be better in Cosmere Theories. So for now, until a mod moved this (hopefully one can, @Mestiv maybe?), spoilers follow. We have this WoB Question So you mentioned earlier that a lot of the characters who are in multiple books are functionally immortal. But some of them when we saw them in actual just books, before they started jumping between worlds, they were not functionally immortal at that time. So can we then take that to mean that they somehow became functionally immortal? Brandon Sanderson You can take to mean that… Question Correctly? Brandon Sanderson You can correctly. Now here’s the distinction. Some of them are not. Some of them are using tricks of...um….uh...no....relativistic time travel to move forward in the future. Some of them are not aging and others are just aging really slowly. And those are three separate things among characters you have actually seen. I will give you hints as you read the books. So there are people in the Cosmere who are, effectively, ageless. Elantrians and Returned (or 5th Heightening Nalthians) are two examples. They don’t age at all. There are then people who use magic to keep their bodies at the same age, while their soul ages (it’s basically a hack). The Lord Ruler is an example. Brandon does talk about relativistic time travel, but I think again that’s more using things like a cadmium bubble to slow time within the bubble – a person fuelling a super-power cadmium bubble could theoretically chill out there for a year or two while the Cosmere around them ‘ages’ hundreds of years. There could also be relativistic time travel through speed, basically getting on a near-light speed ship or doing similar things with speed-based magics. So while I like your idea, and physics ties into a lot of the Cosmere’s time- and speed-based magics, I’m not sure that’s the answer here. One other thing. I’m no physicist, but my understanding of black holes is that, to get close enough to one to seriously change time relativistically, requires getting so close that it would tear apart matter physically. I believe black holes don’t usually have outrageous amounts of mass compared to the Sun, for example, it’s about how densely it’s packed, so you need to be quite close to one to be affected relativistically. But one of the many physicists on this site can correct me if I’m wrong about that.

Using words to talk of words is like using a pencil to draw a picture of itself, on itself

It excites me more than it should.

Ha I just saw this. Mine was Sunday. 37. So happy birthday Canada-me Edit - oh wait you're not Canada, you're just the cool part of the States. My apologies

When you start confusing realmatics for 'real-world' science. For example, Girlfriend - how does gravity work? Me - so your physical body has a spiritual connection to the planet and as y...no wait, sorry, it's the curvature of space-time. Girlfriend - what is nuclear power? Me - so uranium is made up of a combination of opposing Ruin and Preservation particles tha...ergh sorry baby, something about unstable outer shells of electrons. I'll find a Wob. Girlfriend - i got a new metal earring Me - *rips out earring. Happy birthday to the ground! Girlfriend - why are you color blind? Me - why, i'm a drab baby. Girlfriend - why do you buy the champagne with the gold flakes? Me - to see how i would've turned out if things had been different Girlfriend - i wish i had blue eyes Me - *buys sword off eBay

Hm I'm shamelessly add one of mine, though only because Oversleep suggested it.

This is interesting. When I first read it I thought surely not, but there may be something there. Maybe Parshendi food is gemhearts. Like, they eat gemhearts. I'm joking, but am I? And welcome to the Shard!

WOAH

If you ever want something more intimate, do you know that if you hold a flashlight level with your eyes and sweep it around you in the wilderness, the light will reflect off the eyes of any spider as a gresn flash? You can then find all the cute spiders you want! And because there are always more spiders than you think (especially here in Aus), you get to see how many are actually staring back at you. Knowledge you can't unknow.

I want to add one here, subject to discussion. I've regularly seen people speculate on the gemstone Frost mentions to Hoid in The Letter, speculating if it's the black sphere, an Aether, all sorts of things like that. I just saw a collection of WoBs @Oversleep posted (here is the doc) that has the following WoB. That seems pretty authoritative to me, not necessarily entirely answering what it is, but I think at least answering that it isn't the Black Sphere, or a range of other ideas people have come up with. Any evidence to the contrary? I'd have to scour the site to remember some of the other things people have suggested but I can at least put it in as a partial answer. (btw I'm open to any suggestions as to what the Topaz really is. Could it still be an aether? I'm assuming that just a normal topaz has no mystical properties).

I must admit I thought that referred to Hoid. The definition he refers to could be a proto-Radiant but I figured it refers to Yolish lightweaving. I'd love to be wrong though.

Not at all hard to believe, that's the most sensible explanation for WoBs that indicate different things. I was just explaining where the idea of low investiture comes from but yeah it could definitely make sense that the initial change requires a lot while maintaining it doesn't. Similar to how a Returned needs a ton of investiture to Return but only a bit to stay alive. Either way my initial point for that was about how much investiture is required to maintain a soulstamped object, not create one, so that would match what I said about it not requiring much. I feel this is like metals in the end, the soulstamp itself is not invested particularly, it's a gateway to investiture, so yeah soulstamping requires a lot to change a soul, but this doesn't mean that either the soulstamp itself, or the soulstamped object are heavily invested, nor that maintaining that change requires a lot of investiture. Happy to be corrected further though, TES is the book I haven't read in the longest so my realmatic knowledge of it is much lower than for most other systems.

Re: the amount of investiture in forgery, I've seen conflicting things here. How do you explain this one? I guess the difference could be that the soulstamp itself doesn't hold a lot of investiture but, like metals in alomancy, forms a channel for a lot of investiture? Is that the idea?

Thanks @Oversleep, @Pagerunner. Oversleep that spiked Breath WoB us fascinating. I'll wait a bit to see any resolution but that sounds more authoritative than the first. PR, I was always surprises people thought of the new Windrunner being on Oathbringer specifically but you're right, I have seen that misunderstanding. I'll add it and the lerasium colour. And thanks @Argent I've tightened up the language on Hoid's lerasium.

Thanks Oversleep that's exactly what I was after. I hadn't seen an explicit WoB. Why, then, would a living thing need to be re-stamped though if it's a constant influx of investiture rather than a one-off change? Certainly seems like allomancy could provide that flow with an appropriate hack, I agree with that. A soulstamp also doesn't require much investiture so perhaps a few spheres would power one for a while but for one that lasts indefinitely (with hack), allomancy makes sense.

Hm. When I was 24 I was a candidate for the Western Australian Parliament. When I was 34 I quit my career, sold or threw out everything I owned that wouldn't fit it in a backpack, and got a 1 way ticket to live in Prague, a place I'd never been to. Most people find them more interesting than I do (the real question is what I'll do when I'm 44...)

Great job @ButChrisNo! Sure there are 'errors' to people who spend their nights reading obscure answers Brandon has given but I thought it was nicely put together. If it had been a theory on here I would've congratulated you, given an upvote and then told you where it was wrong. Coz that's what we do But yes we're all here to understand and enjoy these books better and for all our academic analysis on here, you're the one who actually gets the chance to draw casual readers further into the Cosmere, through Tor. And even with the odd problem, I love the charts. It's a good idea for giving scope to the Cosmere.