Underwater_Worldhopper

The first one outright answers it, thanks! I was about to argue that Connection alone shouldn't give you the ability to perform AonDor, since you'd need actual Investiture to perform the Art, but I think this could actually work. The Connections you tap would basically make a pipeline between you and the Dor through the Spiritual Realm, and that should totally allow you to perform it anywhere. Come to think about it, this method should allow you to perform AonDor, and any other Selish Invested Art for that matter, wherever you want and whenever you want, like Arts like Allomancy or Awakening, so long as you have enough Connection stored up. Would tapping a lot of Connection allow you to cast supercharged Aons, given that it would make for a bigger Investiture pipeline than even being in the middle of Elantris would create?

I asked this very thing earlier, but nobody responded. Just to be clear, I was asking whether aging the physical structure of the brain up or down would affect cognition, so if you mean something else, please correct me. Anyway, what I'm assuming at the moment is that due to the magical nature of the changes, your spiritweb and Cognitive Aspect are keeping track of what your mental capacities are, so aging yourself up or down as much as possible should not affect your ability to think at all, despite the physical changes to your mind, just like how tapping Iron doesn't give you a strength boost, or how tapping Pewter can't give you speed.

Well, it wouldn't be lowering them, but reversing them

Food critic?

Technically, the black smoke Nightblood leaks is Investiture it absorbed returning to its Shard. He isn't subtracting so much as he is borrowing. And Shards do pay attention to time, especially something like a thousand years. They just think very quickly, I believe the exact quote is "Moments pass like years". That's a bit of a misinterpretation. Nikli is talking about Surgebinding, not a Dawnshard. He says that the more powerful applications of Surgebinding are only possible if you have "the reasoning—the breadth of understanding—of a deity". The Dawnshard is the breadth of understanding, which is why Nikli doesn't want Rysn to get ahold of the Dawnshard. If she becomes a Surgbinder, she can then access those more powerful applications, which we've seen can destroy entire planets.

Most avenues of inquiry end up in dead ends, I very much doubt that Brandon has thought out even half of what we discuss here. After all, we're a whole forum of observant fans who can pick a minor detail and run with it, Brandon is only one person with a limited team who need to manage all of it. The fun of these forums for me is to see how far we can take a fictional creation and still have it make sense. With how many smart people are on here, I feel like we can cobble together an explanation for most things in the Cosmere, even if they aren't true, even if I know it probably isn't true

True, guess we'll have to wait

Could be, but it's been described as a storm in the past, and travel through the Selish Subastral is notoriously dangerous, so I think the Dor would be a little more active than just sitting in puddles. Most of them probably do. Dakhor uses ancient Fjordell characters, which are likely based on Fjordell. Bloodsealing probably has a map of Dhzamar on the Bloodseals. Really the only one I can't imagine using an image of their country is ChayShan, and only because it uses the body itself to create the proper forms necessary.

What turns me off of the 'Shards correspond to the Dawnshards' theory is that the Shards could have had different Intents, or been broken down into a number other than 16

I have no idea what's going on in this thread since I tend to just ignore anything concerning F-Iron, but there was something someone said that I thought I should just throw in here, without reading the actual conversation, just to see what happens. Anyway, the person's theory was that F-Iron doesn't change your mass at all; It only changes what the world around you thinks your mass is. So you could become heavier and do all the conservation of momentum tricks that Wax performs without ever actually gaining or losing mass. That will be all, continue whatever was going on here

Is it weird that I also thought of this exact theory a few months ago? I didn't exactly come up with it, but I made these exact connections. It was on the Arcanum, when I saw this WoB: Looking at this, new to the forums, I was starstruck. It made so much sense. Of course Nightblood would be a Dawnshard, just because of how powerful it is. And then I realised a Dawnshard would be far more powerful than anything Nightblood can do. It was a cool idea, but it just isn't the case unless the Dawnshard is dormant in some way, and it isn't actually being used in any capacity beyond giving it the ability. How Vasher or Shashara would have gotten their hands on a Dawnshard, I couldn't guess. It seems very unlikely to me that Endowment would give someone a whole Dawmshard unless it was for a very, very specific reason. Nightblood is strong, yes, but he can't even affect a Shard in any quantifiable capacity. That can't be the case for a Dawnshard, which was 25% of the weapon that Shattered a being exactly 16 times more powerful than any Shard that exists right now. Especially if it was such a destructive Intent. Nightblood has a power threshold which he cannot cross. I disagree. There was a theory that if there's one Command that's specifically about Positive Change, then the whole structure could be something like this: Something from Nothing; Creation Something to Something Better; Positive Change. Nothing from Something; Destruction Something that stays the Same; Stasis Personally, I like this idea a lot, and Destruction wouldn't be that similar to Positive Change.

Insinuate

I am a bit inclined to ramble Currently, It's exactly the same as what it used to be. Storing isolates aging processes and accolades them. The only difference is, instead of pulling more Investiture from somewhere to gain extra mass, storing also isolates the growth of body and muscle mass and accelerates that too, without accelerating any other metabolic processes, or things like hair or nail growth. The pack of hair and nail growth is why I thought this couldn't be the case, but just as it isolates aging processes, I assume it could isolate the singular growth process too.

Fair enough I feel the strange urge to open a bakery and sell cookies.

That is indeed what I was previously saying, and that's what I addressed as not making sense in the last paragraph of my post just above

Ah, thank god. My entire worldview just near imploded. Well, they're only crippled for the duration of their stay in Shadesmar, which is short. We don't even know for sure how they're crippled beyond staying for a shorter while. And I am nothing if not a morally ambiguous figure. If you're killing someone, at least take something from them that can benefit the living.

Not anymore, not necessarily. All Navani would need at this point is for Vasher to insert a Breath into a sphere and give it to her, whereupon it should act like Giftlight (my working name for Endowment's Light) and Navani can corrupt Stormlight, Voidlight or Lifelight with Endowment's Intent. However, Navani may be unable to hear Endowment's Rhythm, since it isn't native to Roshar. However, a certain Zahel is kicking around Urithiru, would learn about Navani's achievement, is native to Nalthis and thus could hear the Rhythm of Endowment, already has the Breaths and so could perform the experiment himself, and likely has enough Heightenings to give him perfect pitch. So, one way or another, I feel that the key to corrupting Stormlight into Awakenable Giftlight will become available soon.

Hmmmm. I swear spike placement also matters in the donor. @alder24? Spiking someone to steal the ability through the heart is brought up a lot, the only time it isn't done through the heart is when the Set scientist spikes that woman through the back. If spiking a specific point isn't the case, then Intent becomes even more important in Hemalurgy than I assumed. I thought it was a combination of Metal + Intent + Placement, but apparently, you can just kill anyone with the right metal and Intent and get a spike. If that's the case, Wax could make spikes easily by Intending to make one when he shoots people. The corpses aren't going anywhere, so he can always come back and retrieve the bullets, and he doesn't have to feel bad about it because he was going to kill them anyway, so might as well gain an advantage from it, use it to conduct research or give them to the Kandra (again for research or to make communication earrings), building up a supply of spikes for random attributes and different Metalborn powers. Better than wasting them, right? Hemalurgy becomes way overpowered like this, I'd never considered it.

It would not be promoting cell growth, but Investiture would be becoming new cells. Just to be clear, Investiture isn't promoting your body to make more cells, but becoming cells itself. This is the bit you convinced me to go back on since it wouldn't make sense for storing to be unable to affect your mass but for tapping to be able to. As I said earlier, this would mean that Investiture will become new body mass for you for the duration of storing, using your body's current state as a baseline. The reason I didn't think this could happen before was due to F-Pewter, and how Feruchemical powers don't encroach on one another (i.e tapping strength won't make you able to move any faster, being able to move while tapping weight doesn't constitute any net gain of power), but for it to stay internally consistent, you should be able to grow, and thus extra mass would be required. But since the lack of hair or nail growth suggests that your body isn't being induced to increase its metabolic rate to enable said increase in mass, Investiture would have to become the new mass, like with Pewter. ... Honestly though, on second thought, it doesn't make sense for extra Investiture to be drawn to create new body mass. Where would it be coming from, given that Feruchemy is internal? I think it's more likely that just like how storing isolates and boosts only the aging processes of your body, it would also isolate your ability to create new mass and speed that up, without increasing hair or nail growth. In that case, what I said at the start of this post is wrong, and it is cell growth being magically stimulated. How or why that would exclude hair and nail growth is beyond me, but that seems to fit better than the 'Investiture becoming mass' idea, even though we know it's possible through F-Petwer.

Not that we can tell. They wouldn't really need the ability, as all it does is make you immune to Atium as of TFE. It's purely a defensive metal against someone burning Atium. If you work for the person who literally controls the entire Atium economy, why go through the effort of finding and killing an Electrum Misting or wasting a Mistborn to obtain A-Electrum when you can get A-Atium, which includes that in-built defense as well as an offensive boost that makes you nigh-invincible? Their burning Electrum would be indistinguishable from burning Atium to us, and with both options available to them as well as having access to unlimited Atium, it wouldn't make sense for them to bother with Electrum spikes beyond experimenting to see what exactly it took to extract that power. We indeed do not see Iquisitors walking around with Bronze earrings. However, that's a receiving bind point and not a taking bind point. With how many things you could steal from a body, I think each power and attribute only has one specific point where it can be extracted (say, heart for A-Copper, knee for F-Copper), but it can be inserted to gain the power in any bind point (such as gaining A-Copper regardless of whether you insert it into the heart or into the knee). We see that for powers like physical Allomancy or Feruchemy, the taking bind points are very close together, so it could just be that a single point could be used to extract the relevant powers depending on Intent, should the spike be big enough to pierce more than one bind point, which is what they could have assumed was happening here.

There's a WoB that would support your argument. This could be it, although it doesn't tackle the idea of why H-Atium-Electrum would do the exact same thing as H-Cadmium. In-world it's weird, narratively it's redundant. Here's the WoB This solves the issue, they work pretty nicely together. The only problem I can think of is how bind points enter the equation, since presumably, the Inquisitors should think that A-Atium and A-Electrum have different bind points. That gets solved if they think that the bind point is the same and it's the Intent that counts when really they could have been using the same spike to get both abilities.

I feel that there should be a way to describe what F-Atium does in purely Spiritual terms, but that is my physical explanation for it. However, regarding the original topic of the thread, F-Atium can't be very useful irrespective of how it works. The Terris have known about it for at least a thousand years, maybe more if they knew about it Pre-Rashek, and given the scholastic nature of the Worldbringers and Keepers, they would have studied the ability pretty well. All they'd need to do is get their hands on a single bead of Atium, whereupon it could be experimented with and passed back and forth between different Feruchemists for research. They would have found out if it did something useful, and they'd have stewards on the lookout to palm more of the stuff. If they knew about it Pre-Rashek, it would be even more well-researched. The fact that they don't give it any sort of importance at all seems to suggest that there isn't any particularly useful ability of Atium, or at least none that they could discover. On the other hand, keep in mind that some Inquisitors had F-Atium spikes given to them by the Lord Ruler, so there must have been some unique benefit of it that warranted skipping over something like F-Gold for something so useless as F-Atium apparently is. Makes you wonder whether there's some other aspect of it that we haven't considered.

Storing doesn't mess with metabolic processes, only the specific ones that lead to the effects we see as aging. And tapping doesn't perform any time shenanigans, it just reverses those same aging processes, in a way that somehow shrinks you down into a child. I do see your point though, storing should still make you physically grow with age if it can shrink you when tapping. So if a child stores youth, it should allow for an increase of mass somehow. It can't be through fast-forwarding the body into growing, since no other part of your metabolism seems to be boosted, so Investiture would have to become mass for you that way. This way, the two balance out and perform the same thing in different directions.

That is exactly why it is location dependent. It's been confirmed.

Let's nail down aging first. What is aging? What is going on in your body? There are three interlinked things that make up what we call aging: Cells stop repairing themselves, the immune system gets weak, and the body accumulates damage due to the prior two. Most of the things we associate with aging are, in large part, side effects of fighting off cancer. It all starts with DNA. Our chromosomes have these little protective caps on the ends called telomeres. When cells undergo mitosis (divide and multiply), the telomere protects the chromosomes from getting damaged. However, this process wears on the telomere, and eventually, the entire telomere is used up, and then the chromosomes start getting damaged. Your body really, really doesn't want damaged chromosomes getting multiplied. Luckily, it has highly developed systems that detect this, and once they do detect it, triggers signaling cascades that drive cells into apoptosis (the body's natural killing of cells) or senescence to avoid replicating a damaged genome. The thing is, as you get older and more and more telomeres run out, your body has to repeat this process over and over, sometimes at the same time, and the rate of mass cullings of cells with deformed genomes keeps getting higher and higher. At the same time, your stem cell reserves also experience telomeric decay through the body's natural maintenance of them, so they become less and less efficient at replacing the damaged cells. This is one of the leading factors that cause organ failure and dysfunction with age. The second factor in aging, deterioration within the immune system, is because the thymus, the gland that produces T- and B-cells, slowly starts shrinking after puberty, and by the time you reach your 60s and 70s, it's been weakened a lot. This is one factor of aging that can be affected by lifestyle habits like @Koloss17 was saying, since having an immune system that was exposed to sickness more often as a child will lead to one that works far better than that of someone who wasn't, but that's an inter-personal comparison. When compared to yourself, your immune system in your later decades will no longer be as robust as it used to be. The third major factor in aging is the accumulation of damage due to these last two. With cells being killed left and right to prevent the growth of tumors and Stem cells struggling to replace those eliminated cells quickly enough, some things that the body was supposed to be preventing can slip through the cracks. Couple that with an immune system that isn't so good at fighting off disease anymore, and minor dysfunctions of the body start posing a greater threat than usual. Things like Alzheimer's can result from this, where although it's possible it can happen earlier in life, it's much more likely to happen in your twilight years, with your body becoming so inefficient. So, now that we know what's going on with aging, we can figure out what F-Atium is doing. When you store youth, you're causing all of these different malfunctions in your body. Your thymus shrinks and your immune system gets compromised, your cells lose their telomeres (as well as expressing other effects of time) and the body begins to break down just as it would with age. You also begin to accumulate damage at an accelerated pace, etc. Your body isn't performing any time shenanigans. It's simply a bunch of changes and processes in the body being catalyzed while storing, then reversed while tapping, using the body as the Spiritweb dictates it should be as the baseline. Someone who will become a future amputee won't lose an arm while storing, because the future isn't being translated onto your body; it's just the things I outlined above taking place in your body. Similarly, if you just got your arm amputated, you wouldn't grow it back by tapping youth; your body will just reverse the processes given above: your thymus will grow to its previous size and boost your immune system, telomeres will regrow, damage accumulated specifically as a direct result of aging (things that we know F-Gold doesn't heal) will be healed, etc. Then there's the argument about how it affects mass. I think that if a child stored youth, they wouldn't grow any older. The same telomeric decay and shrunken thymus things will happen to them but in their original, small, child body. If you're muscular, your muscles will be maintained (as best as they can while the body is being severely weakened). This is because storing youth affects nothing but the specific things that directly cause aging. Growth in mass is F-Pewter's thing. It doesn't speed up hair or nail growth, so it isn't just fast-forwarding your entire body through time. However, Brandon has said that you could turn yourself into a baby through F-Atium, and we see Rashek maintain a young physique through it, so even though it shouldn't be possible to physically grow older through F-Atium, you can certainly become younger. I wonder though, it's described as purely a Physical Realm change, but it affects your brain too. Would aging too much or become too young affect how you think?