Type 2 Hemalurgy

Hemalurgy as a magic system is still poorly understood nearly 20 years after it was first introduced to us. We know several rules of how it works but we don't really know the limits of what else it can do. When Mistborn Era 3 is published, I expect our understanding of the Metallic Arts to be fundamentally changed as we learn new details of what is possible and better things we thought we understood previously. I wonder if Hemalurgy has some major secrets waiting to be revealed?

OK so Hemalurgy lets you use a metal spike as a magical transplant, you drain an attribute out of someone and apply that attribute to someone else. Physical strength, eyesight, allomantic powers, feruchemical powers, even non-Scadrial abilities and attributes like Breaths can be taken. We have seen a couple of hints at extensions of this basic principle, this usually involves killing the 'donor' but can be done non-lethally with a weaker 'charge'.

Oh and if you take four hemalurgic spikes into a fifth person in just the right way they become a 12 foot tall blue-skinned mutant cave troll thing. Wait what? That seems very different to the first paragraph. That's not just stealing attributes, that's completely changing your bodytype and practically making you a different species. There's something odd with Kandra and their Spikes but that's starting from a weird amorphous state without a clear body layout so changes there are more easily explained with their own peculiar biology. And there's something a little odd about Steel Inquisitors but mostly because they have dozens of spikes giving them multiple powers in a way that should be fatal but it sortof harmonises to work together. Steel Inquisitors are odd but not in the same way a Koloss is odd.

I wonder if this will be reclassified as something different. "Type 2 Hemalurgy" or "Metamorphic Hemalurgy" or something. Perhaps we will learn about other transformations. Like those Chimeras we saw briefly in late Era 2.

Or maybe we'll learn that the transformation associated with the Koloss isn't really a form of Hemalurgy at all, it's a newly defined Cosmere-wide concept like Intention or Spirit-Webs that underpins the whole setting. Perhaps the Singer Forms are the same concept too, we might learn a new term like Mutagenation that covers Singer Forms and Koloss and Chimeras and those Dakhor monks with twisted bones. Maybe the Charred are another cousin-transformation, it's not strictly hemalurgy but it's accessing a transformation in a similar mechanism.