Towards the start of The Emperor’s Soul, Shai remarks to herself that she doesn’t have the skill to heal people with resealing, because that requires an intimate understanding of every part of the human body, down to each muscle fiber and sinew, in order to do it correctly.

When she makes the painting in her room, her conversation with Gaotona implies that she has the skill to make wonderful paintings herself, rather than having to “fake” them with soul stamps.

But then in that same conversation, they talk about her essence marks, and her scholar mark comes up. A person who speaks a dozen languages and is a masker of science, mathematics, history, etc. Things that Shai says she does not know herself.

So how much does a forger need to know about a topic in order to encode it into a stamp? And by extension, what information is actually encoded in a stamp? Does the painting stamp contain an exact diagram of the painting, down to every last brush stroke? Is all of the information her other selves know encoded into the essence marks, or do they just describe the history in which she learned those skills?

If it’s the latter, could a forger make an essence mark giving them forging skills they don’t have? Could Shai carve a resealer mark that rewrites her so she was trained as a resealer instead of a forger?

UPDATE: I understand that soul stamps rewrite an objects history. I am asking about how specific you need to be on certain details of that history. Shai had to know a lot about actual painting, and even had to work directly with the original artist, in order to create a forgery of his painting. The essence mark for the Emperor seemingly had to have every single memory of his encoded within. But then her own essence marks are able to make her a master of many academic subjects, and speak multiple languages. How does encoding a skill that you yourself don’t understand work?