Episode 7 (2009 Anime)

Arriving in Central with Major Armstrong, the brothers find the library's first branch, where Marcoh's notes were hidden, burned to the ground. Back in East City, Lust tells Gluttony she set the fire once Edward learned the notes' location, but her partner is drawn instead to the blood-soaked scent of an Ishvalan in the sewers, and their ambush of Scar ends in an explosion. Mustang, hoping the fugitive lingers nearby so that capturing him might advance his quiet ambition toward the Führer's seat, investigates and finds only Scar's bloodied jacket in the river. Believing his wounds will keep him idle, Lust returns to Central to report to Father.

Handed off to their new guards, Maria Ross and Denny Brosh, the Elrics are taken to Sheska, a former clerk dismissed for reading on the job, who recalls Marcoh's work down to the page. Using her photographic memory she reproduces the entire text over five days, though it reads as nothing more than a cookbook.

Ed suspects the recipe conceals coded alchemical research and sets to cracking it at the main library. When Hughes visits lamenting the loss of court-martial records also stored in the burned branch, the boys point him to Sheska, and he hires her on the spot. After ten days of work the brothers finally break the cipher and recoil at the truth it hides: the Philosopher's Stone is made from living human beings. Ed swears Ross and Brosh to secrecy.

That evening Armstrong pressures the guards into revealing why the boys are so downcast and bursts in weeping over their misfortune, which reminds Ed of Marcoh's parting hint about a truth behind the truth. Studying a map of Central's four working laboratories, he fixes on a supposedly abandoned Fifth Laboratory beside Central Prison and reasons that death-row inmates could have supplied the stone's living material there. Armstrong resolves to investigate discreetly and orders the brothers to stay away, but they slip out by night, find the "abandoned" building guarded, and enter through the vents while Al waits outside. Deep within, two armored figures who call each other 48 and 66 sense the intrusion and split up, and as Ed confirms the lab is still powered, 66 ambushes Alphonse.

The episode adapts the manga chapters "The Philosopher's Stone" and "The Two Guardians," and its title card carries the Elrics' Human Transmutation circle. The previously unnamed waterway where Scar's jacket surfaces is dubbed the Marl River, and the boys trade several esoteric alchemical references while decoding the notes. This is also the first 2009 episode to show a homunculus visibly wounded, when Scar transmutes away Gluttony's left arm, an honor the manga and 2003 anime gave to Marcoh's attack on Lust. Hughes's visit offers the first glimpse of his back-sheathed push knife. References to Basque Grand are cut from the Lab 5 discussion, Armstrong rather than Denny Brosh jogs Ed's memory of Marcoh's words, and the brothers go straight to Sheska's house with Maria Ross supplying her background.