Philosopher's Stone

Known by a long string of aliases such as the Red Stone, the Fifth Element, the Grand Elixir in liquid form, and the Sanguine Star of the Milos legend, the Philosopher's Stone is a potent booster for transmutation that turns up across both the manga and the animated adaptations. Its reputation rests on the promise that it lets a practitioner slip past the strict law of equivalent exchange. Much of the saga is driven by the Elric brothers hunting for one, hoping to reclaim the bodies they surrendered to Truth.

No text ever spells out the exact recipe, yet the essential ingredient is clear: the souls of the dead are captured and packed together using specialized transmutation circles. Those souls, ranging from a single life to countless millions, form both the relic's power and its physical substance. A widespread belief holds that the object itself overrides equivalent exchange, but that notion is an illusion. What truly occurs is that the trapped souls lend extra force, and each act of alchemy burns through some of them, so the stone fades with use and disappears once its reserves are spent.

Even a lone soul carries enough energy to make up for gaps in an alchemist's training. Edward Elric and Roy Mustang, neither of them healers by trade, both trust that a stone would let them attempt life-saving procedures far outside their normal reach. With one in hand, a practitioner works on a grander scale and no longer needs a drawn diagram, since mere contact and concentration are enough to spark a reaction. The souls inside cling to a fading sense of self, and those that offer their strength willingly fuel cleaner, stronger work than those torn away by force. A living host such as Van Hohenheim can even converse with the voices he carries.

Calling it a stone undersells the range of shapes it takes, since it is really any vessel holding soul-energy. It may appear as a rough lump like coal, a smooth polished pearl, a thick liquid of the sort Doctor Marcoh keeps, or even a breathing person. In solid form its shade is always a deep, blood-dark red, and a smaller specimen tends to store a smaller charge. It is rumored to be indestructible, a supposedly perfect material, though that toughness is simply one more product of the souls within.

The earliest stone belongs to the being later called Father, who drew it from the entire population of Xerxes and left behind the legend of a nation wiped out in a single night. Generations afterward, Doctor Tim Marcoh and other alchemists were pressed by Lust and her fellow Homunculi to manufacture more, spending the lives of Ishvalan captives and eventually the makers themselves to bury the secret. That batch stayed incomplete, drawn from roughly thirteen prisoners, and in the manga the relic the priest Cornello wields comes from this same run.

Long dismissed as pure myth, the object has always sat at the summit of alchemical ambition, the dreamed-of key to erasing the craft's natural ceiling. The 2003 anime tells a different origin, in which Hohenheim of Light and Dante craft the first one roughly four centuries earlier and use it to leap from body to body chasing endless life. When Dante spends the last of its power to move into Lyra, the vessel decays and she desperately hunts the stone sealed inside Alphonse Elric's armor. That continuity also features lesser copies known as Red Stones.

The tie-in film The Sacred Star of Milos renames the relic the Sanguine Star, a variant that seems to feed on great quantities of blood rather than souls directly, offering a slower but more humane route to creation. Even so, Edward warns Julia Crichton that swallowing one will devour her soul, and he notes the star her brother Ashleigh took is warping his sense of self, a danger that lifts only once both siblings expel the stones. Because every person houses a soul, a gifted alchemist could in theory burn their own life as fuel, though doing so is thought to shorten their years.