Red Stone

Within the 2003 anime, the Red Stone stands apart as a synthetic booster crafted to imitate the fabled Philosopher's Stone. Where the manga treats the term merely as one of the genuine relic's many names, this continuity presents it as a separate, artificially produced compound modeled on the real thing but never its equal.

Much like its inspiration, the Red Stone frees an alchemist from needing a drawn circle, lets a user sidestep the rule of equivalent exchange, and can even grant alchemical talent to people who never studied the craft. The catch lies in its ordinary, mass-produced origin: it falls well short of the authentic stone's power and grows unstable after an unpredictable number of uses. When it fails, it tends to crack apart in the middle of a reaction and risks triggering a violent rebound.

The raw material is Red Water, a crimson and highly poisonous mixture of amplifying substances that can be brewed in large volumes. Compressing enough of that fluid into a single crystal produces a stone. The alchemist Nash Tringham discovered that running Red Water through a living body speeds its hardening, while his sons Fletcher and Russell later found that feeding it to plant life achieves a similar result. Both the liquid and its crystal are widely thought to draw their inspiration from the mineral cinnabar.

Because they are cheap to churn out, Red Stones serve as the staple nourishment of the Homunculi and are handed to alchemists whose forbidden ambitions those creatures hope to exploit. Placed within a special sealing array, several Homunculi have been made to disgorge the stones from their bodies, as happens with Greed, Sloth, and Lust. The very idea of an imitation grew from a mistake by Edward Elric, who watched Cornello's relic run dry and crumble and wrongly assumed it must be a fake, since he had not yet learned that a true stone's power is finite rather than endless.