The ancient alchemist sought many things: chrysopoeia, panacea, and elixir vitae among them. They believed that, through the application of the right sequence of chemical operations – calcination, distilliation, sublimation – they could transmute base matter into these higher states. In practice, they failed for so long that they began to speak of their fruitless struggles as a metaphorical pursuit of spiritual development instead of a physical one.

What they didn’t realize was that the magnum opus already lay waiting beneath their feet. Thus, the modern science of geochemy: the alchemy of the Earth. By applying alchemic methods to less mundane base materials, turning lead into gold became an afterthought.

Ten of the most notable geochemical materials are described below.

Cintamani

Sanskrit for “wish-fulfilling gem”, cintamani is a transparent quartzoid crystal composed primarily of silicon. Due to the tunable electromagnetic bandgap inherent in its nanostructure, this gem does in fact fulfill one wish: the desire for an ideal photonic crystal, which can refract and shape light with enough precision to operate as an optical computing substrate as well as a light projector.

Although very occasionally discovered as granulated inclusions in upper-strata sandstone, most of these gems hide far deeper down, with the size of a given specimen correlating with its depth. Due to their rarity yet crucial function in the geochemical industry, cintamani are some of the most highly prized minerals a miner can find, enough that a single large gem can buy a comfortable retirement by itself.

Adamant

In classical usage “adamant” was a simply a poetic variant of “diamond”, but today geochemists define it as a distinct carbon allotrope. While made of the same type of atoms as normal diamond, at certain high temperatures and pressures those atoms can arrange themselves into a complex geometric lattice of incredible tensile, compressive, and shear strength, like thickly bonded layers of graphene. The resulting material takes on a smooth texture of glossy black, lighter than equivalently strong metal alloys.

The Anthropocene ancestor culture discovered adamant but never deployed it at scale, so although fragments can be found at that layer, most of it must be recovered from deeper down.

Orichalcum

From the Greek words for “mountain copper”, Plato claimed this mythic metal covered the temple of Poseidon in lost Atlantis. In its current usage, orichalcum refers to a brassy-toned, cuproferrous metal alloy found in the Anthropocene and lower strata. In its natural form, orichalcum ore generates a magnetic field similar to magnetite but significantly stronger. The presence of untapped orichalcum deposits throws off traditional compass readings, so miners typically rely on alternative means of navigation.

When refined into a pure state, orichalcum acts as a room-temperature superconductor: its lack of resistance means that electricity can travel through wires made of it indefinitely without power loss. Due to this property, orichalcum is the basis of all electromagnetic equipment used in modern society.

Eden Amber

Eden Amber, more commonly called simply “amber” by miners, takes its name from an early archaeological report of Paleolithic ruins, which described the world depicted on the buried murals as “like Eden”. Amber is a translucent, yellow-orange polymer made of hardened resin that remains alive in a state of dormant cryptobiosis despite the passage of geologic eras around it. Likewise, it passes this property on to anything enveloped within it: amber-filled Paleolithic sarcophagi contain mummies presumed to still hover between life and death, although none have yet dared to wake them up.

Eden amber can also be processed into a sort of living plastic that “remembers” prior shapes, allowing for conveniences such as jackets that flatten their own creases and ropes that neatly re-coil themselves.

Alicorn

A calcareous crystal named for the purported material of a unicorn’s horn. In normal caves, the familiar shapes of off-white stalactites, stalagmites, and flowstone sheets form over slow millennia as dripping water deposits dissolved grains of calcite. Alicorn, then, is flowstone that flows at a visible rate, accelerated by a quasi-biological sustained chemical reaction within it. It possesses all the useful properties of concrete but also heals its own cracks and potholes like flesh scabbing over.

Alicorn is not only the basis of modern architecture, it is the closest thing to the true bones of the Earth.

Shamir

According to the Talmud, King Solomon commissioned a search that turned up a “grain of Shamir the size of a barleycorn”, depicted by tradition as a green stone. Supposedly the Shamir was stored in a container made of lead, as anything “shown” to it would disintegrate. Today, “shamir” refers to a radioactive actinide, a stone that fluoresces a faint blue-green visible in the absolute dark of the depths. True to the legend, it generates intense gamma radiation, making it a source of both terrible danger to miners and incredible value to them, as simply placing a grain of it into a pot of water will boil it, thus functioning as a source of energy even without enrichment into industrial fuel.

During the Anthropocene, scientists are believed to have discovered how to forge a synthetic superheavy element with enough protons to settle into the hypothetical “island of stability” that would allow it not to decay in a split-second the way high atomic numbers typically dictate – they used a different term, but what they produced was shamir. The largest known structure buried in that layer is a thick-walled vault of lead-lined concrete filled with barrels of shamir.

Alkahest

The ancient alchemists believed in a universal solvent, the “alkahest”, that could dissolve any material, and thus could not be contained. Much more recently, miners discovered narrow, irregularly shaped holes extending across geologic strata. Following them all the way down revealed tiny puddles of violet-tinged liquid in pockets at the bottom of the Archaean stratum. This liquid the miners dubbed alkahest: a terrifyingly toxic, incredibly corrosive superacid that will burrow through kilometers of rock when given a chance, only stopped from going further by the high heat of the mantle denaturing it into two gaseous chemicals, both of them also extremely poisonous.

Amazing for geochemical applications on the surface, but only the bravest miners dare attempt to recover it. Can only be contained in bottles coated with a chemically inert fluoropolymer made of processed amber.

Protoplasm

During the Anthropocene, some biologists believed that a primordial form of life could be found, referring to it as “Urschleim” or “protoplasm”. Although not discovered in that era, more recent delves into the Archaean stratum managed to locate and recover the true protoplasm: the clonal colony of the first living thing on Earth. This genetically simple, anaerobically respiring bacterial mass derives sustenance through chemosynthesis of sulfides released by water superheated by proximity to magma. It appears as a pinkish gelatinous substance deemed off-putting to handle but harmless to touch.

Protoplasm is essentially a stem cell soup that can be seeded with the genetic material of other species. These cultivated cell lines, in turn, can be applied to wounds to heal them, and are also the basis of the cloning tanks used to decant new miners.

Yliaster

Long before the Cambrian Explosion brought forth the numerous forms of multicellular life as we know them, when only bacteria crawled the surface of the infant Earth, a civilization a century more advanced than our own sent a spacefaring vessel across the stars. We don’t know the reason, but either due to a crash or abandonment, that titanic vessel remains buried deep in the Proterozoic layer. No conventionally understood engine powered it: instead, within spherical chambers symmetrically placed throughout the wreck, perfect orbs of pure white lay dormant. Miners call this material “yliaster”, joining the Greek word for matter and the Latin word for star.

Yliaster is an exotic form of matter characterized by its negative mass: gravity, as well as mechanical forces of motion, act oppositely on it from normal matter. In other words, if gravity pulls down, it floats up – and if you push it forward, it pushes back. The use of yliaster is hypothesized to have allowed faster-than-light travel by creating a bubble of negative gravity around the ship to shape spacetime in a slipstream around it.

Lychstone

The Carboniferous era is named for the fact that it left behind a rich layer of coal: a great bloom of rainforests grew faster than decomposer species could break it down, so after a mass extinction due to dropping temperatures, the piled plant matter sequestered its carbon into the ground rather than releasing it back into the environment. Coal is made of compressed corpses.

Now, imagine if the glimmers of proto-consciousness contained within those countless living things compressed together as well. If a plant holds even one percent of the capacity for qualia as an animal, then the mass grave of Paleozoic plants left behind the structural traces of a composite soul within their compacted remains. Lychstone is the result: undead coal, buried in the cold dark for so long it’s forgotten what sunlight feels like. Desperate, confused, bitter. Leaping with a withdrawn addict’s frenzy at the first light and heat brought near it in a hundred million years. Ready to explode.