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Unusual Mineral - Research into Unconventional Alchemy XXV

Journal of Conrad Azohi - Day 1,284 after embarking

Three days ago we found something, here in Atro. Here, in the heart of this dead land, there is a portion of terrain which hasn't been touched. A startling sight after the tar-covered wastelands we've been wandering through for several days, to see land not corrupted by that foul mors-oil. Though, here it is. A small oasis in a dark desert. The soil here is sand-colored clay, there is a muddy lake, some tough, ground-covering plantlife, and as I suspected there might be: ruins of an old civilization. There are a few villages spread out throughout this region, five in total, with the largest on the shores of the lake. The buildings are gray stone, sturdily built, and clustered around a few buildings which strike me as manufacturing facilities.

Most buildings are clearly homes with a fairly standard layout: One central room with three side rooms. The builders of these places seem fairly advanced, incorporating metal fixtures into their construction, whether for decoration or functional purposes. A great many homes have stone walls hemming out a garden to one side or another. Strangely enough, even with all potential caretakers of these gardens long dead or gone, these gardens burst with life, plants overflowing the bounds of the garden walls and even spilling into the home the garden is attached to. This made me curious, so I inspected the soil in these gardens. I have found that it is not the sand-colored clay of the rest of the terrain, but a bright pink, loamy material. After some examination, I found it to be an extremely vitae-dense mineral, explaining why it encourages life so grow so freely.

Of course, this compound is unusual. Most vitae-bearing compounds tend to break apart after interacting with a living entity, vitae molecules separating and being used by the lifeform in one way or another. Though, here, this soil was laid down hundreds of years ago, at least, and these plants and their progenitors have been feeding off it all this time, yet it's still here and still seemingly as potent as many vitea-bearing fertilizers I know of.

As with the mors-oil, this compound contains gold atoms, and individual molecules like to arrange themselves into lattice-like structures. To me, this implies that they must be connected, which returns me to pondering the mysteries of Atro. As before, it seems to me that the oil was most likely spread across the land intentionally, but it seems strange that the land was covered in poisonous oil, and not this live-giving mineral. Perhaps the oil was a byproduct created in the process of creating the mineral and it was spread as a means to dispose of it? But why spread it instead of collecting it and secreting it away somewhere it could not hurt anyone? Perhaps the oil was spread as the first step in some sort of plan to convert the land, but the plan went unfinished for whatever reason? I do not know.

In the manufacturing buildings at the heart of each town, I have found a few potential precursors to this mineral. I still need to research them more, but once I have reached a conclusion, I'll write down over the next few pages how I believe this gold-vitae mineral likely was produced. I might need to go back and edit by previous thoughts on how the mors-oil was produced as well, if my research implies that the two compounds were created in the same process.