Chapter 35

It was the first Transmutation Circle he had managed to complete that actually worked. It had taken him sixteen attempts to make it, something that Flamel had actually told him was beyond admirable as far as his progress was concerned, but bothered Harry, who felt he should have been able to create it in less time and with less failures.

Which was why he was still sitting at the table inside of Nicolas Flamel's alchemy lab, working on another Transmutation Circle. So far the only alchemy he had been able to accomplish was one that transmuted by way of the Four Classical Elements (Water, Earth, Fire, and Air). The wood he had used for his bird transmutation had been Red Maple, which contained 21.2% lignin, 17.1 Celullose, 2.8% Extractives, and 5.2% Ash. It was an Earth based element, though it had traces of water in it due to the moisture often retained in wood. That was why the Transmutation Circle had been so simple to create, and just simple in general.

This time, Harry was going to try a different Transmutation. He wanted to use the Three Essential Principles of alchemy (Salt, Sulfur, and Mercury) instead.

Salt would be the easiest. It was a simple compound containing sodium chloride, NaCI, and water, H2O, which was formed by neutralizing sodium hydroxide, NaHO, a base chemical, with hydrogen chloride, HCI, and acid: Hcl+NaOH→NaCl+H2O. It was a simple empirical formula for ionic salt. The only issue would be discover how much of these chemicals salt contained in order to know the quantity he was transmuting, and that was a relatively easy issue to solve as salt was an ionic compound that had an equal number of sodium and chlorine atoms. All he had to do was create the formula needed to discover the amount of each chemical contained within a gram of salt, which he had already done.

But while salt may be the easiest of the Three Essential Principles to transmute, it was not the one Harry wanted to do. He needed to challenge himself, to push his mind beyond it's boundaries so that he could exceed his own limitations. That was why he wanted to use Mercury for his transmutation.

Mercury was a chemical element with the symbol Hg and an atomic number of 80. It was commonly known as quicksilver, due to it's silvery liquid form. It was also formerly known as hydragyrum, a Greek word that combined "Hydr" for water and "agryrum" for silver.

It was also the most difficult of the Three Principles to transmute.

There were two oxadized states in which Mercury can exist, which have been unoriginally dubbed state I and II by scientists.

Different from its lighter neighbors, cadmium and zinc, mercury formed simple stable compounds with metal-metal bonds. The mercury(I) compounds were diamagnetic and feature the dimeric cation, Hg2+2. Stable derivatives included the chloride and nitrate. Treatment of Hg(I) compounds complexation with strong ligands such as sulfide, cyanide, etc. induced disproportionation to Hg2+ and elemental mercury. Mercury(I) chloride, a colorless solid also known as calomel, was really the compound with the formula Hg2Cl2, with the connectivity Cl-Hg-Hg-Cl. It was a standard in electrochemistry that reacted with chlorine to give mercuric chloride, which could resist further oxidation.

Indicative of its tendency to bond to itself, mercury forms mercury polycations, which consisted of linear chains of mercury centers, capped with a positive charge. One example is Hg2+3(AsF−6)2.

Mercury(II) was the most common oxidation state and was the main one in nature as well. All four mercuric halides are known. They formed tetrahedral complexes with other ligands but the halides adopt linear coordination geometry, somewhat like Ag+ did. Best known ismercury(II) chloride, an easily sublimating white solid. HgCl2 forms coordination complexes that are typically tetrahedral, e.g. HgCl2−4.

Mercury(II) oxide, the main oxide of mercury, arises when the metal is exposed to air for long periods at elevated temperatures. It will revert to the elements upon heating near 400 °C, as was demonstrated by Priestly in an early synthesis of pure of mercury are poorly characterized, as they are for its neighbors gold and silver.

Being a soft metal, mercury forms very stable derivatives with the heavier chalcogens. Preeminent is mercury(II) sulfide, HgS, which occurs in nature as the ore cinnabar and is the brilliant pigment vermillion. Like ZnS, HgS crystallizes in two forms, the reddish cubic form and the black zinc blende form. Mercury(II) selenide (HgSe) and mercury(II) telluride (HgTe) are also known, these as well as various derivatives, e.g. mercury cadmium telluride and mercury zinc telluride being semiconductors useful as infrared detectormaterials.

Mercury(II) salts form a variety of complex derivatives with ammonia. These included Millon's base (Hg2N+), the one-dimensional polymer (salts of HgNH+2)n), and "fusible white precipitate" or [Hg(NH3)2]Cl2. Known as Nessler's reagent, potassium tetraiodomercurate(II)(HgI2−4) was still occasionally used to test for ammonia owing to its tendency to form the deeply colored iodide salt of Millon's base.

Harry was going to use Mercury II for his transmutation, as it was the most common and natural state for Mercury to be in. Using Mercury I would be too dangerous at his knowledge level right now. While he wanted a challenge, he had no desire to go near the other oxidized state at his current level. He was looking for a way to push his minds limits and break them, not commit suicide.

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