Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:Item5 Chapter2 (section)

===Part 1===

Increasing an amount of pure gold by artificial means.



That might sound like fairy tale magic, but from a scientific perspective, it was a field of research with a history stretching back into BCE times.

You could also call it a type of scam.

The most classic example is melting down the gold and mixing in silver or some other metal. You can find countless examples of this, including the legend of Archimedes.

Moving forward in time a bit, gold mixed with flour or wax became rampant. This was the method used by the dishonest sort of alchemist when they wanted to receive large sums of money from bored aristocrats in the name of “research funding”.

Of course, pure gold remains highly valued to this day, so searching for a cheap material that shines with a similar golden light isn’t a bad thing. In the honest world, there are plenty of harmless and non-malicious examples in the fields of decoration and interior design.

But to be blunt, the 18-karat gold everyone prizes so highly is not pure gold. 25% of it is in fact an impurity mixed in.

So there are countless examples of research to create gold-like metals, both legal and illegal.

But it didn’t sound like this case would be that simple.