I have to write this down before I forget but if I had to describe the alchemical worldview it would be “Bitches in 2nd century Alexandria were trying to figure out if you could un-bake a cake.”
You know how baking uses like the same basic 5 ingredients for everything? What if you could un-bake a shitty cake into its raw ingredients, and then re-bake it into a perfect cake.
That’s what transmutation is. It’s alchemists trying to un-bake base metals into their elemental essences to re-bake them into new ones.