u/ELFCHASER

TO CLARIFY. I AM NOT ASKING ABOUT REAL LIFE EXPLOSIVES.

I'm writing a story and one of the characters has the ability to alter materials on an atomic level. due to the inherent difficulty of doing this, he can't really do anything super complicated. everything he transmutes has a short "path" between the original material and the new material, e.g. oxidizing iron by magically bonding it to the oxygen in the air, or turning mercury into gold by removing a proton. it doesn't have to be possible irl, just a technically "simple" conversion done via magic. he fights by carrying around a bag of pellets that he transmutes into explosives. I was thinking maybe capsules of xenon that he converts into cesium, but those feel a bit too exotic, and there's the issue of xenon being a gas and his magic working via touch. ideally it'd be an inert metal that is chemically similar to something extremely explosive, like the xenon to cesium example, but the "starting" material is a solid instead of a gas