Adrenochrome is a red herring.

It's so much worse than you think.

THE SECRET OF THE LIQUOR ALKAHEST. https://www.sacred-texts.com/alc/cc/cc03.htm

6. Q.—Which is it, tell me, I pray you? A.—Man's blood out of the body, or man's urine, for the urine is an excrement separated, for the greatest part, from the blood. Each of these give both a volatile and fixed salt; if you know how to collect and prepare it, you will have a most precious Balsam of Life.

THE STORY OF NICHOLAS FLAMEL https://www.sacred-texts.com/alc/arr/arr06.htm

On the reverse side appeared a king carrying a great faulchion who caused his soldiers to destroy in his presence a multitude of little children, the mothers weeping at the feet of the murderers. The streams of blood were gathered by other soldiers into a great vessel, wherein the sun and moon bathe. Now, seeing that the history appeared to depict the slaughter of the innocents by Herod, and that I learned the main part of the Art in this book, it came about that I placed in their cemetery these hieroglyphic symbols of the Sacred Science.

https://www.uncovercolorado.com/denver-airport-murals-painting-location/

The feet of this substance could not be cut off, meaning that it could not be fixed and so deprived of volatility except by such long decoction in the pure blood of young children. The quicksilver uniting with gold and silver in this blood would change with them, firstly into a herb like that of the fair flower on the reverse of the fourth leaf, secondly by corruption into serpents, which serpents, being dried and digested by fire, would become Powder of Gold, and of such in truth is the Stone. 'This explanation sent me astray through a labyrinth of innumerable false processes for a period of one and twenty years, it being always understood that I made no experiments with the blood of children, for that I accounted villainous. Moreover, I found in my book that what the philosophers called blood is the mineral spirit in metals, more especially in gold, silver and quicksilver to the admixture of which I tended always.