30 Boulder

Stepping inside the room that the elder of the sect ordered me to, I could instantly see everything that was in it. Not because my vision somehow suddenly turned sharp and allowed me to see through the great distances. The room was simply small. Not because my vision suddenly grew capable of seeing through the darkness, as the room was perfectly illuminated in a way that I would be otherwise sure that modern industrial solution would be capable of providing. Not because I was somehow capable of perceiving a lot of stuff all at once, but because there were just two things in this entire place.

Surrounded by all sides with walls built on the base of a circle, the one thing that was inside this room was a strange contraption with a huge bowl standing directly on the floor and filled with the exact same liquid that I refined a few whiles ago. Its content was slowly increasing as droplets of the same, yellowish water continued to drip down from a huge item that was hanging roughly a meter above the surface of the liquid within the huge bowl.

But it was this item that made me puzzled.

Just a single look at it was enough to see all the details. A huge boulder made out of the simplest, grey stone that I could imagine, littered with huge crystals made out of all kinds of materials. I could see a crystalline structure protruding out of the boulder that was nearly for sure made out of diamond alone. I could see another crystal structure with a slightly reddish hue, clearly made out of pure iron. Gold, coal, platinum… The more I looked, the more natural resources I could recognise yet even after a long while during which I attempted to identify all the crystalline structures that protruded from the boulder, I didn't make almost any progress.

Outside of the few elements that I could recognise on the spot, the rest of the huge number of those strange crystals were as strange to me as they would be to any man who never really dabbled in geology or chemistry. Yet, even with that said I could tell that some of the crystals were exclusive to this world, as I was quite certain that earth or rather the entire universe that I came from lacked a metal that was both hard and soft at the same damned time!

Drip, drip, drip…

After yet another moment I realised that the water that was dripping out of this strange boulder wasn't produced by this item, but was actually flowing from the very rope that held it in the air. What was dripping down, were the droplets that slid down the surface of the entire thing.

But what the heck was I supposed to do with this thing?

The intention behind putting me in this room was rather clear. Given how I picked alchemy as the guild that I wanted to join, I could only expect to be tested whether outside of interest alone, i held actually any talent or qualities that were necessary to make a good alchemist. Yet, without the subject of the test defined, I was puzzled as to what my task would be.

Purify the entire bowl of that materia prima? Come up with a better way to produce it? Purify and grind the entire boulder so it could be simply mixed with a large quantity of water?

Placing my hand on one of the crystals, I continued to think.

There was no way that they would want me to do something great. The way in which this strange contraption fit perfectly inside the room made it obvious that it was the room that was designed to fit the contraption, not the other way around. From that, I could easily tell that destroying or changing the boulder in a way that would turn it into something completely else also was out of the question.

And that meant, that whatever I was about to do in order to pass what looked to be my first test, I couldn't leave any lasting effects of neither the contraption, boulder or the room itself!

"How about…"

With my thoughts nearly going awry, I suddenly realised one thing. Given how I didn't receive absolutely any information about what I was supposed to do, they couldn't expect me to notice their intent just like that! If I could do something interesting then it would be for the better, but they simply had no right to expect me to achieve something without informing me about it in advance!

"Wait…"

Suddenly, I felt a strange sensation coursing through my fingers. Then it spread to my entire arm. Then, to the rest of my body.

It wasn't anger nor fury as I could tell that my state of mind was rather calm… but slightly anxious? It felt as if just by touching this boulder, I couldn't help but feel dirty myself.

Was this my system or constitution or whatever was sending those notifications to my vision responsible for this? Or was this the reaction that the guild's master expected me to have?

Either way, this was the very first clue about what I could do that I received in this place and I was as far away as I could be from simply ignoring it for the sake of safety.

After all, the only thing that I was perfectly aware that I was good at in this world, was cleaning!

"Purify…"

Whispering those words and still slightly shaking from the feeling of the dirt beneath my fingertips, I cast my spell right on the boulder itself, doing my absolute best to avoid influencing the crystalline structures itself. After all, even though I wasn't a chemist at all, I still could remember from the times of my education that for example, gold was a material that simply couldn't exist in a solid form in its perfectly pure form. That's why the cleanest gold that existed back on earth was still infused with some additions that allowed for its molecules to bind together, turning the element into a solid-state.

That's why I could tell that daring to push my skill on those crystals could pretty easily turn into a disaster.

But that wasn't the case with the stone.

With the felling of some heavy liquid once again resurfacing in my veins, a shallow light started to come out of my fingers, as layer upon layer of the stone continued to vaporise and disappear in the air, turning the colour of the boulder closer and closer from the grey to white.

Soon, the barrier of perfect whiteness was broken, with the boulder itself decreasing its size nearly by half. Now, as I continued to pour more and more of my detergent into my skill, rather than whitening out, the surface of what remained of the boulder started to turn see-through, all the way to the point when…

My body simply gave up. All at once, my muscles simply refused to keep me standing. It seemed that focused on the task, I somehow failed to notice how big of a toll this kind of continuous usage of my skill would have.

And the last thing that I could recall before the darkness shrouded my mind, was the very same, respectable elder that pretended to be only capable of walking with the help of the cane bursting through the door and jumping towards me.