"This is insane… this is impossible, but I saw it happen with my very own eyes… This will change everything that we believed to be true about the purification of the materia prima!"
Even though I was barely capable of hearing what the man was muttering under his nose, just those few words that I managed to hear before this old master raised his head and noticed our appearance already forced me to realise that the situation won't be nearly as easy as I hoped it would be to solve.
"Senior, did you manage to uncover the secrets of that cup by chance?"
Noticing the excitement of her colleague, Garra was quick to jump on the moment with hope glistering in her eyes. While she had my promise that I would at least attempt to replicate what I did before, I could tell that she wasn't naive enough to fully believe that I wouldn't try to mess anything to hide my true capabilities.
After all, when compared with possibly fake testimony, the concrete results were far more valuable!
"Uncover its secrets? Are you crazy? I barely managed to scrape the surface of what was left there. Sadly, the leftover amount is just too small to properly experiment on it…"
Only as the older man said those words, his eyes finally landed on me. In one instant, his expression changed from annoyed yet determined to one that someone would dress when finally finding out the treasure he would be looking for, for ages.
"It's you! Please, could you explain what did you do last time? Or better, could you just do it again, but leave the product in my hands?"
Dashing forward, the old man creepily caught my shoulders while shouting those words directly in my face.
"Senior, please, stop it. You are startling my student!"
Most likely noticing how I attempted to back off in disgust when droplets of saliva that flew out of the mouth of the excited old man landed on my face, Garra actually bothered to help me. As if her words turned into a bucket of ice-cold water that proceeded to splash itself right on the old man's head, his complexion changed. Taking a few moments to calm down, the old man snapped his fingers only for the same kind of cup that I saw during the tests to appear in his grasp.
"Here. This is unpurified materia prima that you worked on during your first visit. Could you please do exactly what you did back then?"
Passing this crystal glass filled with a murky content to my hands, the old man clearly had some great hopes for me. Just a single look to the side allowed me to confirm that albeit quite suspicious, Garra couldn't hide her own expectations either.
"I'm sorry, but I can't."
Putting the cup on one of the nearby tables, I looked with a serious expression on the two of my seniors before spreading my hands wide and explaining.
"This isn't the same thing that I got back then. I need the cup to be exactly the same, roughly made and cheap one that I used back then."
Without the explanations, I would condemn myself to live in a sect where the only two powerhouses that knew about my existence would only think of me with enmity. That's why, rather than outright accepting or refusing their request, I had to come up with some kind of reason to ignore their first attempt of theirs at making me showcase my abilities.
In fact, it didn't really matter what kind of cup this strange liquid was held in. Given how that purification was a result of me using my skill, the container that held to-be-purified liquid didn't matter at all. But thanks to pushing them to abide by my request, I made a first step towards creating a believable story for how I managed to achieve what I did.
"Ah, sure. Here you go."
Not daring to say anything about this stupid point of mine, the old man quickly grabbed another cup from a nearby stool before passing it to my hands. To my side, Garra only sighed with resignation as if my way of fulfilling her request already proved that there was nothing special about it.
A point for me!
"Listen. I don't expect anyone in this sect to be able to replicate what I'm about to do, so I will explain the concept behind my actions as I will do them."
Accepting the cup that the old man offered me, I caught it with both of my hands.
"First thing to explain that you might've missed due to your status. But instead of telling me about it, let me show you a little experiment. Teacher, I know it sounds stupid, but would you be as kind as to rapidly rub the palm of your hand against the table? The rougher its condition is, the better."
I was completely clueless about how did this purification skill of mine work. While the general idea of what it was doing was obvious, the ins and outs of how exactly it happened were black magic for me. That's why I had no other choice but to use something that would appear as black magic for the people of this world to explain my insane capabilities.
And what was a better thing to use to fool others than technology and science?
Despite not being any kind of scholar myself, I knew some basic bits about the elementary rules of the world. Given how I could walk on the ground, breathe the air and taste the food, even though cultivation seemed to destroy all the concepts of the physics and biology in this world, the fact that all of the basic stuff worked exactly the same as in earth, I hoped that instead of the rules of physic not applying to this world, they would just be slightly modified to accommodate for the cultivation part!
"My hand seems to be getting… warmer? But isn't that something perfectly normal?"
Finally realising what was the intention in this small showcase, Garra raised her eyes to look at me with question marks appearing everywhere on her face. Sadly, this sight only belongs to the domain of my own imagination that interpreted the puzzled look on her face.
"That's exactly what I wanted to achieve. The next point is… Teacher, I hope you do recall how insanely high my fighting prowess was when compared to the base of my cultivation, right?"
Word by word, I was getting close to the crux of the matter. Sadly, given how I knew nothing about the real way in which my purification spell worked, I could only pretend the action of purifying the liquid was something that required one to achieve at least as high peak of fighting proves as me!
"Yeah. I saw the results with my very own eyes. Additionally, the way your muscles moves… It's not something that could be acted. As curious as it makes me know how did you achieve it, there is no denying that your physical prowess is insane."
Nodding to my teacher to show my acknowledgement of her words, I finally took the rough cup back into my hands before starting to slightly move them around. For someone outside, it would seem as if my hands started to move at an insane speed, despite moving only a hundredth of an inch to one side before moving back and repeating the cycle for several hundreds of times within a single second.
"This is one thing that I learned when living in the mountains for a while. In order to drink water from a randomly found source without worrying about it being poisonous, all one needs to do is to boil it. And this is the same concept that I used to purify this glass of… this liquid."
Finally reaching the end of my explanations, I made my hands vibrate even stronger. At some point, I could feel the cup slowly starting to crumble in my hands, so without the further ado, I quickly cast my purification ability on the cup's content.
Retracting it as soon as the colour turned slightly different, I acted as if my knees suddenly lost their power, barely managing to place the cup on a table before falling right down to the ground.
"Incredible…"
During my acted fall, it seemed as if I hit something with my head, making the old man's words the last thing that I heard before my consciousness left for a better place.