"Is that it?" One of the merchant's bodyguards couldn't help but sneer. His voice wasn't loud, but it was like cold water dropped into a hot pan of oil, instantly igniting the suppressed whispers all around.
"A few pieces of rotten wood and a pile of black stones, and he expects to conjure clean water? In your dreams!"
"Look at him covered in black, like he crawled out of a mine shaft. Can he really pull this off?"
"Don't tell me he's just playing to the crowd and wasting everyone's time..."
The whispered doubts buzzed through the crowd like mosquitoes. Even some of the refugees, who had been holding onto a final sliver of hope, saw their eyes dim.
Limeng maintained a blank expression, checking the stability of the apparatus one last time as if he were calibrating a precision instrument. He took a deep breath, bent down, and lifted a bucket of turbid, muddy water just drawn from the public water point. An acrid, foul odor immediately filled the air, with thick sludge settled at the bottom of the bucket and suspicious impurities floating on the surface. Holding his breath, he tilted the bucket, and the murky stream, carrying a sickening earthy stench, slowly poured into the open top of the apparatus.
Time stretched infinitely at that moment.
Every gaze was locked onto the tiny water outlet at the bottom of the apparatus, which had been improvised from a broken piece of pottery. Only the faint, nerve-wracking hiss of the water slowly permeating the layers of filtering material could be heard clearly in the dead silence. Every second felt as long as a century.
Drip.
A single drop of turbid, yellowish water trembled as it seeped from the outlet, hung suspended for a moment, and then fell with a *plop* into the equally battered clay pot waiting below.
A sigh of disappointment rippled through the crowd like a tide.
"See? I told you..."
"It's still dirty! A complete waste of time!"
The corners of the merchant's mouth couldn't help curling upward in a cold, smug smirk of absolute victory.
Yet—
Limeng's brow furrowed almost imperceptibly, but he didn't move. An engineer's intuition told him that the system needed preheating and the filter materials needed to be saturated. He stared intently at the outlet.
Drip... Drip...
After just a few drops of murky water, a miracle occurred!
The color of the seeping droplets faded and cleared at a speed visible to the naked eye! The yellowish tint vanished rapidly, and the turbidity disappeared! Immediately afterward, one drop, then another... Crystal-clear droplets, pure as freshly melted mountain springs, continuously oozed from the edge of the pottery shard and fell!
Plop... Plop-plop... Plop-plop-plop...
The clear stream finally converged into a tiny yet unwavering trickle, gurgling steadily into the clay pot below! At the bottom of the pot, a pool of crystal-clear water rapidly accumulated, reflecting the dim sky of the Serenitea Pot and holding the very essence of life!
"Clean... clean water?!" An emaciated old woman shrieked first, her voice cracking from extreme shock and wild joy.
"Oh heavens! It's real! It's clear enough to see the bottom!"
"Corncobs! It's those blackened corncobs! It's a miracle! It's truly a miracle!"
"It's alive! Our crops are saved! They're saved—!!"
Inbelievable gasps of astonishment and frantic joy erupted like volcanic lava that had been suppressed for a millennium! The deafening roar of cheers instantly swept across the entire clearing! Some wept tears of joy, some fell to their knees in prayer, and others hugged each other, jumping up and down in excitement! The flame of hope reignited in every pair of eyes previously frozen by despair, blazing fiercely.
"Impossible! Absolutely impossible!" The sneer on the Sumeru merchant's face instantly froze and shattered, replaced by extreme shock and twisted jealousy. He stared fixedly at the gurgling, clear water, then looked down at the expensive filter cartridge in his own hand. His complexion shifted from pale green to white, and finally turned as pitch-black as the bottom of a wok. His fingers gripped the filter cartridge so hard they shook violently, his knuckles frighteningly white, as if he meant to crush the crystal mineral to powder.
Amidst the roaring cheers, Limeng picked up the clay pot filled with precious filtered water. The water was cool and heavy—the weight of life itself. Carefully, he walked over to the experimental plot, stepping toward the most withered corn seedling, its leaves almost entirely curled, withered, and yellowed, as if it were about to die completely the next second. He squatted down, avoiding the cheering crowd, and poured the clear spring water like a precision drip-irrigation system, carefully and evenly watering the root soil that had cracked open and dried as hard as stone.
The clean water quickly seeped into the parched cracks.
One second... Two seconds...
Under countless breathless gazes, the edges of the curled, withered, and yellowed leaves of the dying corn seedling twitched—ever so slightly, yet undeniably real—and unfurled! Though it was just a tiny fraction, that streak of green, representing vitality, stubbornly pierced through the withered backdrop!
"It's alive! It really came back to life!" "It worked! Lord Demetrius has done it—!!" Louder, more frenzied cheers shot straight up into the clouds, brimming with the ecstasy of surviving a catastrophe and heartfelt awe for the "Demetrius" before them.
At that moment, the elderly scholar with thick glasses was trembling all over with excitement. Bursting with astonishing energy like a revitalized old mountain goat, he shoved his way through the cheering crowd, practically hurling himself hands and feet first toward Limeng, and grabbed Limeng's charcoal-stained arm with a grip so fierce it made Limeng sway.
"A genius! A truly divine genius!" the old scholar rasped, his cloudy eyes flashing with startling brilliance as he stared fixedly at the crude filtering apparatus, especially the pitch-black carbon granules inside. "This... This is it! This is the lost ancient 'black stone' water purification method from Sumeru's ancient texts, lost for at least three hundred years! The fragment of *Sumeru Ancient Water Purification Studies* only contains a few scraps! We've studied it for half a lifetime and couldn't reconstruct it! How... How did you pull this off?!"
He leaned closer to the device, his nose practically touching it as he greedily inhaled the unique scent of the carbon, babbling incoherently with excitement: "Brilliant! Simply brilliant! Although the adsorption efficiency... the adsorption power definitely can't compare to the refined crystal minerals used in filter cartridges, and the impurity removal rate is slightly lower, but... but for irrigating crops... it's enough! More than enough! And the cost... the cost is practically zero!" He jerked his head around to look at Limeng, his eyes burning with fanaticism. "Young man! You've solved a massive problem! A monumental problem! You've saved this field, and you've saved countless lives!"
Limeng opened his mouth, terms like "specific surface area," "microporous adsorption," and "chemical modification" flashing through his mind. But looking at the old scholar's face, flushed red with ecstasy and academic passion, he ultimately settled for a simple nod. Explaining those things at this moment was meaningless; an engineer's satisfaction lay in the problem being solved.
"So timely! So crucial!" The old scholar patted Limeng's shoulder firmly, as if trying to drive him into the ground. "Do you know? Just a moment ago, Lumine sent word! She successfully met up with a new batch of scholars who broke out of the Sumeru Akademiya! They're on their way back to the Serenitea Pot right now! Among them is Professor Jafar, our Akademiya's authority on ancient water purification technology! And... and a young lady with extraordinary talent and delicate hands for repairing ancient texts, named Jingyi! They say her deft hands can piece a mud tablet smashed to powder right back together! With Professor Jafar here, your 'black stone' method, and Miss Jingyi potentially restoring the ancient technical diagrams... our water, our future, is saved! It's saved—hahahaha!"
"Jingyi..."
This name fell into Limeng's ears clearly and undeniably, like a tiny yet hard seed of jade with a warm luster, cutting through the deafening cheers and the scholar's excited ramblings. It also stirred a faint ripple of curiosity and anticipation among the desperate crowd straining their ears to listen.
A new scholar? An ancient text restoration expert? Miss... Jingyi?
Limeng lowered his head, watching the clear water in the clay pot sway gently, reflecting the turbulent golden light dancing across the barrier walls of the Serenitea Pot. The shifting water surface mirrored his charcoal-smudged, slightly fatigued yet exceptionally bright eyes. A pure sense of satisfaction born from an engineer's technological breakthrough, mingled with the heavy responsibility of saving lives with his own hands, quietly smoothed out the gullies of anxiety he had harbored deep in his heart over the past few days.
He reached out his fingers, unconsciously sliding them into his pocket until his fingertips brushed against those few hard, life-pulsing seeds of "Chisui Double-Resistant No. 3." The warm sensation flowing from his fingertips was heavy—the weight of hope and the anchor of responsibility.
"Water, for now, we have..." he murmured silently, lifting his gaze from the water's surface in the pot, past the cheering crowd, and toward the churning, thicker darkness beyond the distant barrier wall. Deep within his eyes, the turbulent golden light flickered.
"But a greater storm," he pulled back his gaze, his voice low yet clear, piercing through the clamor around him to point straight at the Abyss churning outside the pot, "is brewing beyond this realm."
And the name "Jingyi," like the first seed dropped into fertile soil, sank quietly into the corner of his heart—just recently moistened by the waters of hope and awaiting cultivation—bringing with it an unknown warmth and a mysterious pull.