Dark selected a petri dish and a tool resembling tweezers from the equipment.
He held the scabbard over the petri dish, then carefully used the long, slender-tipped tweezer-like tool to pick the dirt out of the scabbard's patterns bit by bit.
The truth of the matter was very likely not hidden in what could be seen on the surface. The unnoticed dirt might have been what Principal Arte truly intended to deliver.
—Of course, this was only a hypothesis.
But since this was research, every minute detail of the object in hand had to be taken into account.
After some time.
Dark picked out several slightly different types of dirt from the scabbard's patterns and placed them separately into three different petri dishes.
The first petri dish contained dirt that appeared to be the most ordinary. The dirt in the second petri dish was pitch-black. The dirt in the third petri dish carried a faint dark-red hue.
After that, Dark's research began to get on track, in a sense. First, he repeatedly experimented to determine the composition of the dirt.
Then, based on the dirt's composition, he devised an experimental method and separated the dirt in the second and third petri dishes from the other substances, eventually obtaining relatively pure black matter and dark-red matter.
Once he had refined the black matter and dark-red matter, Professor Medea, who had been studying the stone, and Professor Kazel, who had been studying the clothing, both unconsciously stopped what they were doing.
Almost everyone could not help directing their attention toward those two petri dishes.
Dark took a light breath to keep his emotions from becoming overly excited.
He placed the black matter in a fourth petri dish and the dark-red matter in a fifth.
The dark-red matter had more obvious characteristics than