After Ruri helped clean up the laboratory as Imari had requested, following Nagi’s mess and their exploration of a cave, it was time to look for sapphires. However, it involves inspecting the sand, and Ruri gets a bit impatient.
With the mention of sapphire, Ruri looks into the sand for a trace of sapphire. She managed to find one, although it’s tiny. However, Nagi doesn’t allow her to keep it since she needs it for her study to see the bigger ones, which are hard to find. Ruri appears exhausted from examining it through the microscope. However, she is not giving up.
The funny thing is that she went to find one so badly. She rushed out of the classroom after school to head to the riverbed. Yes, even Aoi wonders why Ruri is going to the river. However, the ponytailed red-haired girl starts to notice as she wonders what Ruri wants to do at the river.
Ruri, of course, gathered several bottles of sand. The funny thing is that Nagi laughed, given how all-out Ruri had gone. That is before breaking the bad news that it will take her a year to look through all that sand. Ruri is probably not that patient as she wants it now.
At least Nagi teaches her how to collect the sand more efficiently in areas where it is more abundant. However, Ruri gets impatient as Nagi thinks she has found it. However, when Nagi tries it, she can’t find any. It seems she has lost all motivation, as she wants to see the actual area. Of course, the idea is to look at the sands for clues, as the rocks eventually come down the mountains and flow through rivers, eroding and becoming smaller over time. The idea of searching for it through the sand is to determine the proper location.
After examining more sand, Ruri realizes that the study of sand is much bigger than she thought. With some work, she found a second grain of sapphire. While Ruri wants to search for it, she realizes that they haven’t seen the actual location. With that, she has to study more sites until she finds it. Yep, it looks pretty frustrating as this seems a slow way to find. Ruri decides to stick it out, but she eventually gets tired of it again.
Eventually, she collects more samples and thinks she has found something after collecting one. Is it the one? She feels so as she goes up to the area she believes it is and mines it. The funny thing is that what she mined is not sapphire, but a copper-based mineral. It’s not a sapphire after all, which disappoints Ruri. That means her methods are incorrect, meaning she needs to study more, as shortcuts won’t work here.
As Ruri’s disappointment settles in, she vents her frustrations about Nagi, as she won’t let Ruri do what Ruri wants to do. Ruri intends to cut corners and do less work, but Nagi knows that means more work in the end, as it won’t give the desired results. Imari is about the importance of understanding sand. Well, with the magnet being part of the sand and Imari dropping a magnet while trying to move a blue magnet, Ruri wants to borrow it.
By using it, she was able to remove most of the magnetite from the sand. Therefore, she reduced the amount she had to review. It’s cute how Ruri and Imari celebrate this discovery. While it doesn’t cut down on a lot, it at least makes the job a bit easier.
Since that cave visit, Imari has shown the progress she is making with the rock that contains fluorite, and the smaller one above is not fluorite, but looks different. From these observations, she thinks it’s scheelite, but she needs to study it more. She is having a lot of fun with all the things she is learning. In a way, she is trying to improve her identification of rocks and find their context. That is the same thing with Nagi having Ruri study sand to find instances of sapphire and determine its origin.
With that, as Ruri continues her search for sapphire, it seems that the red-haired girl has taken an interest in what Ruri is doing. After all, she saw Ruri with Nagi in the river. That is, while Ruri gets even better at looking through the sands, Imari compliments her. I wonder if that said girl will eventually join her. We’ll see soon enough.
(Also known as Ruri Rocks)
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