God of Trash

Rhys read through the manuals at a blazing speed. His mana could enhance his mental qualities as well as physical, and his already high reading speed was only boosted further by his empowerment. Many were the same, or copies of a copy. He read all the unique ones, even the copies whose only unique contribution was fresh misspellings. The ones that were truly nothing but carbon copies landed in the trash heap, waiting to feed his next excursion into herbalism. In the end, he had about a box and a half full of manuals. In the end, he even gained a skill from it.

Speed Reading 4

Most of them were truly trash. They were so obviously wrong, so utterly backwards, that they served more as entertainment than education. He chuckled as he read them, shaking his head from time to time.

Others were more insidious. They described a real process or a real technique, but fudged the details just enough to leave prospective mages on the completely wrong track. Any mortal who tried to ascend to magehood from their techniques would not only waste time and effort on the wrong thing, but might even lock themselves out from magehood altogether, just as Az had told him they would. For example, one book recommended that prospective mages brew their own mana potions, then drink them—not dissimilar to how Rhys himself had awakened. However, the formula it gave for mana potions was just wrong enough that whoever followed that recipe would be so laden with impurities they wouldn’t stand a chance of awakening their ability to sense mana at all. Even Rhys winced at that one. If he’d found that as a child, before he’d gained magehood, even he, with his optimal path that led directly to a technique to handle impurities, would have been ruined.

He thought back to the manuals in the town’s bookshop and shook his head. If he’d foolishly bought those spellbooks, and hadn’t recognized the problems with them, he really would have been much more worse off than simply down a few gold. Losing out on his own potential was one thing, but when he thought about how he could have accidentally sabotaged Bast, a talent so rare he was learning under the Sword Saint, the continent’s most powerful martial artist, he gritted his teeth in leftover anxiety. Ruining his own trash talent was one thing. Ruining someone that rare was a crime.

Luckily, he hadn’t, so he simply put the book aside and moved on to the next.

This one was the most promising, and the one he had deliberately put off for late, though he didn’t quite have the patience to put it off until last. It had a big fireball on the cover and promised to teach the reader to do the same. His dream! Since he’d first arrived, he’d wanted to throw fireballs from his palms. This manual almost certainly wouldn’t teach him how to, but it was at least a step in the right direction. Or… in the wrong direction, but the point was, it was a step, and fireballs were somewhere in the vicinity of that step.

Disappointingly, though, it was complete nonsense. There was a fairy-tale story of a man who stared at the sun all day, every day until he went blind, then a very long, very bullshit incantation. The manual didn’t even mention mana, let alone anything approaching what he’d actually need to cast a spell. It joined the garbage heap, and he moved on to the next.

One manual after another. After a while, they all started to blur into one. He kept reading, but his mind wasn’t on the material. Instead, he pondered the totality of the manuals. Why had someone created these manuals? Clearly, to hold young mages back. It was pitiful that there were experts so lacking in self-confidence that they’d spread these books to sabotage the younger generation.

But not all of them were pure sabotage. The one about fireballs seemed more like a children’s fairytale. Some of the other manuals read like a mortal’s attempt to emulate magehood, and their deluded surety that they’d delved its deepest secrets, while not understanding the least thing about being a mage.

As he considered the manuals, he began to see patterns. Repeated themes. There was something to them. Whether intentional or accidental, there was something deep within the manuals that touched on a truth. All their lies, taken together, pointed at one hidden… something. The shape of it eluded him, slipping out of his mind every time he tried to put it all together. He sat back, folding his legs and pouring his all into investigating the truth he sensed behind the falsehoods.

The manuals hovered in his mind. Their words rushed by, over and over. They overlaid one another, washing together into a blur of black ink in his mind. Thousands of words, all saying the same thing, and nothing at all. The truth he’d sensed lurked somewhere in those words, so close he could feel it, and yet utterly unreachable. Rhys pushed himself. He delved further into the words. What was he missing? Why couldn’t he understand?