God of Trash

For all that mages grew by pushing their limits, Rhys also wasn’t stupid. A table leg with a portion of table attached to its top sat within reaching distance to his left, table-side pointed at the cauldron, ready to become a shield via Trash Intent at the first sign of danger. Rhys set up on the side of a cliff. He could kick the cauldron off if it showed signs of fruitlessly exploding, and a stub of what had once been a long board sat on his right, ready to push it off if a kick would be too slow or too dangerous.

Now that he could maintain two Trash Intents at once, he could also activate the stub to jab it off and the table to act as a shield at the same time, and he’d deliberately angled the two so such a thing was possible. Tested them, even, though one at a time. The splitting headache that two activations of Trash Intent, and the prohibitive mana cost, kept him from trying to activate both at once. It was a good activity to do when he had excessive trash mana flowing through him and needed something to get rid of mana, but not when he was about to attempt a difficult round of alchemy that would likely require a fair share of mana.

It really wasn’t something that he could simply ‘maintain at once,’ but rather a life-saving last-ditch technique. Once he practiced it more, he was sure he could maintain two at once without the requisite headache and paralyzingly intense focus, but for now, it was something he’d have to keep as his ace in the hole. If his opponents knew about it, they could easily counter it.

Not only was it hard to activate and maintain, but he also felt instinctively that both Trash Intents were easier to shatter than a single Trash Intent. It made sense. After all, he could truly commune with the trash when he only had one Trash Intent. He could pour all his mana into that one item, and give it every scrap of focus as he dragged it into being. When he had two, and both his mind and mana were split, it was all he could do to hang on, forget about reinforcing the Trash Intent. A good blow would break one, and the subsequent backlash from breaking one might well shatter the second, too, in one fell swoop.

All in all, his new technique was best used as a final ace, to be used as a last surprise to finish an opponent, or for flashy intimidation, but not in equal battle. Right now, though, it was more than enough to save his ass from a cauldron explosion, or so he hoped. His plan was to activate both for a split second, then deactivate the pushing-rod and focus all his attention on the table, so that way the table could absorb the blow. Still, he couldn’t be sure it would work.

Only one way to find out.

He’d fetched some water from a nearby stream. Now he poured it in, wetting the ash to a dark slurry. Most potions called for pure water, but he wasn’t worried about that. The water was clear enough, and besides, he was trying for the maximum concentration of impurities, not attempting to make a proper potion. Once the ashes were fully wetted and ever so slightly slopping around in the cauldron, he lit the fire underneath and began the process of extracting the impurities.

The first time he’d brewed an impure potion, he’d been dealing with potion scraps. They were dense with impurities, and mostly needed to be boiled down. This time, the ash was strewn with a light distribution of very powerful impurities. At a guess, he could probably remove seventy percent of the material in the cauldron, and lose no impurities. No, it’s probably higher than that. The problem was, he needed to remove both the water which he’d just added, as well as the ash, which was a solid, non-melting material.

The pot reached a boil, and Rhys drew out a piece of thin, threadbare fabric from his storage ring. Using a random bit of crooked wire, he fashioned a makeshift net. As the water boiled, the heavy impurities naturally settled down, while the light ashes separated up. He pressed his hands to the side and circulated his mana through the cauldron, encouraging the process to speed up. The impurities he called to the bottom, pulling them down through the ashes. As if sensing their brethren ingrained into Rhys’ every pore, the impurities eagerly followed his mana… or maybe it was the fact that he was pushing out waves of mana into the cauldron, so that the ashes trembled at a high frequency and naturally separated into their impure and pure parts. The ashes constantly welled up, fountaining on the surface, while the impurities sank, sank, sank. It reminded him of those videos online of the rings being cleaned by vibrating them at supersonic speeds. He made a poor replica with his mana, but the end result was more or less the same. The filth sank down, and the ash rose up.

At last, he sensed no more impurities in the surface ash. Rhys skimmed the surface of the water like a poolboy on a summer afternoon, and came up with a shimmering scoopful of pure white ash. He started to dump it on the ground, then hesitated. Pure ash… was that something Sorden might use in her potions? Ash was highly alkaline, so it could be used as a reactant in a basic potion or a neutralizer in an acidic one. Alchemy wasn’t exactly chemistry, he realized that even with his high school chemistry background, but it was close enough that the general rules about acids and bases held true. A highly alkaline base, and one this pure, at that, would likely be valuable to Sorden.