Chapter 51. Forging Robes
Rhys scurried back up the mountain to the upper peak. He stopped by the trash ravine and started the process of burning the high-tier trash to make ash. He needed a new potion after he’d downed the old one, and besides, after he’d used the previous potion to empower his body, he was curious just how far he could push his limits now.
As that processed, he drew out the fabric scraps from his storage ring and laid them all out, ordering them from strongest to weakest. He had the least of the strongest fabrics, and the most of the weakest ones, as expected. It wasn’t a direct linear relationship. There were times where he had most of a relatively strong garment, and only a few scraps of some kind of cheap cotton. But in general, the more powerful the fabrics got, the less of the fabric he had.
He couldn’t just burn the fabric. He’d end up with little more than ash, and he already had so much ash. He needed another method.
Let’s break it down. What is fabric? Fabric was made up of thread, which was itself made up of fibers, woven together. Some way of extracting the fibers and recombining them… Rhys pinched his chin. For fabric, the best way to separate it would be to soak it, right? He couldn’t use heat, but water, and maybe a steel brush, treat it like raw wool or raw cotton and brush the fibers back out of the fabrics… It was beyond anything he’d ever had to do to make cosplay. The most he’d ever done there was cut whole cloth and sew it back together.
Then again, Rhys thought, looking at the cloth before him. He didn’t need to break it all the way down to the raw fibers. With a needle and a thread, he could patch up the larger garments with sections of the smaller ones. Rhys pulled out one of the most complete of the more powerful robes. It was burned and had a few holes and slashes, but overall, the general shape of the robe remained. He turned the robe over in his hands, inspecting it and generating a three-dimensional model of the damaged robe in his mind. Putting the robe back down, he spun the model, mentally reviewing the damage. Several panels had slashing damage, but for the most part, he could simply sew that shut and fix it almost invisibly. The burns and the holes were the real problem, but if he completely ripped out the panels with burn damage or holes through them and replaced them with fabric from another source, rather than simply patching the hole, he could create an end result that looked relatively uniform, as if he hadn’t created it patchwork. The panel would be a different color and texture, of course, but a bit of dye and some creative layering would help hide the difference. And if he replaced two opposing panels, he could even make the choice look intentional, rather than a result of necessity.
His mind ascended into the realm of character design and costume creation. This was no different than the time his female friend had sat on a patch of bubblegum and completely ruined a large segment of her sailor skirt the day before the contest finals. Compared to the exacting eyes of male nerds and costume contest judges, ordinary mages were positively easy to fool… er, or rather, please. The upside of a design he made up himself was that no one knew what it was supposed to look like, as opposed to creating a character’s costume, where the judges could compare the real-life fabric to the picture, and find him lacking. It was for that exact reason that he’d always found original character ‘cosplays’—that is, cosplays of characters the costume maker made up for the purpose of making a costume—weak and somewhat of a cheat, and always resented when original characters won contests, but now, in the real world, he found himself gripping on to those same exact strengths that original characters had.
I apologize for every time I silently cursed you, original character cosplayers. You, too, are trash, and ought to be looked to for enlightenment!
He drew out a pair of scissors he’d found in the trash. The blades gleamed with the light of Trash Intent.
It was time to get to work.
Each fabric had its own properties. Some resisted the scissors’ slashing, requiring Rhys to put extra mana into the cut, and others simply bent when the tip of the scissors dug into them, resisting the piercing quality. As he cut, he sorted the fabric into slash-resistant and piercing-resistant piles. There was less of the slash-resistant than piercing-resistant fabric, but the slash-resistant fabric was also higher quality than the piercing-resistant fabric. He tilted his head. Was it easier or cheaper to make piercing-resistant fabric than slash-resistant? It did make sense. To some extent, fabric naturally resisted piercing, but was less naturally resistant to slashing. Loose fabric could be slashed with a knife, but it would be hard to stab loose fabric, unless there was something behind it. The fabric would just move with the poke.