God of Trash

Rhys sat on a bench, a book in his hands and a cat purring on his lap. The cat rolled over, exposing its belly to the sun pouring in the window. Across from him, a short-haired woman rested her head on her hand, watching the scenery pass by. She glanced at Rhys, and Rhys quickly averted his eyes, pretending not to notice.

The last four months had been hell. Every second had been full of beatings, battle, then more beatings. The second Ev had learned he’d climbed up a Tier, she hadn’t let him go. He was tougher, now, more durable, and able to fight harder, and as a result, Ev had pushed him even further than before. They’d sparred until Rhys was bloody and bruised, and then battled some more, and then kept battling. They’d fought with bare fists, with magic, with swords, with polearms and with every conceivable weapon, even improvised weapons pulled from Rhys’s storage ring. He’d learned a lot, but he’d also spent his entire four months bloody and bruised, beaten an inch from death.

There wasn’t much trash to work with anymore. The pit was gone, and so was all the upper and lower peak trash. He’d still done his daily rounds, but at the end of it, he’d only managed to brew one low-tier impurity potion. Given that the final impurity potion from the upper peak was now nothing to him, that potion was even less to him, so he simply carried the potions with him in case he needed a hit of impurities so he could feed curse power into the curses in his core. His progress had been purely conventional, and as a result, embarrassingly slow. Thanks to Ev, his martial and magical battle prowess had advanced significantly, but his Tier remained locked at the low end of Tier 2 with no trash to feed its progress.

The entire time he’d been in the school, training with Ev, he’d experienced no side effects from the curses. She’d pushed him to the limits, and he’d still had no downsides from the curses. He’d visited the library, of course, and researched everything Az would give him on curses, but all the side effects—heavy impurities, sluggish mana, blackening of the flesh, weakening in the body, deadly pain—simply hadn’t happened to him. In the end, he’d decided that it had to be his mounting the curses on impurities, rather than allowing them to infect his core as Walter had done, that meant he faced no side effects. He read a book on curses now, but it only continued to confirm what he’d already figured out; that he wasn’t getting any of the side effects he should be dealing with.

Rhys finished the book with Speed Reading and tucked it back in his storage ring. Az batted his hand, so he pet the cat as he thought. Heading to a new Academy. A fresh start. Fresh trash… but also a fresh reputation, and in a place where he didn’t care much for the occupants.

It was true that he only had the most limited experience of Purple Dawn Academy, and extrapolating an entire academy from one rogue professor was a bit of a stretch. At the same time, Purple Dawn allowed Ernesto to exist, thrive, and grow, while openly researching curse power and infiltrating smaller sects, likely with the academy’s implicit permission. The kind of atmosphere that nurtured someone like Ernesto, wasn’t the kind of atmosphere he looked for in a workplace… or school, for that matter.

Hell, I could condemn the school for allowing Ernesto to exist, alone. He wasn’t quite that trashy, as tempting as it was. He’d give the school its due. But if he found it lacking… then he wouldn’t hold back. It had been a while since he’d tried any money-making, and he had a few good ideas from his world that he desperately wanted to try out in this one. Ideas related to his path, things he was sure would not only give him enlightenment, but which would also put gold in his pocket at the same time. In other words, the best kind of ideas.

Running his hand through Az’s thick fur, he sighed to himself. If only he had Bast around. He was stronger now, but compared to mages, he was still pitifully weak, and despite his best efforts and Tarais’s advice, his backer, the potions teacher, Sorden, was weak, or rather, she had no influence outside Infinite Constellation School. Even if he considered Aquari his backer—a stretch of the imagination, at best—she had little influence in the face of Purple Dawn, when Ernesto, doubtless a weaker teacher with little influence in his academy, if his eccentric choice to pursue curse power was any indication, could drop by and openly cause chaos at her school.

As for the cat in his lap, though Az was a mysterious beast capable of overcoming Aquari’s barriers with ease, whose Tier Rhys still couldn’t determine, the cat man had little interest in acting as anyone’s backer. His immense power was reserved solely for himself and his library pursuits, and honestly, Rhys understood and respected it. One day, when he was strong enough to count as an expert, it would be a total drag if every young mage around him expected him to act as their backer. He’d be running out day and night to save a bunch of braindead children who weren’t yet fully mentally developed if he let that happen, and that sounded like the opposite of fun to him. He’d chosen not to have kids in his first life for a reason, and it was definitely a choice, not because no women would talk to him. He had a female friend, damn it! A female friend! She even wore the costumes he made for her, and that wasn’t just because he gave her thousand-dollar costumes for free, okay? They were friends. Friends!

His pathetic past aside, he didn’t think it was ridiculous to want to be powerful and left alone, and therefore respected that Az wouldn’t be doing much to help him. That the cat let him into the library when he needed to retreat was already more than he expected from the man.